When You’re the Only Kid Who Knows Death
Shortly after my 2nd birthday, my Dad died.
Shortly after my Dad’s 29th birthday, he would die a tragic (overdose) death. (I wouldn’t learn about the drug part until later.)
There’s a lot of assumptions people make about people who overdose. In some ways my Dad probably fit those narratives, and in more ways he most certainly did not. It’s weird being the kid at school who only has 1 parent living. It’s not really something anyone talks about, so neither did I. I’m sure somebody, somewhere in my school had gone through a parent death loss at a young age, but we never crossed paths, so I figured it out on my own.
I was always the kind of kid who worked things out themselves. Looking back, it’s probably one part personality, and most parts nobody really asked questions, or checked in on how my Dad’s death had impacted me. My mom was a good Mom, but she, like many others, did not know how to have those conversations. At first I was told he died of a heart attack while playing guitar with his friend, dying doing something he loved. But that wasn’t the thing he loved most before he died. And I had to reckon with the idea that I, too, may not have been the thing he loved most before he died. And what does that say about me? (I now know, it speaks so much more to him being human & making mistakes & the disease of substance abuse, than me not being enough.) I spent years of my childhood making peace to this very question. What a fucked up thing for my young, developing brain to have to wrap my head around.
I was always the kid with a “good head on her shoulders” or “so wise, so introspective.” Today these are my superpowers in the work I do with others. I figured out ways to channel them into connectivity instead of isolation. If you’ve lost someone at a young age, then you know the endless cycles of grief that cascade alongside your growth. At every developmental stage, you are able to conceptualize and understand the permanency of death, and the complexities of loss. In every season of life there is some event that will remind you who is no longer there, remind you of what you never really had. Which means you re-grieve the death, over and over again, every time. It’s grueling and it’s so very lonely.
As a kid, I thought I was destined to just have a hole in my heart. That a part of me never meant to be complete without my Dad in my life. I accepted I’d always be a bit broken. But I was fortunate to have friends in my life who never made me feel broken, who filled in all the gaps, holes, and crevices, and filled me whole and brought me to full life, to know what it was like to be fully living. When some of those family and friends died much later in life, it felt kinda like a twisted joke. I often give in to radical acceptance and let go of the preconceived notion that life is going to turn out in a predictable way. When you experience loss, you just know better. It sounds defeating, but to be honest, it becomes more liberating. It is sad and it is also flexible. And when we’re flexible we can move through all life’s intensities and survive it, and then learn how to thrive again after each loss.
If there’s one thing I’d want parents to know for their grieving kids, is that just because they’re not talking about it, doesn’t mean that their loss isn’t on their mind, consuming much of their days as a child. It can feel like this weird secret that isn’t forbidden to talk about, but because nobody ever does, it just doesn’t get talked about. So when you think your child sits in silence, know when they’re alone they are likely slamming their fists against the walls, screaming as quietly as possible into pillows, sobbing uncontrollably, and feeling the mania of what it’s like to absorb the permanency of death and what that means for the living. And the way to healing is simply your presence. It may not always be easy to give, but connection is how we stitch the holes that someone else gave you closed, by letting others who stayed, love you, unconditionally.
