By Somer Sanui Mercado
I walked out into the hallway the other night and found my little guy sitting in a dimly lit room pretending to read a Berenstain Bears Christmas book while crying quietly to himself. He was missing Daddy again. Our pillow fight earlier reminded him of how physical his dad was and this little guy needs A LOT of physical attention with hugs, tickles, wrestling, and pillow fights. I held him and talked and asked him if he would like to look at pictures together. We sat up a little bit later into the night looking at some old albums, me pointing out who was who and whatever story I knew.
This morning I’m thinking again, I’ll have to keep learning how to LIVE after loss. Not just exist. But to LIVE. And it will be a continual learning.
And it’s meant learning this grief thing. Again and again. And seeing how it’s been about learning how to do this for myself but also how to parent it. I can’t help my children when I’m unwilling to touch grief. I can’t help my children (or anyone) if I don’t learn first. And I’ve been learning. A lot. It’s been the most eye-opening time.
It’s been over 5 years now since my late husband Ryuta passed away. Let me rewind a bit. To summarize the “beginning” of our family’s grief journey, my late husband died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2018 of a brain aneurysm rupture while the four of us were together on a family trip. Our boys were in kindergarten and 2nd grade. It was a very traumatic memory for me of how we got home safely after he died. Some of the first thoughts that ran through my mama mind in the onslaught of it all (park rangers, ambulances, etc.) was, “What do I say to the kids?” I needed to get these babies of ours home, safe and sound, and I needed to know how to help them. I needed to know how to do this on my own without my husband. It was terrifying. I did the best that I could to research any answers. How do you tell your children that daddy died? How do you help them?
During that first week, I remember calling up our local Kaiser. At the time, they didn’t have anyone on staff to help the kids. So, I made an appointment for myself to see if I could find help for myself first. The therapist was a very nice lady that I felt comfortable with, but I walked away thinking that I didn’t need to pay someone for a conversation that I could easily have with a friend. I needed something more and something more specific for what I was going through. I kept searching for help. I found a kids’ grief group, but it was a long drive away late at night in the middle of the school week and my kids were still small. That wasn’t going to work for us. Grief recovery eventually was presented to me by more than one person. Although I didn’t find what I needed yet for my kids, I knew that I needed to start getting help for myself, and to put the oxygen mask on. Grief recovery was the start for me to gather some answers and some tools for what we were experiencing.
In these past 5 years, I have been through the gamut of feelings and a continual uncovering of the many secondary losses of a widow who is parenting her children through their own grief of losing their dad. On top of losing my husband and best friend were the secondary losses which for me have looked like a loss of identity, a loss of community, a loss of being part of the “marriage group”, a loss of being part of the family group that looked like “the complete picture”, loss of normal, loss of understanding my clear role with others linked to my late husband (such as in-laws), loss of an expected future, loss of the other half of my parenting team, loss of dreams. I’ve had to come to terms with each of these and sometimes I still need to revisit them.
In this 5th year after my late husband’s death, the focus of my grief has shifted and become more on my children. As the boys enter their puberty and teen years, as their minds are developing, I’m seeing their own emotions and memories starting to unravel. In this year 5, watching my boys show sadness and tears has alarmed me and triggered me in new ways. But, I also have to keep learning and to remind myself that this is all part of their own healthy process of loss.
I have done my best in these years to guide them through the changes. We eventually did attend the kids’ grief group and made that drive for a whole school year. We have gone through many more changes: a diagnosis, puberty, therapy, changes in schools, and the introduction of a stepfather in the boys’ lives. I could probably write a book about the number of changes we seem to keep living through! And yet, I see how our grief and the loss of Ryuta will remain interwoven into our story, into our love, and into who we are becoming as a family.
The question has died down as time passes. But most people ask, “How are the boys doing?” When you are a widow and raising children who lost a parent, it is not an easy question. Sometimes I don’t always know how they are doing. Especially with boys who express their feelings differently. I can only observe. Are they functioning? Are they eating, sleeping, playing? Are they smiling? I can also worry, are they suppressing? Will they grow up to become emotionally stunted or immature? Will they become insecure men since they don’t have their dad? Do they need help to express themselves? Do they feel safe and do they know how to talk about this? And I have to ask myself bigger life questions about what I truly want for my children. What’s the important thing that I want for them? What do I want to stress to them?
Their dad died. They’ve experienced something so mature and so big and catastrophic at such a young age. I really want to handle these questions with great care because they truly deserve it.
At this point for me, after 5 years, I think about what’s mattered the most for me and with my kids, deciding – What matters most? That they are “successful” or that they have hearts soft and open to God/love?
Did it matter that Daddy had money or power or success? Or did it matter that we got that time together and loved one another? What mattered in the end? When I look with the end in mind, it looks very different now. I might not always like that my eyes have been opened to the reality of “the end”, but now that my eyes ARE open, I feel the responsibility of that with my children. This guides me when I think about what matters right now in my parenting.
This starts with ME.
The greatest gift I could give them is a heart open to love: soft, open, healed, intact. This is the healthiest and most important thing I could do for myself and for my children. To do whatever I can to keep my heart soft and intact. And THIS is what I want most for my children, too.
Another guiding point for me has come from talks with friends who lost a parent at different stages of life. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up without one of my parents. I don’t know how that feels. I only know what it feels like to lose your husband. Both of my parents are still alive, married and together. These talks have helped give me a great perspective. From these talks, I’ve seen three big takeaways for myself in parenting grief. And these are 3 that I have to learn first for myself (& keep going back to.):
1. No memories are taboo. I’ve gone through periods in this grief where I was so afraid of how painful the memory would feel. It’s been an act of courage and love to welcome in all the memories, to see it, share it, hear it. There is no timeline for this. And the memories that we can share can have such a healing impact. There is still so much more that I can learn about who Ryuta was and that the boys can learn about their dad. Integrating Ryuta into our lives now, and sharing the memories helps us to feel less alone and to heal.
2. All emotions are okay. Some emotions don’t feel as easy as others but it’s just that we haven’t learned yet how to live with them without fearing or rejecting them. I see how much we live in a culture adverse to sorrow and grief.
3. Reassurance of presence. Presence is about the constant presence of God. My ability to be present as long as I possibly can. The presence of community and the need for that, and integrating the presence of Daddy into our present and future. The reassurance of this healing message: You will never be left alone. This is so important because grief can be one of the loneliest experiences. And community has shown itself to be one of the biggest factors in healing a broken heart.
I look at my children and want the best for them in this life. The pain can still hit me that they are growing up without their dad. I can watch them grow up and reach new milestones and feel sad that again, he wasn’t here to see it.
But I don’t want my children to grow up afraid. I don’t want them to feel afraid of love. And the thing with love is that we will love someone so much in our lifetime and at times, it will never be enough. No matter how much time we ended up getting. Loving someone will eventually mean an eventual goodbye. Being willing to love means opening yourself up to loss, too. I don’t want my children to grow up afraid to love because of that. So, as hard as it is, I’m still learning what will help. So, it matters to me that these boys of ours will hold their memories and their hearts with courage and with love.
