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Paul Harding’s novel Enon tells the worst possible story. It’s the story of losing a child. But it’s also the story of doing what parents do every day: calculating daily how much freedom to give our children versus how much protection to offer. In the main character Charlie’s case, he ultimately, and unexpectedly, gets this calculation horrifically wrong.
Charlie allows his 13-year-old daughter Kate to ride her bike with a friend to the beach. To bike along a winding road, just as he had done (and been allowed to do) when he was a kid. Charlie explains:
“I wanted to tell her that I didn’t care if it was fair, or if it was thoughtful or mean or capricious or bad parenting or anything. I wanted to tell her, 'Because I just don’t want you to, and I’m the parent and that’s why not.' Instead, I closed my eyes and frowned and feigned an exhausted sigh and said ok, she could go. ‘But be careful, especially around the lake and along the shore road,’ I said. (Harding, 2013, 173).”
While on that ride, Charlie’s daughter was struck by a car and killed instantly. In the aftermath, Charlie himself began a downward spiral into every parent’s worst nightmare—one that can call into question our very sense of purpose and value and meaning.
“I felt no gratitude whatsoever for, and no relief from, the pain I experienced every waking moment,” explained Charlie, “and this life felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger. (Harding, 2013, 99).”
By all accounts, anecdotal and quantitative, losing a child is a form of devastation like no other. A study of long-term effects of a child’s death on the lives of parents found that 20 years after the death, bereaved parents were more depressed, less physically healthy, less generally “well,” and more likely to have experienced depression or marital disruption (Rogers, Floyd, Seltzer, Greenberg, & Hong, 2008). Another study found that bereaved parents faced heightened mortality and addiction rates, as well as increased susceptibility to cancer, infectious disease, and cardiovascular disease (Li, Precht, Mortensen & Olsen, 2003).
What’s more, bereaved parents face levels of isolation unparalleled in other forms of grief. The only person whose experience might approximate a bereaved parent’s is that of the other bereaved parent. But too often a gulf develops between the bereaved parents, a gulf that empathic statements or shared feelings are often inadequate to bridge. Many marriages fail. And for both spouses, their situations are so sad and so terrifying that friends don’t know what to say. Those of us who have ever grieved profoundly have some idea what grief does to social support, to marriage, to relationships with colleagues. We’ve had the experience of peers, colleagues, partners, and friends prioritizing their fear of saying the wrong thing over our need for anyone to say anything at all, to connect in any way, however awkward.
It’s hard enough to find ways to talk about being depressed. That conversation is inherently depressing to others, and it wears on people. But talking about losing a child may be instantly emotionally intolerable, even for those without the faintest clue what it feels like.
Like Charlie, we might vacillate between a sense of entitlement to our pain and a feeling of guilt and shame at how important and consuming it is to us. Charlie explains: “My persistence in feeling that Kate’s death was the end of the world was an embarrassment, because I knew of people who had suffered the deaths of children from suicide and gunshots and falling from windows, the deaths of siblings to drowning and avalanche, the deaths of friends and lovers and spouses to fever, to falling, to ice, and to fire (Harding, 2013, 98).”
But it’s precisely a sense of entitlement to our pain, and to just how deep that pain cuts, that can also get us through it. As with most feelings, censorship and self-criticism just tend to drive it deeper and make it more immovable.
While our silence may seem to spare the people around us, by internalizing our guilt, fear, horror, and sadness, we sacrifice ourselves in a much more brutal way. Charlie's story is one such version of that brutal way—one that devolves into depression, drug use, a failed marriage, isolation, and total self-neglect. And his recovery takes him the only way there ever really was to move through his grief: straight through— acknowledging painful memories, devastating regrets, and debilitating self-doubt.
References
Harding, Paul (2013). Enon. New York: Random House.
Li, J. L., Precht, D. H., Morenson, P. B. & Olsen, J. (2003). Mortality in parents after death of a child in Denmark: A nationwide follow-up study. The Lancet, 361)9355), February, 363-367.
Rogers, C. H., Floyd, F. J., Seltzer, M. M., Greenberg, J. & Jinkuk, H. (2008). Long-term effects of the death of a child on parents’ adjustment in midlife. Journal of Family Psychology, 22(2), April, 203-211.
