Wrestling with a breach in security…

I attended a webinar on staying connected as a couple after the death of a child.  One of the first things  the presenter said that there was a “breach in secure attachment with our partner when a child dies.”  I did manage to take pretty good notes for the duration of the seminar, but  could have easily stayed on that first thought, a breach in secure attachment.  What did that exactly mean, it resonated when she said it – but it has taken almost two weeks of reflection to flesh out the application. I believe that for every couple that statement will mean something a little different.  There is no one size fits all in grief, especially when a child has died.

I had car time to think this weekend, Doug drives – I ruminate.  Familiar routes can strike a memory chord and you can remember thinking a certain thought or feeling a certain feeling.  I thought a lot about when Doug was first laid off, we were sure it would only be temporary.  He had some initial interviews and then nothing…for months. We attended daily Mass together and used the time to do  projects around the house.  Six months grew to a year, and we were suddenly in a much different situation.  We turned our focus towards doing projects that would need to be done in case we had to sell the house and mentally prepared for that reality.  My heart pulled a little, we had been in the house for 18 years, but it was just a house.  I hoped that we would be able to keep the pup and the cats, but we were not unhappy, we had our sons.  Justin was settling into his first semester of grad school in South Dakota, Ryan was finishing up his time in the Navy, they were our joy, nothing else mattered.  And it really didn’t, as long as those boys were safe, it didn’t matter what happened to Doug and I.  That feeling of security was so deep, so unshakable, as long as we could hear their voices, get that phone call on Sunday afternoon or evening, find a funny email in our inboxes…all would be well.

I remember the Monday we learned of Justin’s death.  Doug had been offered a job, not enough to allow us to keep the house, but it would buy us some time.  We were weighing options that morning and by 12:10 pm our world stopped.

A security breach….makes perfect sense. It isn’t wrong to draw joy and security from your children, its natural.  They are the lights in our future, a promise of memories, a hope that they will hold your hand as you die.  Justin’s accomplishments blew us away, we were amazed and humbled by his perseverance.  We did nothing to deserve him and had little to do with his goodness, he was gift, pure and simple. His stories of how he was reworking the class he was teaching so it would not be so boring to the college students  could lift us right out of any sadness that we would feel at our financial situation.

A breach in secure attachment to your partner. Everything is called into question when you are grieving a child…everything. Your world view, your faith, your religion, your priorities, nothing is the same.  And I think that is what continually exhausts us, new coping strategies have to be implemented, old ones tossed out. Truly it is as if someone came in to your house and changed where everything was kept and then blindfolded you and told you to function like nothing had ever been rearranged.

And this is all normal, uncomfortable, but normal.  I was glad when the presenter used those words. Normal and uncomfortable. Normal does not automatically translate to comfort or security. Normal is to be exhausted, normal is to experience grief waves, normal is to sit and weep at a handmade card or bookmark with “Mom, I love you” written by your child when they were small – that’s all normal.  Uncomfortable, but normal.

Breach repair takes time. This was not a breach we could prepare for,  or an event that we initiated. Our world was rent asunder in seconds, in what had taken 25 years to build – laid to waste in seconds. And not just us, there are so many grieving parents and families suffering…death happens everyday.  Yet our culture is terrified of grief, and of those who grieve.

Breach repair takes energy, it takes trial and error to find out what works, it takes quiet, it takes trust. Trust that as each one, still blindfolded, finds something – that they will share it with the other, it only takes a moment. You slowly build on moments of light, of discovery of who the other is becoming through their journey of grief, slowly a different couple emerges.

This new couple, they probably even look different, older, worn, sewn together with different thread…quieter.  You might find their speech short and clipped, especially if presented with a first world problem. You might find them impatient, they know the shortness of life and have no time waste on that which does not matter in the long run. You might be shocked at their frankness, they have learned to be direct. They may seem defensive, remember they are vulnerable beyond your imagination, they are still learning to breathe through that wave of defense and perceived threat…and if they have been wounded during this very fragile time, they will be even quicker to defend, and forget to breathe altogether. Adrenaline stills pumps through their system in anticipation of the next mortar strike, it takes years to stand down.

I keep thinking of C. S. Lewis with all this talk of rebuilding and breach repair,

 “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Uncomfortable, but normal.