Written January 15, 2018
Tell us about a guiding star inside your grief.
June 8, 2017, the day after my son, Rader, took his life, I sent a message to my friend Brenda, asking her to put me in touch with a woman named Beth Saadati.
Two years earlier, Beth had come to the Alzheimer's Association support group Brenda and I both attended (Beth's dad was a member of our group), and had done a reading of a piece she had published in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. It was a story about her mom, who was a resident in the facility in which the support group met. Afterward, Brenda sent me an email with a link to the blog Beth had just started. "It's dedicated to her daughter Jenna," Brenda wrote. "I've read it ALL and I wanted to share it with you because you have teenagers."
Jenna died by suicide in 2013 at the age of 14, midway through her freshman year in high school. The blog was new, and Beth only wrote there once a month or so, but what she wrote was real and raw. The first time I visited, I read everything, as Brenda had, and then over the next two years I checked in every few months when Beth's story came to mind.
I had heard about Jenna's death when it happened, because my daughter was an 8th-grade student at the small school Jenna had graduated from the year before. They hadn't known each other, but had friends in common. Now here was Beth, who had written so poignantly about her mom's decline into early-onset Alzheimer's, also telling the world right out loud about one of the most intimate and devastating experiences ever faced, the unspeakable thing people call "every parent's nightmare." I read Beth's blog entries and I read the comments and I read Beth's responses to the comments. They were full of love, hope, and grace. Beth was obviously meeting a need within herself, but with her writing, she also was meeting the needs of other people.
So, then, the morning after Rader died, I knew I needed to talk to Beth. I visited her blog and tried to figure out how to contact her. All I could see was the possibility of leaving a public comment below one of her entries, and I didn't feel up to doing that. So that's when I texted Brenda and put her on the case. Six hours later, less than 24 hours after Rader's death, Beth called me.
I don't remember at all what we said. But we agreed to meet up soon, and in a few weeks, we did. I didn't realize how until I started to write about it, but the way Beth moves through her grief provided a pattern for me when I didn't know how to start.
Rader and I had been signed up for a week of Fine Arts summer camp. He was enrolled in a Photoshop class, and for me, Ancient French Enameling Techniques. I emailed the program director to cancel for him, but told her I still felt like coming. Less than two weeks after losing him, I was in the studio. I had told myself that if it was too hard to be there, I didn't have to continue. But as I had hoped, it was better to be there than not to be. And the enameling process was transformative. You create and fire the piece, and when you see what comes out of the kiln, you decide what else you need to do to it before it's finished: add more enamel, sand it down and start over, try a different color, layer on something new ... but when you put it in the kiln, your influence over it ends. None of the work I did that week was "about" Rader in a literal way. But I did believe that by making art, I was taking whatever thoughts and feelings were inside me and giving them physical form in the pieces I created, and that getting those things out was good.
And so I also kept my commitment to attend a multi-day beginner's ceramics course the next month. And I continued to formulate a philosophy in my mind I had begun months earlier attending a days-long breadmaking workshop with a friend: that the processes of making bread and enamelwork and ceramics are a metaphor for life. You do your best, but none of them necessarily come out exactly the way you intended. Whether caring for your mother who has dementia or your child with depression and anxiety, you are responsible TO the ones you care for. You can't hold yourself to being responsible FOR them, because you can't control the decisions and actions of any person but yourself.
There's a ceramic technique called raku that is a perfect example. You mold your piece from the clay, paint on the glaze, and then put it into the kiln. When you take it out of the kiln, you literally SET IT ON FIRE. How the glaze responds to the fire determines what the design on the final piece will be. After Rader died, I really felt like this was my life.
I'm still working on it, but here's the summary of my current philosophical theory: You plan and create and nurture, you shape your piece and put it into the fire, you take it out and see what you have, and how beautiful it is although maybe not the way you expected, and you love it and let it serve its purpose, proud of the hand you had in the process.