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My son, Nicholas, died 10 years ago. I have missed him in my life ever since he left it, at the age of 34. When he first died, I felt I must carry him with me in my arms and that I didn't dare put him down or all would be lost. This feeling that I had of carrying him, and the pain and physical exhaustion it caused, doesn't make sense, of course. He really left his life but he can't miss his life. I miss it for him. I missed the time his son learned to ride a two-wheeler and the time his daughter went skiing for the first time. I missed him there with them, and I missed it for him.
I think of his big dreams to finish remodelling his enormous mill property in Normandy, and of finding the resources to send his two children to summer camp in Algonquin Park, the same one he and his sister attended and loved so much. He wanted his kids to build up as many Canadian experiences as they could, born as they were in a small French town. I think of him flinging wide his bathroom windows that overlooked a farmer's field where white bulls grazed picturesquely adjacent to the millstream, and all the plans he had for the house and grounds that he and his wife loved so much.
When people ask me whether this losing-a-child business ever gets easier, the answer is yes and no. It does get easier in the sense that I don't break down and cry often now. Hours can elapse before I will have a conscious thought of what he would be doing if he were still alive, and if he would be happy and well. We lived far apart, he in France and me here in North America, so I was used to not seeing him every day, or even every month. Relatively recently, I have been able to put out photographs of him to surround me. When I look at them, I don't just see what a handsome man he had become (truly) – I remember where the picture was taken and how his clothes fit him and how it was very difficult to know what he was really thinking. I try to be a more patient and tolerant person, taking Nicholas as my example.
What I cannot say has improved in any way is the idea that he, my beautiful son, lost his chance at a long-lived life, whatever it may have brought him. I mourn for his life and for all the missed opportunities. Of course, I think selfishly of myself, too, in myriad ways that will never be realized. I want only the comfort of a son’s arm to guide me when I am old or alone and need it. But I did so want his time to be chock full of life, even if many things hadn’t worked out, as they seldom do. He had said that he couldn’t wait for his two children to be teenagers. And now they both nearly are. He would have been good with them at this age. And his kindness would have been useful in this world of ours.
One more thing, for those of us who wear this invisible badge – the mothers of lost children. With so many self-help books on the market, everyone was keen to refer me to a book that I was assured worked beautifully for this person or that person. I must have looked at a baker’s dozen and it was like reading in an unfamiliar foreign language. One thing I know for certain: Each person trudges along his or her own solitary path. The blight of losing a child is a singular sorrow, different for every person so afflicted. That’s why I didn’t cry while sitting through The Year of Magical Thinking on Broadway a few months after Nicky died. Joan Didion was writing and Vanessa Redgrave was speaking the words of another’s grief, not mine.
So beware and be brave: Your love will overcome the grief and then you will be left with only your thoughts about the life not led and your cherished memories, the funny and good more than the sad. Which of course is another kind of sorrow, a sorrow that no longer pierces you so that the wind flies out of you, leaving you without breath or the means to continue on for a moment or two.
Nicholas died 10 years ago. Nothing that I have – not the beautiful and cherished daughter whom I speak to every day, nor the beloved husband and the good friends, nor the marvellous travel adventures that have been possible since I’ve retired – can ever make the slightest dent in the loss of my son. But his loss is the greater.
Carolyn Strauss lives in Ottawa.