In this, Part 2 of my series entitled “On dying & grief”, I talk about encountering these as an adult at various stages of my life, including heart-wrenching deaths of children and young people, one of whom was a teammate in high school.
I got a call on a cold November evening in 1979 while I was engrossed in the first few months of my University of Alberta studies, living in my little off-campus Edmonton basement suite. Bear in mind that those were the days before call display and when calling long-distance wasn’t an expense to be taken lightly. It was my high school basketball coach (still a dear friend until his passing in June of this year), calling to tell me that one of my teammates, Bobby, had been killed in, of all things, a basketball game, when he was hit from behind after going in for a lay-up. He was driven head-first into the concrete wall behind the basket (this was in the days when padding on gym walls was not yet standard anywhere – I understand that this incident led to that changing in Winnipeg). He simply never regained consciousness.
There was no question that I would return to Winnipeg for the funeral, the first in my life of someone that close to me, as we were (and remain) a tightly-knit group.
I can’t honestly remember if I cried at any point during the service or the actual burial, despite feeling a combination of sadness and bewilderment, but also a bit of happiness to be among my dear teammates once again. I doubt that I cried – it all felt very surreal, as I did not yet truly comprehend the stark finality of Bobby’s passing. I do, however, retain a distinct visual memory of how hard our coach and his wife cried as they lowered the casket into the ground at the brief gravesite portion of the multi-day service. It was not until I got into coaching myself many years later that I understood the depth of grief and loss that our coach would have felt as one of “his kids” was laid to rest.
Just a few years ago, I re-visited Bobby’s grave, about 35 years after he had died, and it was then that I finally cried. Maybe I cried because I thought about him, forever 22 years old, while we who remain have aged, or maybe I cried when I thought about all the fun times I shared with him in high school. Maybe it was because I have my own daughter, who was just coming into adulthood at the time I was at the cemetery, or perhaps it was because such sadness works its way into our minds simply from a deeper understanding of mortality that only the passage of time can give us.
There is a picture of him on the headstone, “dunking” a basketball, with a look of pure joy on his young adult face. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what happens after we die, but I’d like to think that Bobby is somewhere playing an endless game of pick-up, wearing that same enduring look of joy.
“Time itself does not ‘console,’ as people say superficially; at best it assigns things to their proper place and creates an order…. Alas, how little the heart forgets – and how strong it would be if we did not stop it from completing its tasks before they have been fully and truly accomplished!”
R.M. Rilke, letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy (January 6, 1923), The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
When my career path took me to the world of financial services, in which one serves clients and their families very directly, and eventually in that profession to the area encompassing the small city of Camrose, AB, death became more ubiquitous: clients die, people you otherwise know in your community, your service club, or your church, die. In such a small setting, death becomes a much more visible and integral part of the cycle of life and it is one of the many events that bring a community together.
You check the obituaries every day in a way that you might not if your job were more insular or your community involvement minimal. It was very telling when my wife, who was a nurse and mental health therapist in Camrose for many years, and I strolled through the Camrose Cemetery one afternoon, as to how many of those interred there either she had looked after or I had served in the course of my business. That was, of course, in addition to all the names we recognized there from our various other walks of life.
Some we remembered fondly, while others perhaps somewhat less so, either because of reputation or some sort of direct interaction. In some cases, we were well aware of the tragic circumstances that surrounded a particular death, perhaps just in general terms because of what we had read in the paper or heard from others while, in other cases, we knew the situation at a deeper level, such as when a couple killed by a drunk driver a bit north of Camrose had died without their wills having been drawn up. Needless to say, this created complications in terms of their four orphaned children’s care.
There was a kind of comfort in having familiarity with so many of the people laid to rest in that cemetery, though; for some reason, knowing these people, having attended many of their funerals and even having been in many of their homes, made death seem more natural than fearsome. This was perhaps especially so in an agricultural community such as Camrose, where living and dying were seen as an inherent part of the rhythm of daily existence. People would be missed, and some deaths would cut to the quick for those around them, to be sure (particularly when there were children or young adults involved), but death seemed to be seen by most as just another stage of life. I drew much from this perspective over time, particularly in how it psychologically prepared me for the inevitable deaths of those much closer to me.
…our efforts, I believe, can aim only at assuming the unity of life and death …the sleeping and the waking, the bright and the dark, the voice and the silence…la présence et l’absence.
Over the years of living in and around Camrose, it’s the two funerals for children I attended that hit me the hardest and taught me something about my own grieving process.
One was for a baby born with some sort of physical deficiency that simply didn’t give the little guy a chance. His parents were good friends of ours and I can’t even begin to imagine the hurt they felt when their precious little boy breathed his last in spring of 2002. I was overwhelmed by the tiny casket, the funeral procession purposely snaking along the street in front of their house, and the pervasive sadness that gripped the entire 400-person community of Bawlf, AB, where we lived prior to moving to Camrose in 2013. The whole community grieved as one.
It should come as no surprise that, once you yourself are a parent – my daughter was five at that time – you hurt for other parents at a more profound level. We grieve because we share the hurt of the parents experiencing the loss, but we cry, too, out of a sense of relief (and not without some resulting guilt), I think, because we are grateful that our own children have not been taken in this way. We are just that much more appreciative of them in that moment. This was when I definitely discovered what kind of passing would bring me to tears: not from grief born of my own loss, but from a grief born of visceral empathy.
The other funeral for someone’s child, much later, was for a young lady from Bawlf who had taken her own life at age 31 in 2018. She was about nine years older than my daughter and was part of a large, mostly Roman Catholic, area family, one that included several members with whom I remain quite close, so there was no question I would attend the service. Funerals in more recent times tend to be quite different from what they once were: for instance, a lot more of the deceased’s favourite music is played and, most importantly, there are many more photographs and videos shown. This has a way of drawing people, particularly non-family, into that person’s life in a way that would not have been the case in the days when the spoken eulogy was the only way in which we may have gleaned some insights about the person.
I’d moved to Bawlf in 1997, when this young lady was barely four. Although our families as a whole weren’t extremely close, we watched that young lady’s life unfold, even if only at a distance, so the photos that were shown at the funeral service were reminders of a broadly shared space and the passage of time. All I could think about during the entire service – which was surprisingly open-casket, no less – was how much she must have been hurting to make the decision to end her life and how much her parents and the rest of her family were now themselves in deep pain. “There but for the grace of God go I” never rang truer. With all those thoughts coursing through my mind, it made for the most difficult, heart-wrenching funeral I’d ever attended and it wasn’t a question of whether I grieved and cried but of when I might actually stop crying. I couldn’t wait to get outside so I could call my daughter just to hear her voice.
Then, in 2019, we moved to a small, welcoming Acadian fishing village in New Brunswick named Pointe-Sapin, both to be next to the ocean and to be nearer to my wife’s family – it seemed that rural life of one sort or another was part of our family fabric, although this new adventure would be different because we would be starting from scratch in terms of knowing people in the immediate area.
However, during the 2022 fall lobster season, our community lost a young man of 15 at sea in a fishing accident on his father’s boat. It was a month before he was found, despite the entire fishing community on the Northumberland Strait looking for him whenever possible, and thank heavens they did, as the family would otherwise have had no closure whatsoever. Even though we don’t know the parents (although we are acquainted with the grandparents, who live a couple of doors over), we certainly attended the funeral and grieved alongside our Acadian neighbours.
Unsurprisingly, the church, which overlooks the ocean, was filled to overflowing and there were even boats just offshore in front of the church that showed their support by blowing their horns and setting off fireworks (as per the image on this page) as the mourners departed the building – yet another ritual I had never encountered. The service included a row of the young man’s fellow students on either side of the main aisle, each holding a candle, which really pushed me toward the edge, as I had coached numerous young men exactly that age. I managed to hold myself together for most of the mass but, once the recession made its way down the aisle and I saw the parents crying their eyes out as they walked behind the casket, I lost it, and not just a little. Yet again, I couldn’t wait to get on the phone to tell my daughter how much I love her (for the record, I tell her that every time we speak, not just after children’s funerals).