Sunny Sings The Blues: Guest Post - David: Loss Through a Child's Eyes

French Horn fingering chart.

I'm pausing from my series on forgiveness to bring readers this guest post..

Joshua, from Vive le Nerd, wrote this moving guest post about his experience with loss at 13 years of age. As a widow, school psychologist, and as a human, I find his story compelling because of how well it demonstrates the complexity of loss. My experience has taught me that the common understanding of grief occurring in five discrete stages, as proposed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, is drastically oversimplified. Her ideas are a starting point for understanding of the process, but that is all. It's only a start.

Grief is convoluted. The stages occur at once sometimes. It changes people. And when it happens to youngsters, it's even more vexing.

Joshua's reaction to grief at the time of his friend's death is not surprising. Grief is difficult, period. The only real difference between children and adults is their ability to grasp the abstract finality of death. Children have less ability to process their thoughts and feelings about their experience. Adults struggle too, but children do not have the capacity to reflect on their behavioral responses in the way in which adults are capable. Though, as I mentioned before, there is no magic wand to make grief go away. Nothing but time and insight that comes from life experience makes it better. Grief is a painful part of life that shapes adults and children alike. Joshua's story is an excellent illustration of that.

Thank you, Joshua. I am honored to have you posting here.

*****

David

Some dates in life are fixed. Often people remember approximately when something happened, but truly extraordinary events—both divine and tragic—etch a specific number into your memory for all time.

I, like others, have many of these dates in my brain. There are the dates we learn about in school (1776, 1941), as well as those we have experienced personally, whether as a collective public or as a family or with a few friends (1963, 1969, 2001).

As often happens in this life, sometimes these events simply change our mood or our collective thinking for a short period of time before returning to the status quo. Other events send shockwaves through your entire being, changing the course of your life forever. Maybe you can’t pinpoint that exact moment because it was a series of occurrences that led to a gradual change. Maybe it was a specific moment.

Mine came on March 13, 1993.

As a resident video game nerd, movie critic, book reviewer, and personal reference library for the obscure and often inane, I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I'm also a band geek. In fourth grade, I started on the flute (for the sole reason that I wanted to be Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull). Two years later I switched to the trumpet; not that I minded being the only male flautist, but I was nine, so what did I know? David was my best friend, so I switched to trumpet so that we could goof off. A few years later, the director of our junior high bad convinced me to switch to the French horn section, so that we would have one.

Fast-forward one year. It was a Saturday morning and we had a band competition to attend that day. My school was three blocks away, so I walked it to catch the bus with the rest of the band. Exactly where we went is irrelevant; it was another school a bit of a drive from us; probably a high school since that's where most of those competitions used to take place.

Speed through the whole getting there, warming up, and performing part of the story. It, too, is immaterial.

Once we were finished performing, we returned our instruments to their cases, packed them away onto a bus for transporting home later, and were given liberty until the award ceremony later in the day.

David and I were just walking the building, goofing around, when he started complaining that he had a migraine. This had happened before, and I was prone to them, too. Food usually helped to alleviate the problem for him, and I steered us toward vending machines.

He stopped.

I turned.

His face was white. Pained.

Eyes rolled up, revealing only whites.

And then he collapsed.

His mom was one of our chaperones and quickly at his side. He was unconscious. Non-responsive. The ambulance came and took him away.

I don't remember much after watching his mom climb into the back of the ambulance and it driving away. I got home, presumably on the same bus we took to get there. Mom cried when she heard what had happened. We got out of the house and went to my favorite restaurant, The Olive Garden. I remember getting home and Mom making me leave the room as she listened to the message on the answering machine. She was crying again. It was an aneurysm.

I didn’t go to school for a few days. Until after the funeral.

At first, everything after was, and still is, a fog. A jumbled myriad of memories all seen through white-hot rage multiplied by general teen angst.

Have you ever read J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan? Tinkerbell gets mad at Wendy and convinces The Lost Boys to shoot arrows at her. Barrie explained that, due to her size, Tinkerbell could only contain one emotion at a time; if she was happy, she was over the moon; anger came out as pure, unadulterated wrath. I was the latter for a while.

So when the principal arrived in my 7th grade social studies class to escort me to his office where my parents and a police officer were waiting, no one was really surprised. All things being equal, my punishment should have been more severe. Four broken windows. Sandblasting to remove the paint. The Molotov cocktail hurled at the school’s brick façade did nothing more than singe the brick and pavement. Perhaps everything from the preceding months was taken into consideration when I was given a juvenile arrest record, released to my parents, and given a one-week, in-school suspension. Mom and Dad quietly paid the bill over the next several months.

Once returned to the general school population, I was still detached. I started blatantly not paying attention and falling asleep in class. I wanted to climb out.

Of school.

Of life.

I started having sleep problems. Late nights, lying awake or reading or just begging for sleep. It’s a problem that continues today. Having kids certainly takes a lot of that out of you, but for the most part it still persists, and I often find myself up at strange hours of the night. Perhaps the two are linked, perhaps it's just coincidence. Regardless, it happens.

I used to have the same recurring dream. David and I were back in the hallway of that school, chatting just like we were then. I turn to see his face go ghostly white, his eyes roll up into his head, and he collapses. I run down the hallway and round the corner to find myself walking and chatting just like we were then. I turn to see his face...repeat...repeat...repeat...

Until my alarm goes off and I wake up.

Every night that I could remember dreaming, this is what was playing. A haunting, looping, 3-D IMAX.

It wasn't until my freshman year in college five years later, while taking an intro psychology course, that this problem started to abate. It still occurred, but with decreasing regularity. Again, perhaps coincidence, but perhaps not.

Even today I'll have this dream. But it only happens once, when it does happen. It never repeats. And it's not the same as it used to be. The passage of time, it seems, changes things. Memories become what you want them to be; fuel runs out; heat dissipates.

In the end, you're left with the memory of a great friend, the best you ever had.

It's not just one person or one event that shapes who you are, who you become. But there are times, like these, that alter the course of your life forever.

Funny, maybe, that I still think of him now. But not with the same sense of loss and hurt that once was there. Eighteen years, it seems, is more than adequate time for scars to stop aching constantly.

Postscript: Not very long after the events of March 13, 1993, Mom, Dad, Brother, and I were walking through Volo Bog, near where we lived in Illinois. Dad and Brother were ahead of me; Mom was behind. I was walking with my eyes turned toward the ground. I heard a noise and looked up. I saw Dad, and then I saw black. When I came to, I'm not really sure how much time had passed, and Mom was crying above me. Dad was holding me. And the first words out of my mouth were, "What the hell did you throw at me?" Apparently a rather large branch had fallen out of a tree and hit me square on the head. The last thing I saw was Dad, and it looked like his arm was out, as if he had just thrown something at me.

*****