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I have been struggling this month to figure out what to write about.
I've had a couple of ideas and false starts, but nothing has clicked. I don't know how to explain it, but when I sit down to write a column, there is a feeling I get if I'm not on track with the right subject, sort of a, I don't know maybe a “stupor of thought.” Can anyone tell me what that's all about? I like to believe that if there is someone out there with a specific need, maybe I can be used as the messenger if I'm tuned to the right station.
Another column I wrote this month related to September 11, but it never occurred to me to do my parenting column on the same subject until today, when I was in the middle of an e-mail to a friend. As soon as I got the idea, though, I heard it click into place, so here goes.
Yesterday while watching the many shows in remembrance of September 11, there was one where they were interviewing kids who had lost a parent in the terror attacks. The comment that was heart-wrenching for me was when a teen-ager said, “Every time I watch footage of the towers collapse, I am watching my father die. I wish they would stop showing that.” That has got to be so hard for those children, for all the survivors, never to be able to forget and move on, because we keep reliving it and showing it.
I think that if I were in that situation, I would try a little escapism and pop a funny movie into the player on that anniversary day and try and forget, but I don't think you can escape successfully into forgetfulness when the whole world is trying to remember. Escaping the remembrances of September 11 is probably no easier than trying to escape the buildings was on that day. It isn't just their private anniversary date, like June 15 is to me. It is the whole country's anniversary date. I don't think September 11 will ever be “just another day.”
I remember my mother once telling me of a small plane that had crashed in Idaho, killing several people. Someone had been there with a camera rolling at the right (or wrong) time and had filmed the plane spiraling out of the sky. Because it was spectacular footage, the local news station used it, along with other newsworthy clips, in their opening sequence to the evening news. My mother was sensitive to the fact that any time any of the surviving family members saw that, they were reminded of that tragedy in a way no one should ever have to be reminded.
Most of us are far-removed, geographically if not emotionally, from the events of September 11. I may know someone who knows someone who lost a loved one. But we all know children who have lost a parent, although not necessarily on that fateful day or under such dramatic circumstances. We can be part of their healing. We can learn from the things that have been helpful to those children who were interviewed and find similar things to do on a smaller scale.
Support Groups
I was glad to hear that someone has organized support groups for the children who lost parents on September 11, because the one thing that helps those kids, more than anything the counselors do, is having other kids they can talk to who feel the same way. There is immeasurable value in having a friend who has experienced the same thing, someone who truly does understand and will cry with you because they have the same pain. That has got to be more healing for those kids than anything.
I had a support group when my husband died. My support group was named “Rondi.” She had two young children, I had one. We had experienced similar things. Our husbands had died in accidents within a month of one another. Our children went through many of the same things. We could compare notes and know that they were normal. We could compare notes and know that we were normal. We kept each other sane. We laughed and cried together, sometimes not sure which to do. One time I was at her house and the phone rang. I heard her explain to her father, “My friend Susan is here. She's my friend who lost her husband.”
Struck by the funny ways we describe death, I piped up from the background, “Yeah, he wandered down the wrong aisle in the supermarket, and I haven't seen him since.” Then we both started laughing while her puzzled father listened on the line.
When she regained control and picked back up on the conversation, he said dryly, “I'm glad you both think it is funny.”
We could talk about aspects of young widowhood that we could not approach with other people.
“Up a few pounds? Have you been making love to the fridge again?”
Struggling to keep up with everything your husband used to do? Rondi taught me the finer points of how to get out of a ticket, using the widow's defense.
My registration is expired? “I'm sorry officer. You see, my husband, may he rest in peace, used to handle that…” (It has been over twenty years, and I think she is still getting out of tickets that way.)
My son now has a built-in support group, step-siblings who have lost their mother. They probably don't think of each other that way, but there is understanding when the melancholy comes and a listening ear when Mom's or Dad's name comes up, instead of a quickly-changed subject to avoid an unpleasant topic. My son had a missionary companion whose mother died while he was on his mission. I was grateful at that time that that young man had my son as his companion, someone who would do his best to understand and be sensitive.
Work Therapy
I was also impressed that one of the things they had done was take a group of the kids who had lost parents in the terrorist attacks and had them doing a service project. I don't remember all the details. I just remember seeing kids with hammers and paint brushes, building something in a depressed country, realizing they were not the only ones who struggled, a good lesson to be learned at any age. Work therapy works.
Taking them to Disneyland tells them, “I am special. I am in pain. People should take care of me and do things for me and feel sorry for me.”
Helping them to help others tells them, “Yes, I am in pain, but there is more than one brand of pain. I have many things to be grateful for. I feel good about myself because I am helping someone else.”
Dad The Guy in the Picture
I also have empathy for the children who never knew their parent who died, who see the missing parent in the picture and will live all their lives trying to figure out who that other parent was. In our local paper there was a story about the children who were born after losing a parent on September 11. Researchers are studying these children. Many parents have said that they are surprised to see traits of the missing parent showing up in their children. I, too, have marveled that my son inherited his father's dry sense of humor, very different than my own, without Paul ever around to model that behavior.
Scott was ten months old when his father died, and I know the drill, showing him the picture, talking about “Daddy Paul,” wondering how old he would be before he figured out that other kids had dads who weren't in a picture in a frame on the wall. I have struggled every Father's Day since June 15, 1982, when the Primary kids sing the all-too-familiar Father's Day song. Even though Scott is 25 now, I can still picture my three-year-old singing along. “I'm so glad when daddy comes home.”
Is it a sin to admit to hating a Primary song? If so, chalk me up for that one. Janice Kapp Perry, if you're listening, would you please write a new song the kids can sing on Father's Day?
Complete the Picture
If a child has lost a parent, he or she will get a skewed view of that missing parent from the surviving parent. After September 11, I wondered how widows were going to fare if they remarried, with the new guy following in the footsteps of a hero. Even if someone was not a fireman or police officer if he died because he worked in an office in one of the buildings still somehow a hero's status has been conferred upon the people whose lives were lost that day. Dad can suggest that Mom didn't get out of the building because “she was probably helping other people.” Soon the “probably” is lost and reality becomes what we want it to be by people filling in the blanks with information they do not and cannot know, except from what they knew of a person's character. Somehow, though, those wonderful character traits become amplified while we downplay the flip side of the record. (Note: Round black things containing music that your parents and grandparents used to listen to, playing on something called a phonograph before the iPod was invented.)
We all do that to some extent, no matter how our partner died. I asked my son once if all my stories had helped him to know his dad and he told me, “Well yeah, but I don't feel like a really know him, because you only tell me the good things. Similarly, I know all of the virtues and few of the faults of my husband's first wife and the mother of my stepchildren. It can be daunting to feel you have something impossible to live up to.
When I was called as Primary President not long after my husband and I were married, all I could hear was the accolades of her presidency ringing in my ears. “No one could get the kids to sing like she could.” “The kids would run up to her every Sunday and give her hugs.”
Convinced I was too perk-impaired to work with the young children again, I reminded myself that I brought different strengths to the calling and to stop making impossible comparisons. Children don't have the maturity to understand that when given a saintly father or mother to live up to. If as adults we still struggle with our feelings of inadequacy, think what it must be like for children. Just the other day, I ran across some things I had done for Primary and again had to remind myself that I, too, had been a good Primary President.
If friends and family weigh in with their stories, kids find out that Mom was a prankster and one of her jokes backfired once or maybe that Dad was not quite a self-starter, prone to procrastination. For kids trying to live up to an image of a parent they don't remember, some reality mixed in can help give them a truer picture and more realistic expectations.
Be a Mentor
If you are an aunt, uncle, friend, grandparent, be prepared to step in now and then. We always think of a mentor as someone who is there for the long term, and that is a wonderful thing, if you can find someone like that an uncle, a caring teacher, a coach. I have a friend in Florida who lost her husband, and her second son was devastated that his dad was not going to take him on the promised trip that his older brother had enjoyed, back to Dad's mission field, somewhere in South America, if memory serves me correctly. This young man's father had forged the kind of friendships that often originate in the mission field, and one of his former missionary companions “stood in” for Dad and took this young man to visit his father's mission field. It made me cry when I heard of that, and I was grateful for the support her family was receiving. Most of us are not in a position to do something so costly and dramatic, but we should never use that as an excuse for not doing what we can afford to do, with both time and money.
Paul lost his father when he was seventeen, and there were several men in the ward that stepped in as surrogate fathers. One of them was Jess Hesse, so close to Paul that I invited him to speak at his funeral. Another brother that he often talked about was his first home-teaching companion, Brother Bruce Hafen, now known as Elder Hafen. I had the chance to meet with Elder Hafen when I was in Germany with my husband summer before last. Realizing that we were near his office, I went over in hopes of introducing myself and shaking his hand. He kindly spent forty-five minutes or so speaking with me about Paul. Before I left, he asked me if there was anything he could do for me. I asked him if he would be willing to send an e-mail to my son, living in Provo, and tell him a little bit about his dad. Headed home for a month to Orem, he went one better.
Scott was not accustomed to getting calls from General Authorities at work, so that got his attention, not to mention that of his co-workers. Elder Hafen set up a meeting and graciously spent about an hour in person with Scott telling him about his father. (My gratitude is exceeded only by my embarrassment that my son invited him to his scummy bachelor pad for the meeting.) For a busy man like Elder Hafen to make time for my son spoke volumes to me about the man.
The reality is that we often have our hands full with our own family challenges and are struggling to carve out the time for activities and meaningful time spent together with our own children, must less to have time to be there for someone else's child. If that is the case, then be a mini-mentor. Help a fatherless Cub Scout make a birdhouse. Be the brother that offers to put the training wheels on a little girl's new bike. Be the emergency-backup-mom who takes a motherless teen-age girl along on a school-clothes-shopping expedition.
My husband was recently asked to give a young man whose father had died a ride to his first church dance. He immediately intuited the purpose for the invitation and on the drive to the church talked with this handsome young man about girls and their feelings, about getting out from behind the refreshment table and dancing with a lot of different girls so that they got a chance to dance. When his mother asked if they talked about anything on the way to the dance, all he would say was “guy stuff.' That took only half an hour, but it made a difference.
As we have watched the replay of the events of September 11, we all wish we could do something that makes a difference. We all can.
Alison Moore Smith is a 61-year-old entrepreneur who graduated from BYU in 1987. She has been (very happily) married to Samuel M. Smith for 40 years. They are parents of six incredible children and grandparents to two astounding grandsons. She is the author of The 7 Success Habits of Homeschoolers.