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IN YOUR PRIME
Moms
This is for those mothers who, through misfortune, accident and unpredictable, always unimagined, circumstances now confront
Mother’s Day with reluctance and great, abiding sadness.
For, they have lost a child to death—a mature son, or perhaps a daughter: a beauty and a mother, shepherding a carefree
family, the kind that fills a home with laughter, incessant teasing, humor and infectious joy!
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” declares the mother, who also may be a grandmother. Understandably, she is searching for
some way—any way---to unload her confusion, her anger and numbing disappointment. “Parents are never supposed to outlive
their children,” she continues.
One of the saddest errands I’ve been called to shoulder was to drive my friend and mentor, veteran journalist and author W.
C. (Bill) Heinz, from his Connecticut home to Dorset, Vermont, where he donated his late daughter’s books to a local library.
Barbara Heinz, just 16, had died of an unspecified virus that provoked a fulminating and fatal pneumonia.
In smalltown Dorset this bright, already accomplished teen had been in summer camp the summer before, a giddy experience
which produced a boy friend: Barbara’s first and, sadly, her last.
Recently, word reached here that a fellow columnist, a partner in caring about Aging USA, had lost a 38-year-old son to
death. It was, of course a tragedy. “My oldest son died alone ... all alone, in a Las Vegas hotel room last week,” this
mother wrote for her California newspaper.
“We think he took too many pills. We think he was confused by the reaction of his different medications,” she continued. “We
think he took a drink of vodka. And he died.”
Later, following a celebration of the son’s life, my friend told her readers, “They called him, ‘Hoss.’ This 6-foot-5 giant
of a man whose heart was as soft as a kitten’s.”
Then, in a word-picture that is apt to haunt you, as it now troubles me, this grieving mother becomes attentive to a grandson
of 10. The boy needs an answer to his quandary: “Why did my Dad die?”
Instinctively, I thought back to when my youngest of three children, then just eight, went to school following the death
too-soon of her mother. As mother’s day neared, Janet Ann was told she could make a card for her father—while the classmates
did their cards for mothers at home.
Jane Glenn Haas, in her column for the Orange County Register, tells her grandson that for now only “God knows...” why his
Dad came to die. Her final line reads, “It will take both of us much of our lifetimes to really understand that answer.”
Lastly, we aged parents, and grandparents, live out the winters of our lives with a conundrum. Even as we wish to add still
more years to our earthly adventures, we hope and pray no harm befalls our children, or their children. Some of us, by
nature’s inexorable laws, are destined to be disappointed.
Thereafter, certain mothers and fathers will hurt most on holidays, remembering when ... and, equally unkind: “what might
have been!”
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Outrageous Associations
