Lessons in grief from a little boy

A FATHER receives unexpected lessons on how to deal with grief - from his toddler son.

IT was on November 10, 2012, that my life changed forever.

Just after 8pm I left my friends’ house a happily married 33-year-old father. By 9.17pm I was sitting in an ambulance on their street, a widower in shock. I only remember the time because I noticed that the hands on the clock were in the same position as when our son was born two years and three weeks before.

My son and I managed to narrowly dodge the car that killed the woman I’d loved for the last eight years. The woman I’d married just the year before. It killed a wife; a daughter; a sister; a friend treasured by so many. But, ­perhaps worst of all, it killed a toddler’s beautiful and devoted mummy.

As soon as my son started asking where she’d gone, I decided to tell him the truth. Somehow the illustrated books I’d been given by well-meaning friends, which explained to a badger that his elderly rabbit friend had gone to the stars, were not going to help my child understand why his mother would never be back. So I showed him a picture of Desreen on my phone and invited him to kiss it.

“Jackson,” I began, “Mummy’s gone away and she can’t ever come back. She didn’t want to go,” I continued. “She would never have left you out of choice because she loved you more than anyone or anything in the world. But Daddy’s still here and I’m going to look after you now. And I know how to look after you because Mummy taught me.”

Jackson didn’t get upset; he simply cuddled up close, nodded and repeated some of my words back. There was no way he’d taken in what I’d said but I knew I needed to start somewhere. I asked my mum and everyone who cared for him to use exactly the same words as I had, to try to minimise his confusion. I banned expressions such “gone to a better place” because I worried that he might want to go there too or, perhaps worse, think she’d chosen that mysterious place over him. And I chose not to talk about heaven because, at that time, he didn’t know the geographical difference between paradise and the local park.

I suppose in my heart I knew that it was going to take months, perhaps even years for the message to sink in and to be truly understood. Yet the maddening thing about bereaved toddlers, or rather, any toddlers, is that you can tell them something one day but they may well have forgotten the next. Even if they say they understand, you can often find ways to prove that actually they don’t.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s strange to pay so much attention to what a child of less than three has to say. I can’t imagine I would have taken Jackson’s comments as seriously had my wife not died so prematurely. In trying to make sense of both the exciting world around them and the new and unfamiliar words circulating in their own little heads, toddlers inevitably speak a lot of nonsense. But I did pay a lot of attention because I longed to know how Jackson felt and what he was thinking, to find out whether he really understood what he was saying.

You might expect that a toddler who had been without his mummy for the latter third of his lifetime would cry out for his daddy when upset or in pain. After almost a year my son still called out her name first. You might think that her continued absence would make him understand that she was never coming back. After almost a year my son still showed continued signs of hope.

July 19, 2013, eight months since Desreen’s death: “Mummy’s coming to Grandma’s house tonight, Daddy,” Jackson shared with me. “She’s coming in a aeroplane.”

August 12, nine months since Desreen’s death: “Annalise, your mummy’s out in the hall,” I told my friend’s daughter at nursery one day. “My mummy?” Jackson asked quickly.

August 13: “Who’s your best friend, Jackson?” his carer asked him. “Mummy,” he replied.

August 18: “Mummy likes this one,” Jackson informed me about a shirt that was bought as a gift after her death. “She’s coming to see me later.”

After the first six months I suppose I thought we’d got there. Experts in child grief and psychology had told me that children couldn’t truly grasp the concept of death or the finality of “never” until they were around five or six years old. I, perhaps naively, thought that my son understood sooner than most. For once my optimism got the better of me. He was only two but I thought that because he could repeat my words, he’d realised what they meant.

Toddlers daydream and play pretend all the time, so it’s hard to separate what they really believe from childish fantasy or the delightful drivel they constantly speak. Reason should have told me to apply a pinch of salt when listening to comments from a child who would tell me that he’d had a Tyrannosaurus rex in his underpants over for a tea party “last morning”. But reason isn’t always the dominant force in grief. Hope can often be found sparring with it.

I should know: I’ve often been in the same position myself. I know my wife is dead: I saw it happen; I watched her die; I was handed her belongings in a clear plastic bag and then my confused and tired little boy and I were driven home by the police who were on the scene when it happened; I saw her lying in the chapel of rest at the coroner’s office and the funeral home; I gave her eulogy at her funeral and I committed her body to the ground. Yet hope often still trumps reason to get the better of my senses.

In July 2013, eight months after Desreen’s death, I was out shopping. Hope swiftly stopped me in my tracks, took my breath away and stopped me from seeing straight. My phone rang and the caller ID read: Desreen Brooks. I froze. My body ran hot and cold simultaneously. My feet were rooted to the pavement but my head shook from side to side as I looked for her in the street, or for cameras, like it might be some kind of sick joke. It took me what felt like forever to realise what had happened. I had ­several telephone numbers for my wife stored in my phone: her mobile, her parents’ house, a home landline that she never used, and her office. Her business partner, Cathy, had just called me from the office. There was no way I could call back. I found myself standing on one of the country’s busiest shopping streets feeling sick, shaking and crying my heart out.

How could a death so sudden, so tragic and so pointless ever feel real? And if it was like that for a man of 33, how could a child of two be expected to fully accept and understand his loss?

One day Desreen’s brother, Anthony, went to pick Jackson up from nursery. Rather than shoot straight for the exit when his uncle arrived, Jackson guided him into the room. “Come,” he instructed Anthony. Jackson wanted to share something with someone in the family but clearly not with me. His nursery had a piece of equipment that enabled toddlers, who couldn’t yet fully articulate, to attempt to share their moods in pictures. Jackson picked up an angry face. “This is Mummy,” he told Anthony. Next he selected a sad face. “This is Daddy.” Next he chose a happy face. “And this is Jackson.”

Anthony told me about this shared moment some days later when we were alone in his car. “That’s heartbreaking,” I said. “Why does he think she’s angry?”

“Well, it makes sense, I suppose,” he replied. “ ‘Mummy’s gone away and can’t ever come back,’ ” he said, repeating the words I’d asked everyone to learn for the sake of consistency for Jackson. ‘ “She didn’t want to go…’ ” he continued. “I’m not surprised he thinks she’d be angry about that.”

“I guess you’re right. But I hate to think of him seeing me as so sad.”

“But you wouldn’t want the order shifted in any way, would you? It’s amazing that he’s still able to say he’s happy, if you think about it.”

Seven or eight months after his mummy died, Jackson reached that age where he suddenly needed things that, personally, I imagine he could quite comfortably have survived ­without: chocolate, Play-Doh, a new car. He NEEDED them. The first time I noticed this was the same day Jackson actively brought his mummy into conversation for the first time in a couple of weeks. We talked about her a lot, every day, but usually I was the one who mentioned her first. As my son had ­little grasp of the concept of time, it was me who was preoccupied with keeping Desreen present and who kept a mental record of how long it had been since we last chatted about the woman we both love. As I rinsed the plates I heard Jackson ask for his dummy. Except that wasn’t what he said. His dummy was already hanging loosely in his mouth, like Detective Columbo’s omnipresent cigar. “I want my mummy back,” he said, out of nowhere.

“What did you say, Jackson? Take your dummy out,” I urged.

“Mummy loves me. Mummy’s gone away.” Words he had now learnt off by heart. “I want to kiss Mummy. Mummy’s far away in the sky. I want to go to the sky and kiss Mummy. Mummy wanted to go away.”

“No, Jackson, remember Mummy didn’t want to go away. She loved you so much and she didn’t ever want to leave you. But Mummy can’t ever come back.”

“Mummy wanted to go away.”

I realised it was time for Jackson to know more. His speech had come on so much since the first time I told him what had happened and so I reasoned that his understanding had, too. “Jackson, there was a nasty accident and Mummy was hit by a car.”

“I don’t want to be hit by a car, Daddy.”

“No, Jackson, and I don’t want you to be either, which is why we always have to be very careful and look both ways when we cross the road.”

“But I want to kiss Mummy.”

“Well then, we can.”

The week before this conversation I had put a large picture up on the kitchen wall of ­Desreen and Jackson kissing one another on holiday in Spain just three months before she was killed. I suggested that Jackson kiss that. “Ah! It’s Jackson kissing Mummy!” he exclaimed happily as if he’d never seen the photo, with which he was already so familiar. He leaned in and kissed her picture. Then he kissed his own. Then he kissed me and squeezed me tightly.

The next morning Shelley Gilbert, the founder of a child bereavement charity, called to invite me to an event. I told her what had happened. “It’s interesting that he used the word ‘want’,” she told me. Her words immediately triggered a thought that made total sense of the confusion I was feeling. “He didn’t say need,” I interrupted. “He’s started saying he needs everything but last night he wanted his mummy – there’s a massive difference. I want her too but I know that I can’t have her. Perhaps I should try to take some comfort in the fact he’s no longer saying need.”

Whether he said “want” or “need”, I would still feel like shit because I couldn’t give him what he was hoping for. But our situation has forced me to give up on the idea of striving for the impossible. I’ve gradually come to terms with the idea that I’m just going to do my very best for my child, as the surviving parent. Sometimes that’s tough. Sometimes he knows when I’m sad. And sometimes when I’m at my lowest point he is also at his, making life feel almost unbearably testing. Discipline can be hard because I don’t want to upset my son, knowing how much happiness he has already been deprived of, but the consequences of running from it entirely would be too trying to take.

I don’t think it’s possible to be a perfect parent. I think it’s even harder when perfect has been taken from your life. And I think it’s even harder still when your child suddenly starts to articulate his own pain by mixing the language of an adult with the innocence and confusion of a child.

“I’m so worried, Daddy,” my son once told me when he was writhing around my bed tormented, panicked and with a soaring temperature brought on by chicken pox. “What about, Jackson?” I asked, flustered more by the sudden maturity of his concerned voice than his controllable body heat. “Me,” he replied.

“It hurts, Daddy,” he said a few weeks later, without any previous indication that anything was wrong. “What does?” I probed. “Jackson,” he responded, repeating the same sentiment.

Each time he took my breath away with how precisely he’d articulated how I also felt about myself. And each time he made me wonder if perhaps we were both riddled with the same kind of agony and anguish and simply unable to express it in the same way.

When my wife died I realised quickly that there would always be pain in our home. It will no doubt come and go in unpredictable and intermittent waves. But as long as there’s also love in that home, I suspect the two of us will be OK. However tough it gets I’ll remind myself of something Jackson said to me the week my grandma died. After acting out a colossal tantrum in the park by my parents’ house, I asked him if he was ready to be friends again. “Don’t be silly, Daddy!” he replied. “We’re always friends.”

Edited extract from It’s Not Raining, Daddy, It’s Happy (Hodder & Stoughton, $26.99). Benjamin Brooks-Dutton’s blog: lifeasawidower.com