Innovations in End-of-Life Care
an international journal of leaders in end-of-life care

Searching for a Healing Place

Susan K. Jensen

[Citation: Jensen S. Searching for a healing place. Innovations in End-of-Life Care. 2001;3(6), www.edc.org/lastacts]

At 35 years old, the sound of fallen autumnal leaves swirling on the ground still makes me regress to being an 11-year-old child. I lost my mother on a dark, cold fall day at the age of 11, and as a motherless daughter the first sound I heard was the rustle of those damned dead leaves on the ground. It was such a lonely sound.

I was shielded by my family against many of the details surrounding my mother’s illness and death, and was herded through the rest of my childhood and adolescence. But the protection they provided was only a thin veneer. The wound went so deep, especially because nobody ever really talked to me about it. We just didn’t discuss it. To this day, Dad finds it difficult to talk about Mom without getting choked up. It makes it difficult for me because I want and need to know more. I was so young when she died that I just knew her as "Mom." I didn’t know her as a person, as an individual with thoughts, opinions, feelings, fears, and ideas.

As I grew into adulthood, I continually and increasingly began to feel cheated. I never had the chance to become her friend. So many interactions, occurrences, and events that mothers and daughters share never took place. Even though it is 23 years after her death, I still feel cheated.

Because I grew up motherless, it forced me to be independent and self-reliant. But it also made me scared, anxious, and lonely. To a child, death is not just the end of a life. It is the birth of fear. The safety net of being part of a family is heartlessly ripped away. As a direct result, I’ve never felt safe in any regard since the day Mom died. I never get comfortable with anything or anyone. I view every relationship as fragile and vulnerable. I see everything as "only temporary."

Before Mom’s death, I didn’t know what fear was. From that point on, fear became a part of my daily life. I became concerned with all the facets of life that children should not have to deal with. I thought about the finances and how my Dad would run the house on a single income. I feared losing the remaining members of my small family. I had dreams of Dad dying suddenly, therefore leaving me completely parentless. It's a feeling that strongly resonates even today.

As a child, I had to watch Dad grieve unabashedly for the loss of his wife. I remember feeling at that time that watching him grieve was sometimes worse than suffering through Mom's loss. It was so painful to watch him in the wake of her death. Night after night, he relived the heartache. And I dealt with my own feelings by not dealing with them. I think that might be why I never caused him an ounce of teenaged angst…I couldn't stand to cause him anymore pain.

My grammar school teachers acted as if nothing had happened to my family, and it made me feel awful, almost like an outcast. Teachers and schoolmates virtually ignored my loss—just because they thought that's what I wanted. I wanted somebody to sit down with me and say, "Tell me how you're feeling..." No one approached me in my isolation. Twenty-three years later I can clearly see that children affected by the loss of a parent need to have people there for them, reaching out to them, even if the child herself can't ask for help.

Only months after my mother's death, I had to cope with the introduction of a new woman into my Dad's life. That was not always a smooth road—and it was a decidedly different road than I would have been on had Mom lived. There were different expectations and limitations on both sides, and when my Dad and this new person decided to move in together, my nuclear family acquired a completely new dynamic—one that I never fully got used to.

Back in 1978, therapy--especially for a child--was not exactly "in fashion," nor was it as readily available as it is today. Had I known that I would forever carry emotional, and perhaps irreparable scars from this loss, I would have begged for therapy. Instead, I put my grief, anger, and confusion in my back pocket where they festered for years. When I finally started to examine those feelings in my mid-twenties—a decade and a half after her death—I felt like I was experiencing it all over again.

It torments me that I never had a chance to talk to Mom about what was happening to her. I so wish I had. I don't know how she was feeling. I don't know if she was scared. I don't know if she was mad. I don't know if, perhaps, she was relieved by the prospect of death, she was, after all, extremely ill. Seeing her in her hospital bed was so hurtful, so sharp, so cutting. She looked sick and weak. She looked as though she was holding out for a miracle…to stop the burning inside her. It must have hurt her tremendously to think that she was going to leave behind a husband, a son, and a daughter. Yet, until recently, never once did it cross my mind to consider her pain and fear. I was concerned solely with my own feelings. I guess that just shows how much I stayed in the pain – and how much the pain stayed in me. My mother's death has defined me. Not a day goes by that I don't feel like a motherless daughter and wish that she were here. I never had the chance to tell her how much I loved her.

However, now that I can finally consider her feelings—not just my own—maybe I can truly begin to heal. Now, she has become a person to me, not just the saint that I, and my entire family, have canonized. Realizing that she suffered, too, has led me, finally, to begin to deal with these issues head on. Through discussions with others and in writings, such as this piece, I'm learning to uncover those buried, unexpressed 11-year-old's feelings. I've only just begun this exploratory process, so it remains to be seen where this road will take me, but I believe that it will take me to a healing place, even after all these years.

To this day, whenever I suffer a loss through death, I revert back to being that wounded 11-year-old child, and I deal with the grief the same way I did back then. My mother's death felt nearly insurmountable. I didn't know how I was going to survive. So, when our country suffered terrible losses by the horrific events of September 11th, I found myself asking again, "How can life go on when everything has changed so drastically?" As a logical adult, I realize that life indeed goes on, although during those first few grieving days, it seemed impossible that it would. I thought of all the children whose parents would not be coming home anymore. For those first few days, I was 11 years old again. Then I "grew up" ... again, just like I did years ago.

I wish I could reach out to every single child that's been orphaned by the events of September 11th, to take away the pain and make each one feel safe again, just as I wish someone could have taken away my pain and made me feel safe. Children need to feel secure, especially in these insecure times. These children need to be allowed to express the myriad of feelings that they harbor. Remaining family members need to help them feel protected, guided, loved, and supported. Teachers need to let the children know that they can talk to them. The most detrimental thing to these bereaved children would be for them to bury their feelings beside their parent(s). I hope and pray that these children will receive the therapy that I so desperately needed when I lost my mother. These children's lives crumbled along with the Twin Towers. My hope is that the adults whose lives touch theirs will help these grieving children rebuild their shattered worlds.

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