Broken Promises

Chapter 24 - Finding Me Again

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow.

A husband who loses a wife is called a widower.

A child who loses his parents is called an orphan.

There is no word for a parent who loses a child.

That's how awful the loss is.

– Jay Neugeboren – An Orphan's Tale – 1976

I read this passage a while back after losing you and crumbled. It seems that is all I have done for as long as I can remember. I break along what few edges I have left. There are so many fractured pieces now I am sure my soul is nothing more than broken confetti except without the prettiness. Maybe one day I will get used to the breaking or get used to living without a soul.

Still, this paragraph by Jay Neugeboren sums up so much. The terms widow, widower, and orphan represent more than a simple designation. They carry with them an understanding of what the person is going through and how you should interact, or not, with them. There is no need on the part of the holder of these terms to justify an action of avoidance, a breakdown, or those moments when they see someone who has what they lost and they just quite breathing while frozen in time. People do not ask the questions they do not want to answer. They are free to be as broken as they need to be. They are free to exist without existing.

The same cannot be said of the parent who loses a child. Everyone knows for a while what happened. It seems to be quite the gossip. People look at us with that look. They have no idea what to say or do. But over time no one remembers, and that is better. We eventually move away and only a select few who have known us for ages know. That is until people who we are new to ask if we have kids. If we say no, they will tell us that we should have them soon, how our lives will change for the better. They may even ask why we do not have any, some asking if we are afraid to commit to the responsibility. If we say yes that we have kids...or that we did, they will ask for details that do not exist and worse we have to remember again that we are no longer a father, so we cannot lie there even if we wanted.

It is not a conversation we want to have. But it will happen. It happened to me again recently when a new friend asked me if I had kids. I said no and another friend who had seen your ashes blurted out, "Yes you do" and then froze when he realized what he had done. I left as quickly as I could to avoid the rest of the conversation. The story was not for them to hear. This is our story. These are our pieces that burn.

It does make one wonder why there is no term for this state of being. It is as if no word can exist that can contain that level of pain and loss. Orphan is the closet as it portrays an out of place loss, but this term belongs to them. It is their pain contained in their word. Meanwhile, we have no box to contain our trauma. We have nowhere for our love to go so it just burns like caustic acid, eating up the few remaining fragments.

And yet, when we lose our child we have no word to describe your state of being, our loss. We have no understanding. We have nothing. And maybe that ends up being the right term for what we are. Maybe that is the term we should use to describe parents who have lost our child. We are Nothing.

I have witnessed an evil in my heart that I cannot purge. I heard of a couple of kids with life-threatening issues recently, and I cannot help but get my head in a bad place. I am wondering if the time they had before will make it worse or easier than never having had any happy memories. A relative has a traumatic accident and ends up being okay, and I find myself jealous. I hate this feeling. I am angry and ashamed of myself for thinking of this. It just reinforces all the things my soul misses. Things that people take for granted when it comes to their kids.