Posted on Sat, Sep. 15, 2007

PARENTS UNDERSTAND GRIEF'S STING

GRIEVING MOM AND DAD REACH OUT TO OTHER BEREAVED PARENTS

By Cheryl Truman

CTRUMAN@ HERALD-LEADER.COM

Published: Monday, May 28, 2007

In the movie Space Between Breaths, there's a moment where a grieving woman who has lost her young daughter to cancer recalls the second she decided not to yield to her grief and let herself die.

She hears a truck coming. She realizes the driver will not see her before the truck hits her, and knows that she can finally end her pain.

In that space between breaths, she decides that she will live.

The death of a child is unfathomable, a despair that changes every succeeding moment. Rosemary and Luther Smith of Beattyville found themselves dealing with that grief, multiplied, when they lost two of their three sons in a traffic accident on the Mountain Parkway almost 15 years ago.

The tragedy led to Rosemary Smith's volunteer work now, scouring newspapers looking for parents who have lost children and offering them packages of information -- which include her own book on grieving parents, a video, CD and a looseleaf notebook featuring poetry and inspirational sayings.

It also led the Smiths to produce the movie Space Between Breaths, in which bereaved parents from around the nation talk about how their children died and how they went on to celebrate the memories of the children they lost.

It is an unsettling movie about a haunting subject.

But you can't take your eyes off it.

Says Les Franklin of Denver, who lost two sons to suicide a decade apart: "Death will be a relief. The stuff that I have to carry on my back every single day, the commitment to live -- it's a lot tougher to live."

And not only to live, but to go through the stages of acceptance that your child isn't coming back.

There is, after the initial disbelief, the moment the parent finally acknowledges that the child is gone. For Tessie Hunter, the mother of a New York firefighter called out on 9/11, the realization that her son was really dead came weeks after her son didn't return home, when she went to his fire station and saw his car still parked there.

Grief comes in waves. One subsides, and another, different tide rolls in.

Sue Ann Duffy, a Memphis mother in the movie, recalls meeting an acquaintance six weeks after her 16-year-old son's death in a car accident and being asked whether she had "gotten over it" yet.

Another parent in the movie notes that there's never closure for parents of dead children: The closure, she says, is when they nail your own coffin shut.

Ann Kechter, who lost her son Matthew at the 1999 Columbine school shooting, remembers gathering his athletic clothing -- redolent with teenage boy musk -- and sleeping with them, then quietly wondering if she had gone insane.

Tessie Hunter remembers spraying Joe's boots and firefighting gear with holy water, trying to ward off the dangers of his job. But holy water could not save Joe from 9/11.

In the film's opening song, played over a montage of photos of the dead, musician Cindy Bullens sings that paper and glass is all I have/all that's left of you and me. She lost her 11-year-old daughter Jessie Bullens-Crewe to cancer in 1996.

Maria Housden, whose daughter Hannah died of kidney cancer just before her fourth birthday, recalls thinking that only other families lost children, only adults got cancer.

Before their children died, these parents didn't think about such things. Afterwards, they thought of little else.

"The longing after for that hand, for that kiss, for that voice ... that is who you are. ... This longing to feel your child again is a hunger that will never go away." -- Maria Housden, in the movie Space Between Breaths.

Space Between Breaths includes interviews with bereaved parents including Dinah and James Taylor of Williamsburg -- where Jim Taylor is president of University of the Cumberlands. The Taylors lost their only child in 1991 in an auto accident days before his high school graduation.

Drew and Jeremiah Smith were 18 and 15 when they died on the Mountain Parkway while returning home from a concert. Rosemary Smith remembers too well the first dazed hours after she found out that her boys were gone.