House of Grief

I was born into a house of grief in 1967. My oldest brother died about 10 months before I was born. He was 2 years old. I have an older sister who was a baby when Edward died from choking on a pinto bean. My family was living in West Virginia at the time and my mother (she married at the age of 14) was very young. She was home alone with her babies and had no car or driving abilities. The nearest neighbor was miles away. She carried both of those babies in her arms to the nearest neighbor for I don't know how long, while Edward was struggling for air and she not knowing what to do. It didn't get any better when they finally arrived at the hospital. After Edward's death, the attending doctor would be sued for malpractice. He gave my brother water to drink, which actually expanded the lodged raw bean and closed off his airway completely, leading to his death. This is what I was told. It's like I've always known the story. The story of his death has always been a part of me.

Things I knew about his life: Mom said he was afraid of the MGM Lion's roar and would run and hide when he heard or saw it. He also liked to play peek-a-boo with my sister by hiding in the wardrobe.

Over the years, I remember my mom sometimes setting an extra plate at the dinner table. Then she would remember herself and put the extra plate away.

My mother had a small box in a closet. I only saw the contents of it a few times. It held some of Edward's clothes, a pair of his shoes, and a small toy metal truck. The Heimlich maneuver was introduced by Dr. Henry Heimlich in 1974. My mother was introduced to it in the 80's in an in-service at her workplace. I know, because she came home crying and saying 'if I'd only known this then' as she went to gather the box of Edward's things and burn them in a pile in the back garden. I didn't understand her actions at the time, but it must have been a need to freshly grieve and bury her child again.

When I was a child and as I grew up, I never understood my sister's relationship with our father. My dad could be a bully and I didn't have thick skin back then. In grade school, Teressa would cry when my dad went to work. If he was gruff, it didn't seem to phase her. They were close in a way that made no sense to me. Likewise, I was close with my mother in a way that made no sense to Teressa. About 5 years ago, my sister shared some insight into what she remembers from the time after Edward died and after I was born. Her memories make my mother sound cold and distant and not at all nurturing. Her early memories of dad are of spending pleasant time in the vegetable garden. In stark contrast, my early memories are of an extremely nurturing mother and a father who liked to make me cry.

I was born into a house of division. A house of contrast and confusion. My cheeks and my neck and my shoulders are flushing and burning as I type these words. Grief can be shared in ways that you're completely unaware of. My mother was very young, had just buried a child, and then became pregnant with me. While she carried her grief and feelings of guilt, it was probably all that she could do to focus on her pregnancy and my subsequent birth. Someone had to take up the slack of tending to my sister and that fell to our father. My sister has special memories of spending time with my father that I never remember having. My mother would recount fondly that when I was born, I was the only baby on the maternity ward. In an era when babies spent most of their hospital stay in the nursery, I was allowed to spend the whole stay in my mother's room. This seemed to bond my mother to me in a different way than she had bonded to my siblings. Now that I'm an adult and have experienced my own deep feelings of grief, it all makes sense. My parents are no longer with us, but for me anyway, their grief still is. When I started writing this blog post, I wasn't fully aware of how much I need to sever myself from my parent's pain. I still feel it. I still feel this "thing" that was wedged between my parents that broke off in splinters and affected the whole family unit. Maybe just putting it into words and acknowledging that this grief of losing a child and this pain that divided my parents, belonged to them and not me...maybe that is the start to releasing it from my own story.