He's Gone Now: How to Live When Grief Comes

A statue of Mary perches above an entry beneath the second floor window of my son’s dorm room. She is carved of gray stone and wears a heavenly crown. Oliver’s dorm is one of the oldest on campus at the University of Notre Dame—its narrow windows belong in medieval castle turrets; their tall peaks carved in the shape of a clover. His view is filled with thick trees that tell old stories and the grass carpet of the campus’ South Quad. 

On sunny days, young men move their futons from the stagnant air of dorm rooms onto the green. The futons breathe a sigh of relief—rescued from the smell of dirty socks blended with piles of sour laundry. 

I dreaded move-in week—the end of an 18-year-long commitment to clothe, feed, and plow good soil for my first born boy to grow in. I often imagined our final goodbye. I’d wear a Notre Dame tank top of navy blue and gold, running shoes with stripes of emerald green to celebrate my son’s new home among the Fighting Irish. The boy who was once cradled inside of me, the one doctors forced to come early because he was too small and starving, would lean his six-foot frame down to engulf me in a hug. 

And…I would lose it—

right there on the quad’s green;

wails so loud that even the chiseled eyes of Mary would shed a tear. 

She knows what it feels like to lose a son. 

But grief is more like those dorm futons. They unexpectedly appear smack dab in the middle of everyday life—wanting to be exposed, needing fresh air after being shoved into mildewy compartments.

And on the day of the final hug and the long drive home alone, it surprised me. I kinda wanted to celebrate.

Phew.

Eighteen years of fighting for my son was now over, and although this is completely cliché, he really had learned to fly. 

I was still abuzz from all the welcome week activities for parents. I cried when his dorm rector made a promise. In the middle of a chapel with stone arches, wooden pews and windows formed from stained glass, he promised that our son would become a part of his family. 

I said the Lord’s Prayer from the sticky, blue seats of Notre Dame’s basketball arena. During the final mass, voices of two thousand incoming freshmen and all their parents echoed:

“Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done.”

We especially eyed our sons and daughters as we pleaded with heaven: “And lead us {them} not into temptation, but deliver us {them} from evil…{and copious amounts of booze.}” 

I climbed up in the rafters of Oliver’s dorm room, risking my life to make his lofted bed one final time. We ate hot dogs with shamrock-shaped sugar cookies under the family tent in the quad. The university gave us many ways to say goodbye.

And after years of fighting every possible predator who tried to pick away at Oliver’s health, his dreams, his belief in himself, I felt a celebratory peace. I returned home to my fourteen-year-old daughter and life continued.

I still awoke at 6:30 a.m. every day to take Ava to school.

I cooked the same ol’ rotation of tacos, spaghetti and chicken chili for dinner. 

I baked my customary chocolate chip cookies to celebrate every Friday night. 

But Saturdays were different. 

For years, every Saturday, Nick woke up before the kids and made the kitchen rattle with glass mixing bowls, whisks, and cast iron skillets. Oliver inherited a love of hot eggs, bacon and pancakes from my father, and big breakfasts became our weekly tradition. 

But he was gone, and Ava never really looked forward to the ritual. 

She preferred Saturday mornings alone, lounging in her captain’s bed under a plaid down comforter, surrounded by squishmallows, under the breeze of a ceiling fan. 

Then I noticed that grief was not where I expected it to be—seated on that nacho cheese-stained futon left abandoned on the quad at Notre Dame. 

It was the empty chair at my dining room table. 

The silent Saturday mornings. 

Frothing milk for only one cup of chai tea. 

The silence—no more stories about football practice, or the latest scientific discoveries, or the description of that artsy girl in English class he wished would notice. 

Grief rained down on me once I realized that Oliver was doing exactly what we trained him to do, and my life would never be the same. 

Oliver brought out distinct colors of life, of conversations. He affected the way I interact with my husband, with Ava; provided a unique presence in our home as ingrained as the wood floorboards. And although I can access it momentarily through a chat on FaceTime or during a school break spent at home, the daily color of one of the great loves of my life, is gone. 

C.S. Lewis recognized the same type of loss when describing the death of one of his  friends in a close trio of confidants: Charles (the deceased), Lewis, and Ronald (the famous J.R.R. Tolkien).

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.”

Grief never fully goes away. We learn to live with it, to build new loves and daily rituals around it. But we can never completely replace the loss. The color that unique person brought to our lives, and drew out of others, disappears.

It is impossible for me to find the exact hue of olive green that my Oliver brought into every single moment, conversation, and daily rhythm of life. That is both the deep joy and unavoidable pain of real love; of raising a skinny-legged baby to run!

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose work focused on terminally ill patients, made famous a framework of five typical stages of grief with the publishing of her book on death in 1969. Last week, Taylor Swift incorporated Kubler-Ross’ work into her own personal playlists on Apple Music. Swift curated her favorite songs for each of the five official stages psychologists use to help us understand the journey of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. 

These stages are not like my son’s weekly engineering courses—all performed in order, at their assigned times and classroom locations. Grief cannot be prescribed to follow a syllabus. Some don’t experience all of the stages. Many find they occur out-of-order or re-emerge with a certain memory—like a dorm room futon’s gut reaction to run at the slight smell of an athletic sock. 

In sending my first born off to college, I’ve experienced:

 Denial (The high five I gave myself on the way out of Notre Dame’s parking lot).

Anger (Why do I give all of my energy, my love, my everything to someone who eventually leaves me; doesn’t even realize the sacrifice?)

Depression (This is where I’ve camped out most. Sometimes I cannot imagine living years without my Oliver under my roof. I struggle to find hope in a life that creates so much love followed by so much pain.

But a plethora of Taylor Swift songs and C.S. Lewis remind us that it’s worth it:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

I grieve because I once loved someone in the womb, to and from football practice, through pancake breakfasts and broken hearts. 

I cry from lost dreams that can never be recovered; from the excruciating work of building a new life that I never designed or wanted. 

You served someone through the long cancer battle, the dementia that stole memories, the final night in the hospital room, through the never-ending questions from the funeral home, and during the long, lonely drive back home. 

Grief demands to be felt.

I can sit in the denial, anger, bargaining and depression now, or grief promises to arise from its burial ground later—a zombie hand clutching for anything to heal the pain.

I will never again have my son sit at my dinner table every night, chatting about a dreaded calculus test. I hope not; that’s not what he was created to do. '

He’s gone now.

The sadness remains in me, shrinking with time. Fresh life waits to grow around the grief. New people sit at my table with their own distinct color that blends into my own. 

And one day we will be able to say, as I did when we left tall, independent Oliver standing underneath Virgin Mary, in front of his new dorm:

“God, I loved them and I know I did my very best…It’s time to fill my empty kitchen with Taylor’s voice singing evermore and invite someone over for Saturday pancakes.”

~“I had a feeling so peculiar that this pain wouldn’t be evermore.” - lyrics by Taylor Swift~

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