In 1968, two year old Jefferie Hill went missing while playing near a creek near his home. Distraught family members searched the creek, which was narrow and full of rubbish, because they were sure he had not been swept away. They believed he had been taken. He was never found, dead or alive.
Radio New Zealand covered Jefferie’s story as one episode in a series call The Lost.
Jefferie’s family members were interviewed for this series and talked about how they had coped with this difficult and unresolved loss. I was most interested in the words of his younger sister Laura. A reverend had told Jefferie’s mother that in order to get over the loss of Jefferie, she should have another baby. So she did, and it was Laura. Laura talked about how if it had not been for Jefferie going missing, she would not exist. And she said this:
‘I was born into a family of sad people’.
I wondered what it is like being born into a family of sad people, so I asked my friend Anne Marie.
Anne Marie had her first baby very young, a beautiful boy Callum. Circumstances were not ideal, but she was firercely proud of Callum and did all she could for him. Then one day she went in to check and Callum was dead.
Anne Marie already had various authorities sniffing around in her life, and she was used to adversity. When she saw Callum, she just knew he was dead, there was no ‘denial stage’. She thought, very calmly, people will come, I had better clean the house. She cleaned the house, set out tea and biscuits, and rang the Police, and rang her mother, and settled down to wait, dry eyed and dissociated.
Anne Marie drank her way through the next few so-called ‘stages of grief’. She was bored and tired all the time, slept a lot, played first person shooter all through the nights, thought about Callum all the time, without actually thinking at all. She would stand in the street in the middle of the night and shout Callum’s’s name. She would drive drunk to Calllum’s grave and lie there for hours. It was the wild party of despair, the frantic psychic search through all the dark and muddy fields of the soul.
When she got pregnant again, she was at first indifferent, but love grew and Zoe was born. Zoe, like Laura, was born into a family of sad people. She was so loved. Unlike Callum, Zoe was bonny and big almost ridiculously bright and healthy. Anne Marie indulged her new daughter quite deliberately. Now married, and in stable accommodation, she knew Zoe both was, and was never, a replacement for Callum. Despite her robust nature, Zoe was born with a shadow on her, to a mother who still ran from time to time in those dark and muddy fields. She was born to a family of sad people.
There is no tidy ending to Anne Marie’s grief. Anniversaries relating to Callum are still hard for her. Her marriage ended badly. Her husband took custody of Zoe, and then sent her to boarding school. However, some years ago Anne Marie became an active Christian, and her faith community supported her grief in sober and caring ways. She told me that the funeral for Callum was terrible; it was tainted by family conflict and Anne Marie had no say over how it took place. It left her feeling more alone than ever. So her faith community created a new funeral for Callum. It was a traditional funeral with a eulogy and speeches and afternoon tea afterwards. This time, Anne Marie was able to express her grief safely among friends.
Anne Marie is an experienced and sophisticated griever. She knows that grief is a part of her, and that there is no simple ‘getting over it’ with time. The emotional parts of our brains have no time frames – trigger us the right way and we are right back there, all over again. She told me about a poem she read once, and this is how she described it:
There are people one this side of the shore, and the dead person is placed in a ship, and the ship sails to the other shore, where it is awaited by the community of the dead. The farther away the ship gets from us, on the living side, the closer it gets to the shore of the dead. Thus, the soul’s farewell by us of the living, gently passes her to the welcome of the dead. She is always accompanied. *
*Here is a link to the poem.
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