Eric and I walk across a golden field toward a one-room stucco chapel under the bluest sky I’ve ever seen. Inside the church, pews line the walls, and a wooden tray filled with pebbles sits at the center of the room. We find seats near the door among a dozen or so bereaved parents. We don’t know their names or where they are from. We don’t know how their children died, how old they were, or how much time has passed. Some of the parents meet our eyes and smile, while others fix their gaze on the floor or out the window. No one speaks as we wait for the workshop to begin.
My quads ache from skidding down the side of a mountain earlier this morning. Eric and I got up early to hike to a mountain lookout that was once used by Taos Pueblo Indians to survey the plain below for invaders but is now commonly used by people like us for Instagram photos. After climbing switchbacks through a forest of fragrant juniper and piñon pines, we snapped a few pictures, then decided to take an alternate route down—a quick, steep drop into a dark canopy of Douglas firs. Small lizards skittered across the trail in front of us, and cactus gardens sprouted miraculously from rocks and dirt. Twenty-four hours after leaving our eight-year-old twins with my mom, I had finally managed to stop the disaster scenarios from unfolding in my head. Our children were not suffering or dying without us. They were probably just playing video games.
The hike up Devidadero Peak was how I sold Eric on making the trip from Oregon to New Mexico for this weekend workshop on the loss of a child. Yes, a grief retreat would be sad, but we are sad anyway, and when was the last time we’d gone for a hike without children who required rest and water every five minutes and needed to be bribed with Dairy Queen to keep going? As a closing argument, I read out loud from the menu of the Love Apple, a cozy restaurant inside an old adobe church in Taos: “red-chile enchiladas, quinoa fritters with cilantro-lime relish, duck-fat-fried potatoes.”
We are in between the hike and dinner, in a room where the air would certainly be heavy enough to crush the wannabe influencers who breezily passed us on the trail earlier this morning. After a few minutes our white-haired facilitator walks silently to the front of the chapel, lights a candle, and takes a seat. He is the founder of the retreat center: a licensed clinical therapist, certified grief counselor, and ordained minister. Roughly two decades ago, his daughters, aged six and nine, were killed in a car crash.
Soon the silence is broken by one of the mothers—a slight, middle-aged economics professor with dark-brown hair whose teenage son overdosed on fentanyl—gasping and frantically pulling kleenex out of a box. Her husband, a barrel-chested man with gray hair, puts an arm around her, making the noise that comes out of men when they try to suppress an eruption of tears. (“Honking,” Eric will later call it, and we’ll laugh, though I’ve heard him do it, too.) Next to me, sitting on the floor, a Native American woman with long braids begins rocking back and forth, emitting a low moan. I feel Eric heave beside me. I grab a few kleenex, hand some to Eric. As the room shudders, I have the sensation of being on a river raft with these other parents, tossed over rocks in a roaring canyon. A ten-year-old panic rises in my chest.
The facilitator welcomes us over the sound of sobbing, and that’s when I feel the river empty into the ocean. No less water, but more room, less frightening. He encourages us to introduce ourselves and, if we feel comfortable, share a little bit about the child we are missing. One by one, we light a tea candle and place it atop the pebbles in the center tray.
The causes are the ones our culture has come to accept as common: mostly cars, guns, and drugs. Some of the parents do not disclose the cause of death, like the mom of a baby who died in the hours after being born. When it’s my turn, I tell them about our son Seamus, a curly-haired, green-eyed tank of a toddler who walked at nine months and knew all the letters of the alphabet. Eric was pushing him through a crosswalk near our home when they were struck by a careless driver. After me, an immigrant father struggles to find the English words to tell us his son died by suicide. Most of the parents in the room are making their way through year one. At ten years, Eric and I are the child-loss veterans. For many, like the economics professor, it has been only a few months. I sense, but cannot say, that she will weave her pain into something beautiful. For others I am not so sure. Some of them have no partner, no other children, and few resources, and they have been forced back to work too soon.
Later that night at the Love Apple, Eric and I laugh at our puffy faces in the mirror we’re seated in front of. We eat enchiladas and remember our first year after Seamus died. It seems like yesterday but also forever ago. Wiping tears with our napkins, we agree that our kids will be very interested in our pictures of the lizards from our hike, and that maybe we will plan a family trip so they can see the wildlife here for themselves. I go to the bathroom, and when I come back, Eric is looking at Google Maps on his phone. “There’s no Dairy Queen in Taos,” he says, and I laugh.
The next morning we gather again in the chapel with people who feel like family now, and we are transported back to those awful early days, only this time with a decade’s perspective. I notice that Caroline, the Native American woman, sits by the door, as if keeping her options open. She is vibrating, rocking, and every few minutes a sound comes out of her like she is suppressing a scream. When we go around the room to share, she apologizes for the noises. “Since Ashkii died, I have these tics, almost like Tourette’s syndrome. My doctor says it’s nothing to worry about.” Even though her doctor could not explain it, to me and the others in this room nothing has ever made more sense.
In making the case that we should attend this retreat, I told Eric that lately my connection to Seamus felt faint. We talked about how the grief rituals we shared—lighting a candle, looking through pictures—had become rote and familiar. One of the dozens of grief memoirs I’d read said that grief is wrenching but also tender. I told him we needed to make ourselves tender again. Oddly, we would have to awaken some of the pain in order to feel better.
Listening to parents who are newly grieving, I notice the places where their voices break. It is not when they describe the concrete details of suffering and lifeless bodies; it is in the emptiness that follows. My most painful memories are not of the hospital but of our first steps out of it. I can steadily relate the story of Seamus’s surgeries or even his cold skin in the hospital bed, but when I try to talk about driving away without him, the rain pelting the windshield of our Subaru, Goldfish crackers crunching under my feet, and his car seat rolling around the wayback, my throat constricts. There’s death, and then there’s separation.
I still do not know who washed Seamus’s breakfast dishes and picked up the books and toys scattered across the living room, only that when we came home, the tasks were done, and I was relieved. I remember Eric’s wide, unblinking eyes, helping him reapply bandages over road-ravaged skin that was somehow clammy after a scalding shower, and the smell of soap mingling with panic sweat. I remember emptying a manila folder given to me by a hospital social worker and reading grief pamphlets while Eric slept: “Children Die, Too,” “Brain Death: A Simple Explanation,” and “Guidelines for Grieving Couples.”
I remember my house full of people as we gathered around our mantel, where I had propped photos of Seamus: a squinty, wrinkly newborn; a chubby, drooling six-month-old; a toddler at the beach with sand in his hair and in our backyard covered in blue sidewalk chalk. There was one from just a few weeks prior, of him snuggled on the couch with our dog, reading a book in his Christmas pajamas.
I remember Eric asking me to take the pictures down.
I remember hushed voices, occasional laughter, the comfort of friends, and the sounds of Eric wailing from behind Seamus’s closed bedroom door. I remember wanting to comfort him but knowing I couldn’t go in there.
I remember the way Seamus’s nap time still divided the day for weeks after he died. How I would unload the dishwasher so quietly.
I remember the odd relief of not having to worry about where he was or what he was doing.
In the house across the meadow from the chapel, we’ve gathered around a whiteboard. Caroline is flanked by a couple of other moms of dead teenagers, and I feel relieved that she is no longer perched near an exit. Before the session begins, they smile and talk about where they grew up, what they do for work, and where they are staying.
Our facilitator walks us through the science of bereavement. It’s the kind of information I was hungry for in the early days, scouring the internet and bookstores for explanations. Why couldn’t I stop shaking? Why didn’t I recognize people’s faces anymore? Was I still a mom?
He tells us about emotional and cognitive brain processes in the aftermath of a loss. He warns that it’s a fraught time for people who have struggled with addiction because we grasp for anything that helped us cope in the past. “Our brain literally thinks we are dying,” he says. “Loss of short-term memory, impulsivity, hypersensitivity, and irritability are all very common.” He says grieving people need time to cope with shattered identities and form new pathways out of who they used to be and into the person they are now.
One of the moms, a tattooed single parent of a teenager who died in a car crash, tells us that even if she had been able to take time off, she couldn’t afford to. She says she has sought comfort in bars and sex with strangers. I want to take her shame and light it on fire, push it over a cliff, watch it explode into dust. It makes me wonder about the mom whose baby died on the day he was born. Was it also shame that made her reluctant to share the cause of his death?
“There is resistance to letting go of anguish,” our facilitator says, and the husband of the economics professor confides that he doesn’t actually want to feel better. I try to light a path—carefully, though, because I would have hated someone trying to do it for me—by telling him, “You think that your connection to your child is somehow rooted in that intense anguish, but eventually you find ways of connecting that don’t feel like shit.” He nods, then honks. His wife sinks her head into her hands and moans.
Some of us roll our eyes when our facilitator asks if we’ve heard of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the five stages of grief. Because of her, I had expected an orderly process from which Eric and I would emerge “accepting” our child’s death. What we found instead was emotional chaos.
But our facilitator defends Kübler-Ross. He asks us to think of her stages of grief as phases that we can move in and out of, sometimes multiple times a day. He invites us to think of denial as more like insulation. I remember being unable to cry for weeks and wondering what was wrong with me. For years afterward the woman who worked at the lunch cart I’d visited when I was pregnant with Seamus would ask about him, and I would say he was fine, calculating what age he would be and throwing in a casual “just a crazy four-year-old doing four-year-old stuff,” and we’d laugh.
When our facilitator suggests we think of anger as protest, I flash back to Eric putting on earsplitting death metal in our garage the week after Seamus died and throwing beer bottles against a wall, shouting, “My buddy’s dead!” Our home was full of people at the time, and they all quietly filed out while I begged Eric to turn the music down and tried to coax him into the house. During a break in the workshop Eric tells me he did not feel angry or out of control in that moment. But I was frightened by his outburst and worried about how it might escalate, so I tried to stop it. If I’d had the word protest in my mind, I might have let him go on. I might have joined him.
As a nonbeliever I figure the bargaining stage doesn’t apply to me. Then our facilitator says bargaining is your brain directing a movie, tinkering with the script, trying to arrive at a different ending, and I go back to my desperate attempts to figure out how to undo what had happened. I always thought of bargaining as a trade you made with your higher power—“Take me instead of him”—a deal I would have taken, but not one that would have resolved the most wrenching aspect of Seamus’s death, which was the separation. I wasn’t trying to trade my life for his; I was trying to solve a vexing problem, to find my missing child. I did not feel in control of this pursuit—my brain was a computer searching, searching, searching, even while I slept. “We are trying to make it be how it used to be,” says our facilitator, and I feel a rush of tears and recognition.
Depression is what it sounds like. Our facilitator describes it as an elevator we ride into the well of acceptance. We don’t want to go down, and we may detour back through denial, anger, or bargaining when we sense where it’s headed.
He tells us that grief often unearths childhood trauma, and we may find ourselves regressing to early coping mechanisms—throwing temper tantrums or sleeping with a stuffed animal, for instance. I am the oldest of five siblings, and my parents’ marriage deteriorated over the course of my chaotic adolescence. But I could always count on my family for material support. Despite sometimes dire economic circumstances, I always had food, clothes, and shelter. They also came through for me when Seamus died. My mom cooked huge vats of potato soup and fried crispy bacon to sprinkle on top. My dad gave me money and helped us find an attorney. My brother fielded requests from the media. My sisters coordinated out-of-town visitors, helping find cars and accommodations for family and friends who were flooding in from all over the country.
But when it comes to emotional support, I learned early on not to count on my family. I remember a therapist once asked me to picture myself at seven. If I hurt myself, she asked me, who would I go to for comfort? I stared back, blinking, trying to remember where the bandaids were in the house I grew up in. Because of course I would get them myself. And so now it made sense that, just as the recovering alcoholic might go back to the bottle in the wake of tragedy, and the tattooed single mom might escape from her pain with casual hookups, my prefrontal cortex cried out for a time in my life when I felt emotional safety and a sense of belonging: in my early twenties, living with my college roommates. This might explain why, before I even left the hospital, I texted all five of them, “I need you guys here.”
Weather was the first to arrive. I had the sense she had left her house in Georgia in a sprint the moment she’d gotten my text and hadn’t stopped until she’d reached me. She ran into our house, past the people who were milling around, and wrapped me in a tight hug. The rest of our roommates arrived the next day. I remember familiar perfume and jingling bracelets as we fell into a sloppy hug in the lobby of the Best Western, our delighted squeals dissolving into sobs. The scene was so absurd, I started laughing. Then we were all laughing.
My girlfriends accompanied me to a suburban shopping mall to find a dress for Seamus’s memorial service. Two of us ducked into an athletic-wear store to try on yoga clothes while the others scouted for dresses like bridesmaids preparing for the most somber wedding of all time, barking instructions at confused salespeople: “Knee length. Size eight. Not for me, for a friend. Long sleeves. No cleavage. No sequins. No sparkle. Gray. Black. NO BROWN.”
I think the first time I cried for Seamus in earnest was standing in front of a mirror in the dressing room at Ann Taylor, seeing my ghostly reflection wearing a cowl-neck black dress.
My friends agreed this was the one. Then they formed a circle around me as a young saleswoman came into the dressing room with an armload of dark-colored dresses.
I remember Weather’s exasperated-teacher voice, saying, “No, THANK you,” as she waved her away.
There are only three couples in our group; the rest are single or have come without their partners. Our facilitator talks about how normal it is for couples to be out of sync, to experience the phases of grief at different times, for different durations, at different intensities. On the night Eric smashed beer bottles against the wall in the garage, I slipped out the side door to join my friends who were staying down the street. I sat in a comfortable chair in the corner of the dining room, trembling even though I was warm, and my friends piled blankets on me. We drank wine, ate Doritos, and talked about our roommate days, when we had a neighbor whose dog we called “Shitter” because of his daily forays into our yard. Weather said once she had looked out the window to see Shitter in our yard drinking a Pepsi through a straw.
I didn’t want to go home to the black dress and the angry man. I wanted to laugh with my friends and go to bed and wake up to them huddled over a crossword in the kitchen. I wanted to ride my bike to the coffee shop and talk about boys. I wanted to sit on a couch we’d dragged to the porch from our neighbor’s curb, drink beer, and listen to bluegrass. I wanted to yell at Shitter to go home.
Over lunch on the second day of the workshop, I sit next to the woman whose baby died. We’ve both had children since, and we talk about how hard it is to keep our dead infants in the mix as our families grow. I give my well-practiced spiel about Portland parenting culture: the pressure to breastfeed, co-sleep, give birth “naturally,” whatever that means. Sensing an opening, I tell her about an organization called Brief Encounters, which supports women who experience late-term pregnancy loss and infant loss.
I mention that the moms I have met through this group taught me how inconsistent regulations can be for home-birth midwives. Many bereaved moms struggle with intense feelings of guilt until they realize that state regulations sometimes allow midwives to practice with much less training than hospital-based nurse-midwives. I am trying to tell her, without telling her, that the death of her son isn’t her fault. Then she tells me her baby might have survived if she’d had a properly trained midwife who would have recognized the signs of oxygen deprivation and insisted on a C-section rather than letting her labor for days while her baby slowly suffocated. I cry with her, and now I can say it out loud: “It’s not your fault.”
On the final day of the workshop we write letters to our children. Eric wanders into the meadow, then sits on a tree stump, hunched over his notepad. I see him dab his eyes with the back of his sleeve.
We burn our letters in the fire pit, then say goodbye to each other, promising to keep in touch. Caroline is among the first to leave. She gets halfway down the long driveway, stops her car, gets out, and yodels—a haunting, beautiful sound that vibrates through the rest of us. I will think of the yodel when I receive an email a few months later, in which she writes, “I want the universe to know my pain and love I had for Ashkii. I want to shout it from every mountaintop.”
On our way to the airport Eric and I stop for one more hike, this time a flat walk along the rim of the Rio Grande Gorge. We see bighorn sheep lazing in the shadows of enormous sagebrush and a golden eagle soaring overhead. We talk about the surprising physical toll of the workshop, how exhausted we are. We fantasize about a long night’s sleep—the kind that will be impossible once we are back home with our early-rising children.
At the end of the trail we gaze into the canyon, the river eight hundred feet below. We soak in the bright sun and the cool desert breeze on skin that is raw from crying for three days. We watch swallows dive and weave below us.
I ask Eric if he’s glad he came.
“Yeah, it was good to think about Little Buddy,” he says.
We snap a selfie, then laugh at our red cheeks and swollen eyes, agreeing to never share it with anyone. Instead I post photos on Instagram of bighorn sheep, cacti, lizards, rabbitbrush, and a chapel in a meadow under an impossibly blue sky.
