A grief that never ends

Two weeks ago today, friends and co-workers joined me at a fundraising lunch for The Dougy Center, the Portland-based nonprofit that has been a pioneer in providing services to grieving children and families after a death.

It was an event typical of The Dougy Center's organization and efficiency: A spacious hotel ballroom with a healthy lunch; lots of volunteer greeters to steer you to the right table; a concise program with engaging speakers that started right on time and ended precisely one hour later so people could get back to work. The lunch raised $75,000 and introduced hundreds more people to the important work that the center does and which has been replicated at 500 sites around the world.

It all began in 1982 after the death of Dougy Turno, who died of an inoperable brain tumor at age 13, but not before he inspired the idea of a center where kids could talk about openly about death and dying. Today The Dougy Center provides peer-support groups that serve nearly 400 children a month, all free of charge. I've been on the board of directors of The Dougy Center for about three years now, and while I obviously support its programs I've always felt slightly apart from most staff and board members in that I haven't experienced the trauma of losing a parent or sibling as an adolescent or adult.

How narrow my thinking has been. Just a few days earlier, I was in California. There I spent a day with my mom and drove her to the cemetery in Salinas where we put fresh flowers on the graves of four relatives I never had the opportunity to know: my brother, my twin sisters and my maternal grandmother.

My grandma Mercedes was killed in a car-train accident in 1953 at age 47 when I was barely 6 months old. My oldest sister was born in 1947 and I came along in 1952, followed by my younger sister in 1955. In between, my mom gave birth to a boy in 1949 and twin girls in 1950. Beverly Jean and Barbara Ann died one day after their birth. Robert Joseph was born Oct. 19 (the same birth date as my younger sister) and died Oct. 21 (the same birth date as my mom).

It must have been a good 10, if not 20 years, since I'd been to the cemetery. Standing there on a Sunday afternoon with my mom, who's now 82, I witnessed how deep the pain still cuts some 60 years later. No wonder her birthday brings a mixture of joy and sadness, knowing it's the day she lost her first-born son. To carry those babies as best she could, only to have them die as virtual newborns, before the medical advances that might have kept preemies alive, had to have been crushing. And yet she had the courage to get pregnant again -- and again.

If her babies had lived, would my younger sister and I have been conceived? That's probably an unanswerable question. Had they lived, how different would our family dynamics have been? I would have had a big brother to look up to and been No. 5 in a family of six.

All this was coursing through my mind as I sat at the table during that lunch two weeks ago. I guess I do have more in common than I realized with my Dougy Center colleagues.

Photo by Dharma Daylilies