I was sitting in the sunshine in LA on Friday afternoon, drinking a spicy Bloody Mary surrounded by hummingbirds, when the flurry of texts began. A boy we knew had been in a horrific car accident, driving home alone at night in the fog. We have known the boy since he was 7 years old, and we know the family well. His little brother was good friends with my son, and he actually came with us on several trips. When the parents got tickets to the World Series, I took all 4 kids overnight so they could attend. We carpooled with them for years. And now James, who went through school with Annabelle and was now a gorgeous smart 18-year-old heading to play football in college, had been in a car accident driving home, a few blocks from his house. Then a few minutes later, another text arrived.
He did not survive the crash.
Chills ran up my body and tears ran down my cheeks. My hands started to shake. The waiter came to check on me and I told him what I had just learned, tears racing down my neck and chest, dampening the front of my fox dress. He shook his head in sadness. So did I. I called my kids so they would hear it from me. Annabelle was in the shower. I told Henry to tell her to come out.
As I told them, my voice broke, my heart broke, everything broke all over again. Life is so fragile, we are so fragile, and yet we are powerful in our fragility. Or maybe not. I don’t know a damn thing anymore. I put words on paper for a living, what do I know?
I know that we love this family. I know that we needed to do something, anything, to show our love. I knew there was nothing we could do to ease their pain. Of course I know that. I know that pain of searing loss, where your bones feel like they are on fire, and when you are just waking up, you have a brief moment where you forget what has happened, and then it all comes flooding back in scalding water, and you don’t want it to be true. It can’t be true. But it is true.
Last night, I baked cookies and arranged flowers, pitiful gestures I know, but who knows what to do when something like this happens? I told the kids that though they may just throw them all away, I needed to do something to show them we care. We would just leave them on the porch. But the father, Jimmy was outside when we showed up. I ran to him and hugged him, his tears now running down my shoulder. He was delirious in his grief, and he ushered us inside his house, talking and bustling to find us drinks even though we said no we didn’t want to intrude. But he insisted we sit down so we sat in the kitchen, looking at the piles of food and flowers. He insisted we stay while he took a phone call with the boy’s football coach, weeping while telling him what happened that night. The kids and I looked at each other, a bit paralyzed, unsure what we should do. I didn’t want to invade Jimmy’s private grief, but he seemed adamant about us staying. I told Henry to demonstrate his first day of rowing on Crew for us to give us something else to think about. He demonstrated, and I told him I was pretty sure that rowers don’t row with their pinkies in the air. The older daughter came home and showed us the new black dresses she had just bought for the funeral.
Jimmy came back and we made our way out into a night so dark we couldn’t se our car. Jimmy held out a hand to me to help me down the dark porch stairs just as I tripped. He caught me. I thanked him for saving me from a fall. His voice shook with sobs as he said, “I could save you but I couldn’t save my son.” We hugged again and cried on each other, then we hugged the kids. We all got into the car wiping the hot tears on our faces as we drove past the pole where a big picture of the boy was pasted along with massive flowers and notes.
It was devastating and I wondered if I had done the right thing, allowing my kids to stay present in such deep bone-burning grief. We are not strangers to grief, and loss. They are woven into the very fabric of our being now. All night long, I tossed and worried and ached over the family’s pain and my own kid’s experience of losing someone their own age. But this morning I realized, I am teaching my kids to stay present in pain, to step up and into the pain of others and carry it with them even if only for a moment, by witnessing their tears, holding them in their unimaginable grief, a grief there are no words for… I’m trying to teach them to be spiritual warriors, to survive the moonless nights and keep their arms and hearts open for all of it.
