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PARENTS UNDERSTAND GRIEF'S STING
GRIEVING MOM AND DAD REACH OUT TO OTHER BEREAVED PARENTS
By Cheryl TrumanCTRUMAN@ 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.
But she also notes that there's a transformation in grief over the years: It becomes less about your loss, and more about what you can retain about your children so that their lives, however brief, will still resonate with other people.
"Losing Drew and Jeremiah taught me that there is pure love in this world," says Rosemary. "Their love transcended this physical life."
"It's a very strange paradox -- if you believe in God, then how could God do this?" -- Dan Crewe, who lost his 11-year-old daughter Jessie to cancer 11 years ago.
Space Between Breaths doesn't preach. If it has a point of indignation it's about the horrible things people say to the grieving the platitudes about God not giving you more than you can handle, about how only the truly strong can lose children.
None of the movie's subjects thinks they're particularly strong. Some of them come to doubt God, then relearn their religious faith. Some turn to music, to dreams where they gratefully glimpse their children, for comfort. They see a kid who looks like theirs while on vacation. Occasionally, they're certain they hear their child's voice.
They can't stop being parents. But they're parents with unfillable holes in their family.
In the film, Dinah Taylor breaks down when she remembers being at an event where carnations were being handed out to mothers on Mother's Day and having the flower retracted from her grasp, as if the giver had performed a quick mental calculation and determined that since her child was dead, she no longer qualified as a mom.
What Smith and the other parents find hard in the years following their children's deaths is that the living grow wary of them. Old friends drop away as if the death of a child is a contagion.
"Everybody left at 5 o'clock that Saturday night, and we looked at each other and said, 'What do we do now? What do we do with our lives?'" -- Joe and Elaine Stillwell of Rockville Centre, New York, who lost a 21-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter 20 years ago in a car accident.
One of the parents in Space Between Breaths notes that there's finally a time when parents know that their pain has, if not eased, then changed into something else -- a search for ways to celebrate the life of the dead child.
"Once you've got through your head that they're not going to be walking through the door, you can sing their song," says Elaine Stillwell.
Says Dinah Taylor of her late son: "I don't think of him as a separate entity, but a part of what I am now."