When our daughters Allison and Hayley were 13 and 11, and our son Chris was 6, my husband, their father died. Although he had cancer, until his final 24-hours doctors assured me that he was going to turn things around, so I told our kids that he’d be home any day and we’d go fishing by the end of the summer. When I had to tell them that he died, my daughters refused to believe me. Somehow, their denial was more heartbreaking to me than despair or rage might have been. My powerlessness to help them was overwhelming.
Eighteen months later my mother died. My kids each had their own inside jokes with her; they all completed each other’s sentences. This time we saw it coming with a three-month prognosis. She died on Christmas day. That twisted Christmas morning I had to wake them up and tell them that it was happening and I’d be back from the hospital as fast as I could. I told them I was pissed that it was Christmas—it was outrageous to me—it still is. When I got home from saying goodbye they comforted me, helped me get a turkey in the oven because “it was still Christmas,” and they were so calm and lovely and accepting and worried about me instead of themselves, their love that day almost literally knocked me over. I held on to counters and chair backs as I moved through the house, afraid I might just topple over if I wasn’t careful.
Stunningly, my sister died in her sleep in early June of this year. She had a life of addiction, but she was not sick or diagnosed with any life-threatening condition. Now my daughters are 23 and 25 and I couldn’t bear to tell them when it happened. The 25-year old was in New Orleans for the weekend, a big, planned and saved for trip. Everyone in the family told me not to tell her, which meant I couldn’t tell Hayley either. I just couldn’t imagine what Hayley would do with the information if she couldn’t talk with Allison. Chris knew as soon as I did because he still lives at home and heard me crying and hyperventilating when I got the call. I felt so bad that he didn’t have his siblings that night. I kept my sister’s death a secret for three days and when I let the girls know, again they asked, “Are you sure?” “Is everyone sure?”
On election day, we went to the polls together. The girls live together in the city and we had a sleepover the night before. We proudly wore our “I Voted” stickers and did the pose for social media complete with American flags they had brought. We went straight to breakfast at a cafe in our little town, saw people we knew, and it all felt like a celebration. Both girls talked about what an important time it was for women, how happy they were that the first president they truly cared about was a black man and the first president in their post-college lives was a woman. My son’s first vote was for a female.
When we parted ways to go to work and school we talked about meeting up at a viewing party that night. I let them know I would have to check my anxiety levels; that if I was nervous I’d rather be alone until I felt comfortable, but hopefully I’d join my daughters in the city by 7:30 p.m.
By 9 p.m. our texts to each other were frantic.
By 10:00 p.m. they were monosyllabic.
At 3:30 in the morning Hayley called me and said: “Is there any chance this could be a mistake?”
Her desperate need for it to not be true brought me back to 12 years ago and the death of her Dad. Wednesday, they texted and called all morning, and Allison said she wished she was home. All that day felt just like death does: The hollow heart, the constant re-remembering and the wind-knocked-out-of-you feeling it causes. I spent the day trying to distract myself and trying, trying so hard to find some way to some words or ideas of comfort, or even a neutral read, on the day’s event.
I feel exactly like I did with each of the deaths in our family---simply crushed that I cannot help my children, that I cannot take the pain away, in any way, cannot protect them. I feel like their lives so far have been so unjustly topsy turvy, so insecure, like they are walking on terra firma in which gravity might just stop working at any moment, or, more likely, the ground might just open up and swallow them whole. If this is like a death it’s more of a car accident than cancer. I feel like they keep getting punched smack in the middle of their beautiful faces.
A week later, we are in great pain. We are bouncing around in the stages of grief; we keep getting stuck between denial and anger. It feels like the loss of a future, the future feels like a life I cannot even imagine, but the worst part is--I cannot “fix this” for my children. Again, my powerlessness is nearly impossible to bear. I hear the line from Yeats “The Second Coming” in my head like its our theme: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;” and I cannot stop it.