My husband died of a heart attack during a work trip abroad. He was fifty-three. Nothing had prepared us for losing him so suddenly. When I told Charles what had happened, I started by saying something serious had occurred. He answered immediately: "Mommy, Daddy is dead." His intuition shocked me. When I confirmed it, his next reaction was to ask, worried: "Who will take me to the pool on Saturday?" Then he ran to his room and didn't come out until evening.
I don't know if Charles understood that his father's death was permanent. At first, he seemed to react only to the immediate consequences—his father wouldn't be there—without imagining what came next.
This made it hard to explain to him, as it did to his sister, how his father had died so suddenly. I simply said: "Daddy had a sick heart and died at a restaurant while eating with a coworker." I never thought Charles would connect restaurants and eating itself to his father's death.
In the weeks and months that followed, he stopped eating. He'd stand in front of his plate and refuse everything except pasta—at lunch and dinner both.
Later he asked me: "What if you die, Mommy? What will happen to me?"
He was afraid of being abandoned. The future frightened him. He picked up on my own anxiety and absorbed it. That's when I asked other people to look after him, to shield him from my own worries and fear.
Family, friends, people from church all stepped in. They offered to pick Charles up in the afternoons, take him to the pool every Saturday morning, get him out of the house—anything to give me breathing room. Those months were brutal. From one day to the next, after his father died, Charles refused to wash, to get dressed, to go to school. He stayed hidden under the table, unwilling to leave home. His refuge. As if he was afraid of the world outside. He regressed badly. At first I tried to force him out, but I was exhausted too. I had to accept that his depression—temporary, natural under the circumstances—was what he needed right now. His father's death had shattered every anchor he had. He needed time to trust again. With help from friends, Charles slowly emerged from his shell and found joy in his routines again. But it took nearly two years. His psychologist at the mental health center also helped enormously, working with him on grief.
One thing gave me hope: Charles talked about his father every single day.
He did it naturally. He made his father present. He'd say good morning to his photo as he passed it, explaining: "My daddy is dead. I think about him. We used to go to the pool together."
I was locked in my own pain and couldn't be as spontaneous as he was. I couldn't approach "the thing" so easily. In a way, hearing my husband spoken of so naturally—when my own grief kept me silent—did me good.
Anne Ortiz, 2010
Why Did They Put Grandpa in a Box?
Last year my daughter Giulia, who has Down syndrome and is fourteen, lost her grandfather. She was very close to him. I thought it would be hard to explain his death to her, but she took it quite naturally. We spoke simply and didn't hide anything. We told her that Grandpa wouldn't be here on earth anymore, but that he was happy "up there."
At the funeral, though, Giulia didn't seem to grasp what was happening. I think she froze when faced with our emotions—with her siblings crying. We didn't hide our grief. We all cried together.
What really upset her was that Grandpa's body could fit inside a coffin. She kept saying: "It's impossible he could fit in that box!" On the way home from Mass, I saw her lie down on the couch with her arms pinned to her sides. She told us: "I'm practicing to see if I can fit in the box." We all laughed.
Sophie Cluzel
