Collecting Grieving Mothers by Corie Skolnick
“the way the body of a mother who has lost a child trembles”
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More than ten years ago, my friend Jan called and told me that her son had been killed. David, not yet 18, died a grisly death under the wheels of a freight train in rural Illinois. The details were sketchy.
There was speculation – of course there was – that alcohol was involved in the accident and maybe drugs, but I never asked her for those details, and she never said. She had 6 children, 5 sons and now she has only 4. She told me when David died that she hated it when people said, (and more than a few actually did), At least you have five other kids.
I saw Jan last month when I was in Chicago. She told me with fresh new tears in her eyes that she hates it when people say, I’m sorry for your loss.
Bren’s son died riding his bike down Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, maybe, maybe not, in the fog. Maybe, maybe not, run off the road by a car. Maybe, maybe not super hung-over. They will never know.
When Jack died, people also tried to find consoling words but mostly they just said stupid shit. I probably did myself. I’m sure we all meant well, but Bren told me that not one of us said a single thing that gave her any comfort whatsoever. It took her three long years before she woke up without wishing she hadn’t.
She wears a pinch of Jack’s ashes in a tiny vial around her neck and when she goes on bike rides on mountains in exotic places like Machu Picchu or Myanmar, she scatters a few grains to the winds at the top. I light candles for Jack in every cathedral I visit everywhere I go in the world, even though it was his mother who gave me Bertand Russell’s essay, “Why I’m Not A Christian” and it has been many, many years since I had any hope that there is a God who would care about my candles or any afterlife for Jack. I don’t light the candles for his immortal soul. I do it for Brennis, because now she says, “it can’t hurt.”
When Nickie overdosed, I was in the middle of a remodel on our master bathroom and I was standing in the tile store with my contractor trying to decide if two rows of glass tile was “over the top.”
When my cell phone rang, I glanced at my cousin’s name on the screen and let it go to voicemail. I left the store and went to my car to play her message. Then I drove directly over the hill to Santa Monica without returning home.
My cousin’s grief was painful to witness. It was painful to touch her but I held her when she wanted to be held. When she could bear it.
There is no way to accurately describe the way the body of a mother who has lost a child trembles.
It feels like the molecules that make up her mass have been electrified. Her atoms are in disarray. The change in her body chemistry is evidence of things out of order in the physical world. Her pain is palpable. It is definitely “over the top.”
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Karen’s son died in Africa in May.
He was her wild child, always the one of her four boys to push the limits, to seek out extreme adventures. I know that some people said (and they said it at his memorial, behind his mother’s back), that it shouldn’t really be a surprise that someone who courts so much danger and lives such a dangerous life should find his life cut short, but I can tell you for sure, it is still a surprise to his mother.
It’s November now, and she can’t stop weeping. She said she still expects to see him walk in the back door with his duffle bag over his shoulder, the way he always did when he returned from an adventure.
Dee was my clinical supervisor and colleague at the university. Her son overdosed in the canyon behind their house. Another Sandy I know kissed her 16-year-old boy goodnight, and he never woke up.
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These women are all personal friends. These are not just stories I know, or contacts from my professional life. If I added to this list all the mothers from my work life that I had to console when their sons died of AIDS or got shot in Afghanistan or were victims of gang violence in the San Fernando Valley, the number is staggering; almost unbelievable.
So you might be wondering by now if there is something cosmic at work in my life that has brought so many grieving mothers into it, and you would be right to think that.
I have held way too many mothers in desperate pain, grieving and mourning.
So the time has come now for me to reveal a secret that I have never written about, and rarely talked about. It is why I have said yes to public displays about grief and death and dying and loss in the recent past. It is my mea culpa.
Before I knew even one mother who had lost a child, I killed a man.
He was 32.
I want to tell you that the police declared the accident 100% his fault. His blood alcohol levels broke records, they said. There was nothing I could have done, they said.
He drove his motorcycle into my car windshield on a dry, clear afternoon at just after 4 o’clock without even tapping on his brakes.
He’d been at the bar at the base of the canyon road all afternoon. The police said that he might well have already been dead or at least unconscious when he crossed the line. I wonder whenever I think about this event, an event that makes that day rank as the worst day of my life, I wonder still… was there something I could have done differently?
I asked the police for his mother’s phone number. I thought it was the right thing to do. When she answered the call, I explained who I was. I think I was crying. And she said, “I don’t have a son.” I asked if I had the right person. Was she the woman I was looking for? She said, yes. “You have the right person. This is the right number. I don’t have a son. I haven’t had a son for a long time.”
For a while, I compulsively blurted out that I’d had this terrible accident. Like someone suffering from Tourette’s, I told everyone I saw that I’d killed a young man whose mother didn’t care.
Then, probably around the time my Xanax prescription ran out, I just got sad and I stayed sad for a long time. And then I let the story die too. I haven’t talked about this for a long time.
I don’t know when exactly I started believing that I would have to pay the obvious price for this terrible accident. It’s ridiculous and superstitious, I know, nevertheless, my own son will be 32 in less than a year, and the clock is ticking.
And I am collecting grieving mothers.
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Header image courtesy of Suzanne Brown. To view her photo essay, "Folds," on NAILED, go here.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised on Chicago’s south side, Corie Skolnick moved to Southern California when Ronald Reagan was the governor. She was a California licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice, a consultant to several Los Angeles agencies serving high risk youth and families, and a “sometimes” psychology instructor at both California State University, Northridge and Moorpark College. She currently writes fiction full time, travels extensively, and contributes to the travel site, DESTO3.COM. She is married to the social psychologist and photographer, Paul (Pablo) Skolnick.