Loss

When my son drowned in 2006, the devastation I felt was overwhelming.  Shock, disbelief, numbness, denial and confusion: it is hard to tell which emotion ruled in the swirling kaleidoscope of grief. I dealt with it. I was not alone. My then wife. My daughter. I needed them. I think they needed me. I realised that I had to be strong for myself and for those I loved. They responded similarly—but all the time I felt that it was all a terrible mistake. I felt that some time soon, Robin would ring or walk through the door. This was all some sick, surreal fantasy.

I write this in 2015. What happened? Time passes. Other emotions take over. Some change. Some simply shear off. New ones always replace them: anger, guilt, regret, loneliness and despair—the journey never ends. I moved on, but I never move far enough away. When you lose a child you never get over it; you just have to work through it.

I still run the gamut of what passes for empathy from well meaning people. I deal with platitudes. Some criticise me for not letting go. How can I? Some accuse me of trawling for sympathy. Ultimately, this kind of loss is my own deeply personal burden. When I do bring it up, it is for one reason: I miss my son. My daughter and my ex wife grieve in their own way. So do I. Let everyone be true to what they are and what they feel. There is no selfish ownership: there is only a one on one relationship that now has a different form.

Living in Asia, I am struck by how differently varying cultures and societies deal with loss. When Robin died, my Caucasian friends and relatives were kind and gentle, talking things through—almost ad Nauseum. I sometimes cringed when they said things like: he has passed on, he is eternally at rest, he is at peace, it must have been quick, he would not have suffered.

I bit my lip when those blinded by religious monomania assured me that my son was safe in the arms of Jesus. They had their parameters: they responded within the restrictions of those same parameters. I appreciated that.

When Robin died, my Asian friends barely mentioned a thing. At the time I thought this was harsh and unfeeling. Then I began to see, as I shared their own losses, that they simply accept what has happened. Karma. Move on. Why discuss what cannot be changed?

I attended several wakes. I sat with my friends who had lost a parent or a relative. We spent the time talking about so many things: none of them related to the deceased. Friends would come up and greet the bereaved. A brief nod said all that needed to be said.

Is it a case of one being better equipped to deal with loss than the other? Ultimately, it is what we are that sets the parameters we use to deal with what happens to us.

I have long since stopped asking the gods: why? Why did I stop asking? Because there is no god apart from a human need to have one. Like Robin, Jesus died. End of story.  But… Does Robin live on? Yes. Of course.  

My parents are long dead. Are they still with me? Yes. Indeed they are. Each day of my life. So is Robin. In that sense, anyone could say the same of Jesus. Why stop there? What about ‪Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim and Siddhārtha Gautama and Hitler and Attila?

Wordsworth almost got it right in Ode to Immortality. .                     Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

What did I learn from Robin’s death? That we grieve alone but yet we are not alone. It is in the conflicts of sharing within different parameters that I tried to learn to appreciate intent and deal with sometimes jarring execution.

Ours was a broken family. I broke it. When Robin died, for one brief moment, we were a family again. Our love for Robin overcame our dysfunctional, broken past. We were, momentarily, united in grief.

At the same time, as we stood on that beach in Timor, we focused on ourselves. We stared at the ocean. We closed our eyes and shook our heads: we barely said anything to each other. We were lost in our own world.

As my daughter sang a Gaelic song at the edge of the great sea that had taken Robin, my ex wife and I held each other. She sobbed on my shoulder. I stared beyond the sea and wished things had been different: all things. Maybe I am wrong. It is not for me to speak for my daughter or for my ex wife; but I sensed that we put rancour to one side, for in that one tragic event, we recognised what really mattered: Robin

Does it last? No. We are complex beings. We share. We support. But we remain ultimately selfish. We wallow in our grief. Ultimately, we grieve alone. When the moment passes, we return to our own lives.  We return to deal with the raw emotions.

Guilt and regret? These are the worst of it. I went through an endless list of questions: If only. What if I had…? Did he understand how much I loved him? Did I love him enough?

I fought the feeling that somehow I was responsible for my son’s death. Over bitter time, I tried to forgive myself for my shortcomings. I tried to accept that it was not my fault, but I could never escape the feeling: had I not been to Dili, Robin would have never gone there. Had he not gone there, he would not have died. I tried to deal with it, to resolve it. I still have not succeeded.

Did grief affect me physically? Indeed. I could not sleep. I did not want to eat. I lost concentration. I was irritable. I wanted ongoing empathy and when it came I fought the resentment I sometimes felt when it came out in a way that conflicted with my own selfish limitations.

I re-examined my own priorities and questioned my beliefs. I wondered if I could ever rediscover—or re-espouse—the confidence of those who find strength in faith. Over time, I realised that, as with all tests in life, any succor or comfort comes only from within myself. Any answers lay within my own inadequate soul.

Then I realised that my son was helping me—simply because he was. In the weeks after his death, when all I could feel was injustice and anger, it was hard to imagine ever smiling, laughing or finding joy again. Over time, I saw that grief was an ongoing, long journey. The pain eventually softened. I shifted my focus away from Robin’s death toward his life. I saw that others kept him alive. I learned to do the same.

I visited a cousin in Australia. She had planted a grove of native trees as a memorial to him in a forest she tends in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. She named it: Robin’s grove. She suggested I plant some trees there. I did. They now grow tall and proud facing the rising sun. I visit them when I return to Australia and I remember Robin.

Occasionally I hear from complete strangers who knew him. They admired him. I smile. I know that they speak the truth. I saw tributes to him on the net. I realised that he contributed so much. I feel proud. What he did lives and matters.

I learned to deal with the things people said and did which rankled me. It made me a better person, albeit that the making is an ongoing process far from complete.

When Robin died, I was in hospital in Singapore. I have rods in my spine and they had just been replaced and my lower vertebrae re-fused. He died the day after my operation. I was scheduled to stay in hospital for two weeks while I recuperated.

My mobile phone rang. (Yes, we were allowed to have our phones in the hospital). It was an Australian Government employee in Canberra.

‘Your son is missing in East Timor’, intoned the functionary.

‘What do you mean, missing?’ I asked.

‘All I can say is that he is missing’.

I rang Robin’s mobile. His partner answered. They had been free diving off Cristo Rei beach east of Dili. A huge statue of Jesus—a gift from Indonesia during its brutal occupation of that benighted country—stands on the point overlooking the Wetar Deep where they were diving. Fat lot of good that. Robin simply went diving. By himself. How foolish. How irresponsible. How Robin.

They found his body next day. I had visited Robin and his partner a month earlier and taken him—at his request—a pair of outsized flippers. Yellow. Those poked out of the silt on the seabed. These the searchers saw.

We greeted the hundreds of guests at his memorial on the beach near Dili. I remember well the gist of what my then wife said at the ceremony.

‘Far be it from me to feel distraught at the loss of my son’, and she paused and looked at quietly listening Timorese standing round on the grass under the trees as the beautiful yet demonic ocean that had claimed Robin clawed at the beach behind her.

‘You have suffered far more than I have. I know that here today are countless women who have lost their sons. You understand loss far better than I’.

It was a selfless comment and one which made me realize that, had things been different, what we once found in each other that was compelling, was still there, albeit irrecoverable. My own words were far more mundane.

‘When Robin visited me when I lived in Dili, he was known as my son. Now I come back and I am known as Robin’s father. That makes me immensely proud’.

Robin was 29 years and two months when he drowned. Is that relevant when one loses a child? I think not. My nephew lost an infant son in the same week Robin died. One of Robin’s schoolmates also lost a child two weeks earlier. Both came to see me when I returned to Australia. 29 years, 29 days or 29 minutes: it makes no difference: no matter how long we live or what we achieve or do not achieve is not the issue: loss remains.

Who really understands death? I had seen it ‘as an observer’ in violent countries in which I had lived: Pakistan, Indonesia and especially East Timor. I saw too many bodies: eviscerated children, decapitated adults, women with their babies ripped from their wombs, teenagers lying peacefully on a slab looking as though they were simply asleep; atrocities it is hard to comprehend. Even though I was in homes with grieving families, shoulder to shoulder, or jostling at the site of a massacre, I watched as if from afar. For the East Timorese, it happened with deadly regularity. It became a morass of unending grief from whose tentacles you never escaped.

Robin’s Timorese friends attended his memorial. They attended despite the foment in the city, the guns firing in the street, the violence that saw Indonesia finally expelled—by a vote. I got a tiny inkling of what understanding really is. They understood and you could feel that. For them, there was no detachment: they lived grief.

When I returned to Singapore, I went straight back to the surgeon’s office. The sister came over and put her arm around my shoulder.

‘How are, Mr. Lansell?’ she asked kindly, well aware of what had happened.

I burst into tears. She fetched me some tea and I settled down, still sobbing. Sitting next to me was a plump, middling aged, bejewelled and multi-bangled Chinese Indonesian lady. She leaned over and said: ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. Is everything all right? What happened?’

‘My son died last week’, I said quietly.

She nodded, and settled back into the sofa. ‘I know exactly what you are going through’, she said. ‘My little doggie died on Wednesday’.

Initially I was reminded of Shakespeare: ‘Methinks thy face could be improved by the application of my fist’. I looked at her, bewildered. Then I realised that she was being genuine. Perhaps her pets were her life. I understood that. I appreciated her words. I smiled—I hope sincerely—and, bangles jangling, she reached over and patted my hand.

People try to show they care, and that is what I learned to appreciate, regardless of what I see—rightly or wrongly—as the occasionally clumsy and sometimes formulaic manner of their words. What I learned to value was the attempt.

After all these years, have I put it all behind me? Of course I have moved on. I have accepted. I now smile. I laugh. I love. I live. What else can I do? I do not consciously set about grieving. Grief still surprises me. It lies in wait: in a vision. In an experience. In a fleeting image. In a memory. I might see someone in a shopping center or on a train, holding their child to them. I can sense the love; and it all floods back. I see Robin as a boy with his blue suit and his red hat kicking his tiny feet whilst tied into his white baby carrier. I see him as a grown man teasing me as he often did. I read a critique of my work and I see Robin: his forthright stare; his insight: his standards: his anger: his love. I see him.

I watch a program on TV about diving. I turn it off. It is too hard to watch. Drowning scenes? I cannot bear to watch them. Swimming? It is yesterday’s joy.

People ask now how many children I have. I reply: ‘Two. My son and my daughter’. 

Robin is with me. Both my children are with me. That is what counts.

Am I a better person? That remains a work in progress.