Matthew Voz

Grief highlights the inadequacies of words

THERE IS NOTHING in this world quite so perverse as a child’s coffin. Many of us in this community were reminded of that fact this past month when two of our children, Arrow Wildhack and Nathan Gunderson, died in a car accident. Both of them were well known, on the cusp of embarking on a journey toward reaching their potential, and by all accounts intelligent, sensitive, and kind human beings.

When faced with things we cannot understand or things too large to digest through polite conversation, we often revert to the use of clichés, as though by reminding ourselves of the frequency with which we encounter miracles and tragedies we can somehow tame them inside our hearts. To say that we should not have to bury our children is certainly a cliché, though to watch it happen before our eyes—to see the lifeless body of a young man we saw smiling just days before, to watch a family we rub shoulders with almost every day crushed by unimaginable grief—is altogether a different and essentially ineffable thing. No, clichés cannot protect us from this; no words can sew this up into a neat bit of folk wisdom.

Irony can be defined as something that is “poignantly contrary to what was intended or expected.” Certainly the death of children could be characterized as ironic, particularly the death of cherished sons on Mother’s Day, or the occurrence of such a tragedy on prom night, a symbol of American youthfulness. But even irony, that queerest, last, and particularly modern salve cannot assuage the cruelty of this event. This is not Camus’ benign indifference, or Dostoyevsky’s mystical redemption; no rank and vulgar intellectualism can contain such a thing. To attempt to make sense of a dead child is something we must never do. The sympathy, fear, and loss that is left cannot be spoken of but must instead be felt and communicated with the body, or even something deeper and more real.

I have lived in this area off and on for almost eight years now. I have experienced a lot of joy and a lot of sadness, and all of it on this strange stage, beneath the peculiar lights of a small town. In that time I have married and divorced, had three children born and one of them nearly die. I have been a participant in and a beneficiary of many a meal wheel, and the giver and receiver of many a hug. But I have also chafed beneath the yolk of a life lived in semi-public, where not only friends but also enemies can be found at the local grocery store or restaurant, where “keeping it in the family” is not only impractical, it is impossible. It can be hard to breathe in this community, or in any small town for that matter.

But watching the way that this community has handled the death of two of its most vibrant young members has made me realize that gossip and a somewhat translucent private life are a small price to pay to be able to not only share our victories with one another but also to have the honor to hold one another up in times of despair. I have more than once been half-jokingly called a misanthrope, but what I witnessed in response to these deaths has bolstered my appreciation of mankind. I have seen so many people look into the eyes of a devastated mother when it might have been easier to look away. I have seen so many put themselves in the chill presence of death when it might have been more convenient to let strangers “take care of it.” I have seen human being connect with human being outside of the terribly inadequate world of words. I have seen men, women and children, all the generations from a hundred different families learning and teaching each other about what it means to be human. I have learned that the boundaries of the family are not drawn with strong, crisp lines but that our concept of family must operate as the light of a candle in the darkness, strongest at its hot center yet still able to shed a faint light even to every corner of a room.

It seems we can satisfy our need for cliché and irony after all: They say it takes a village to raise a child; I have learned it takes a village to mourn a child as well.

As a high school teacher, I watched as many of my students dealt with the death of their peer and their friend. To be faced with one’s own mortality in such a profound and immediate way at an age where immortality is taken for granted is a lot to ask of a teenager. To pick up the pieces and carry on with our lives seems both an insult and a tribute to the one whom we have lost. It seems wrong at times to ever laugh again, yet we know the one whom we miss must now live through us.

I was sitting in my office above an elementary school playground when I heard the shrill laughter of the children floating up through the maple leaves. Then, just as quickly, I heard the lusty and desperate tears of a child, crying for a scraped knee or stolen toy. Minutes later, there was again the laughter.

I thought of the funeral of my great uncle, dead at 82, and how even his own brothers and children did not weep. Then I thought of the last time that I wept, the last time I really sobbed without restraint. I began to think that the frequency and abandon with which we weep and the rapidity and completeness with which we find joy after a loss—in short, how childlike we are—is surely a measure of how alive we are, and thus derives the perversity of a child in a coffin. We have all become older by these deaths, yet somehow childhood is not tarnished and the lilacs will still bloom each spring.