Heartbroken. Worried. Concerned.
Those were just a few of the emotions that swept over me as I read the email from our school leader. I came across it while rushing between meetings, so I didn’t really read it. I skimmed it. But the opening stopped me cold: one of our students had just lost a parent.
It felt like déjà vu, because we’d just been down this road. Over the past two years, our small independent school community has been rocked by stinging losses, one after a long illness and another in a tragic accident. Neither felt like something we saw coming, and to this day we’re still picking up the pieces. But here’s the thing about our community of families: when we grieve, we grieve together.
I immediately reached out to my two oldest girls, both in high school and both friends with the student. It turned out they didn’t know. My daughter called me in tears, wanting answers that, quite frankly, I didn’t have. I kicked myself for not reading the email closely enough to see that students wouldn’t be told until around dismissal. Then I pulled myself together and headed to school early to be with my girls and the rest of our community.
I didn’t know the dad well, but I know the struggle so many of us are living with right now. Check on your strong friends. That’s what I keep reminding myself. And that includes me. On the drive over, I called a few friends, first to see how they were doing, and then just to talk about how I was doing.
This feels like a tough time to raise kids. Not simply because of what’s happening in the world (at what point in human history hasn’t the world been a little on edge?), but because everything feels so heavy and consequential these days. This is the most important election of our lifetimes. Is it? Climate change is the greatest threat to our existence in our short history on this planet. Well, that’s not promising. But hasn’t the planet bounced back before? I could go on… but then I’d be spiraling, and that’s exactly what it felt like I was doing on that drive.
So I phoned a friend, a fellow girl dad whose daughters also attend the school, and we talked about how to talk to our girls about death. At the time we didn’t know the cause. Now that we understand how tragic it was, we have even more empathy for how fragile we all are. On the one hand, life is hard, and nobody makes it out alive. But that’s not exactly comforting to an 8-year-old who wants to know why after-school activities were cancelled and why all the adults are sad. We agreed to be straightforward with the girls and to give them space to see what came up for them. One thing we both knew: there’s probably no “right” or “wrong” way to talk about death and tragedy. Just better and worse ways to have an already difficult conversation.
I don’t usually park and walk up to get the girls, but this time I did. I wanted to physically meet them. And ever since she got her permit, my oldest usually drives us home. Yesterday she met me with tears in her eyes and said she didn’t feel like driving.
As I climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled off, my natural instinct to fill the silence kicked in. Nervously, I started sharing how I felt when I heard the news about the last friend we lost. When I heard, I lost it. Fortunately, I was on a call with close friends who are also my colleagues. They stopped everything else we were discussing and spent the rest of the call just listening as I worked through the stages of grief in real time. I’ll never forget that kind of comfort.
I told them the family in our small group who lost their mom last fall probably felt something similar. The dad, now a widower, and I get our teenage girls together from time to time. A few weeks ago, we went skating and then out to eat on a Saturday evening. Yes, they just lost a wife and mother. But they’ve also had a community of people holding them up and staying close. That kind of stuff matters. It makes the difference in how we heal together. I told the girls they’ll probably never know how much their friendship means to that family, and how much they may come to appreciate it when life inevitably happens to us. I also told them that days like this remind me just how thankful I am to spend my days with them.
Going straight home didn’t feel quite right, so we just kept driving. And as usually happens when I’m feeling lost, we ended up shopping. Nothing quite lifts my mood (or lightens my wallet!) like shopping with my girls. When we finally made it home, my wife was there to greet us. She’s our emotional rock, and we all lean on her to help us build emotional resilience.
I don’t know what happens next for our school community, or how the girls will work through this grief alongside their friends. But what I do know is that they have the emotional agility and the support network to do it.
And that’s really all you can ask for in this life.
SDW3
