gone.”
Lorenza: “You really learn to live one hour at a time. To this day, I don’t like to make plans. Everything is spur of the moment. It can only be like that. Even when we made a trip to Europe, it was on short notice because what if I get up tomorrow morning and I’m in such a state that I don’t feel like doing anything
that I had planned to do. So, now we don’t plan. If someone says, go, we kind of go with the wind, so to speak. We don’t make commitments.”
Ariella: “When I have expectations, I set myself up for disappointment. Now, with time, I find that when I don’t expect anything, I am open to surprises.”
Once upon a time we were rather childlike in our love of life; now it is hard to recall what being light-hearted felt like.
Lorenza: “The child within me died. Anything a child does—the happy singing, dancing, laughter—was gone. Even today they’re not there. I now just exist. I fill up my day with as many activities as possible. I go through the motions of my daily routine. Even my laughter is superficial.”
We carried the guilt of our early bereavement into our redefined lives, some more than others. Our families had always been our foremost concern and our greatest source of joy. We reveled in our motherhood. We were so proud of what we had accomplished, and we were all “good” mothers. How could we be punished in this terrible way?
Barbara E.: “I felt like I was a failure because I couldn’t protect Brian. I didn’t want to take care of anything. I even got rid of my house plants. I believed I would kill everything I came in contact with.”
That terrible burden of guilt hung heavily on us for a long time, and only began to abate gradually, as eventually we were able to look at the situation more rationally.
Ariella: “From the time you’re a child, you’re told you’ll be punished if you do something bad. We have suffered the ultimate punishment. But eventually we realized we couldn’t all have been evil and cruel in our lives. Look at all those parents who lost children in the World Trade Center on September 11; they weren’t all evil and cruel.”
Maddy: “My husband said if people were punished in such a way by God, you’d be walking down the street and see kids dying. That’s when I was able to put it into perspective.”
Audrey: “Irv and I constantly searched. What did we do that was so bad?”
Perhaps the most painful change any of us have experienced is the inability to trust in love. We have grown afraid to feel closeness for fear
that the one we love so dearly will be taken from us. We know it could happen anytime and in any place. We hear the screech of a car’s brakes, the siren of an ambulance, a phone rings in the middle of the night and we cringe. There is an immediate flashback and our hearts race.
Phyllis: “I’m afraid to get too close, never wanting to be hurt again.”
Barbara G.: “I’ve tried to build a wall around my emotions. I was hurt once and I will not be hurt again. Although it has been years since Howard died, I live in fear of catastrophe striking again.”
Maddy: “Being afraid to feel close to people is something a lot of us felt. I didn’t like meeting new people for a while, because I might learn to care about them and I could lose them. My husband even quit the synagogue because most of the people were getting older and we were going to a lot of funerals. He didn’t want to keep watching people die.”
Our faith in religion has been tested and in some cases trampled with the deaths of our children. We each travel our own road in regard to spirituality. But we all wonder what kind of Supreme Being would allow a young person to die before they have even begun to experience life? So, while some of us do continue to attend religious services within our own faiths, we have allowed distrust to enter and mingle with our spirituality. We have too many questions that the clerics of all of our faiths seem unable to
Lorenza: “You really learn to live one hour at a time. To this day, I don’t like to make plans. Everything is spur of the moment. It can only be like that. Even when we made a trip to Europe, it was on short notice because what if I get up tomorrow morning and I’m in such a state that I don’t feel like doing anything
that I had planned to do. So, now we don’t plan. If someone says, go, we kind of go with the wind, so to speak. We don’t make commitments.”
Ariella: “When I have expectations, I set myself up for disappointment. Now, with time, I find that when I don’t expect anything, I am open to surprises.”
Once upon a time we were rather childlike in our love of life; now it is hard to recall what being light-hearted felt like.
Lorenza: “The child within me died. Anything a child does—the happy singing, dancing, laughter—was gone. Even today they’re not there. I now just exist. I fill up my day with as many activities as possible. I go through the motions of my daily routine. Even my laughter is superficial.”
We carried the guilt of our early bereavement into our redefined lives, some more than others. Our families had always been our foremost concern and our greatest source of joy. We reveled in our motherhood. We were so proud of what we had accomplished, and we were all “good” mothers. How could we be punished in this terrible way?
Barbara E.: “I felt like I was a failure because I couldn’t protect Brian. I didn’t want to take care of anything. I even got rid of my house plants. I believed I would kill everything I came in contact with.”
That terrible burden of guilt hung heavily on us for a long time, and only began to abate gradually, as eventually we were able to look at the situation more rationally.
Ariella: “From the time you’re a child, you’re told you’ll be punished if you do something bad. We have suffered the ultimate punishment. But eventually we realized we couldn’t all have been evil and cruel in our lives. Look at all those parents who lost children in the World Trade Center on September 11; they weren’t all evil and cruel.”
Maddy: “My husband said if people were punished in such a way by God, you’d be walking down the street and see kids dying. That’s when I was able to put it into perspective.”
Audrey: “Irv and I constantly searched. What did we do that was so bad?”
Perhaps the most painful change any of us have experienced is the inability to trust in love. We have grown afraid to feel closeness for fear
that the one we love so dearly will be taken from us. We know it could happen anytime and in any place. We hear the screech of a car’s brakes, the siren of an ambulance, a phone rings in the middle of the night and we cringe. There is an immediate flashback and our hearts race.
Phyllis: “I’m afraid to get too close, never wanting to be hurt again.”
Barbara G.: “I’ve tried to build a wall around my emotions. I was hurt once and I will not be hurt again. Although it has been years since Howard died, I live in fear of catastrophe striking again.”
Maddy: “Being afraid to feel close to people is something a lot of us felt. I didn’t like meeting new people for a while, because I might learn to care about them and I could lose them. My husband even quit the synagogue because most of the people were getting older and we were going to a lot of funerals. He didn’t want to keep watching people die.”
Our faith in religion has been tested and in some cases trampled with the deaths of our children. We each travel our own road in regard to spirituality. But we all wonder what kind of Supreme Being would allow a young person to die before they have even begun to experience life? So, while some of us do continue to attend religious services within our own faiths, we have allowed distrust to enter and mingle with our spirituality. We have too many questions that the clerics of all of our faiths seem unable to
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