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Monday, March 13, 2006

Sadness

This is not the story of the day Jamie was sad.  I have promised Jamie that I will not tell that story publicly, and I will keep my promise.  This is another story, about the day Jamie asked about how to handle sadness.

It was almost a year ago, April 22, 2005.  Nick’s nineteenth birthday—his first birthday away from home.  Janet, Jamie and I went shopping that evening for groceries and things, and we were very anxious to get home by seven because Nick would be calling on his birthday.  So we bundled up our loaves of bread and our seafood salad and our cereal and our trash bags, and we collected all the ingredients for Nick’s finals-week cookies—the Toll House chips and the sugar, the milk and the cookie mix—but we didn’t make it.  Nick’s call came while we were still in the supermarket, and Janet picked it up on her cell.

Nick sounded weary but happy.  The first year of the architecture program was grueling, but tremendously stimulating.  He spoke to Jamie with fondness and enthusiasm and love.  He said he couldn’t wait to finish his freshman year and come home.  He couldn’t believe he was turning nineteen.  Neither could we.  After all, we’d turned nineteen just the other day. . . .

When we got home and unloaded the groceries, it quickly became clear that Jamie was disappointed.  No, he was well beyond disappointed.  He was crushed.  He sat in the back room, cross-legged, with his head in his hands, and only after a few minutes of my worried prodding did it become clear that he’d believed that Nick was coming home for his birthday.  In fact, he thought Nick would be home to greet us when we got back from the store.

“Oh, sweetie,” I said.  “And that’s why you were so excited about making him cookies?”

“Yeah,” Jamie replied, barely audible.  “Nick could come home right now.”

“Well, no, he can’t come home right now,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulders.  “But he’ll be home in just two weeks, and you can see him then.”

“Nick could come home right now,” Jamie insisted.  And I began to realize the depth of his sadness, a sadness that must have resonated for months, all the way back to the previous August when Nick first left for college and our house emptied out—because when Nick left, we lost not only Nick and a couple dozen soda cans strewn about various rooms in various states of partial emptiness, but also all of Nick’s friends, who had congregated in those rooms all summer long and turned our house into Teen Lounge.  The contrast between the House With Nick, in which it was not always clear to us how many teens would be in the house when we woke up, and the House Without Nick, in which there would only be one child in the morning and one child at night, was very stark, and very obvious to Jamie in those suddenly lonely weeks of late August and early September.  Now, in late April of 2005, it seemed as if that loneliness had become unbearable.

Sometimes I measure Jamie’s maturity by gauging how he handles disappointment. Actually, that’s one of the ways I’d measure anyone’s maturity.  For example: a couple of years ago, I took him to swim at a local gym, only to find that the pool was closed for cleaning.  Jamie simply did not understand this.  It was Saturday, the pool should be open.  The pool is always open on Saturday.  Maybe the pool is open!  Let’s try and see!  I let Jamie pull at the locker room door for a few minutes, and I even gave him help when he asked for it, but in the end, I had to say, “Really, Jamie, the pool is closed.  Let’s do something else today.” He did not welcome the suggestion, and it took him hours to snap out of his funk.  By contrast, a year later, when we arrived at the same gym only to find that it was closing early, Jamie turned to me and said, “Oh well!  Let’s go to the Y.” I praised him effusively for this, and, of course, I took him to the Y.  (I should add that I myself eventually got tired of this gym’s bizarrely limited hours, and gave up our membership.  I don’t have unlimited patience for this kind of thing either.)

By the time he turned 13, then, Jamie had acquired words for complex emotional states like “disappointed” and “frustrated”—the latter, I think, involving a bit more agon than the former.  But Jamie’s complex emotional state on Nick’s birthday went well beyond either.

I reassured Jamie, again, that Nick would be coming home very soon and that Nick would take him out to dinner with all his friends.  “I know,” Jamie said.  “But I’m still sad.” I nodded.  “I understand, Jamie.  I’m sad too.”

And then Jamie said something stunning.  Dejectedly, he mumbled, “How can I stop being sad?”

“Ah!” I replied.  “That’s a very good question.  Well, usually, people are sad for a while, and then gradually, the sadness goes away, little by little.”

This didn’t float Jamie’s boat at all.  He waited a few seconds, then said, “But I’m still sad.” I was reminded of the time when he was 11 and had a sudden fever; a few minutes after Janet gave him his Tylenol and antibiotics, he stomped up the stairs, complaining that he was still sick.  Over the next two years, especially after his brush with pneumonia, he came to understand that illness doesn’t fade just like that.  Now he’d have to learn the same thing about sadness.

So I decided that this might be a good time to pass along something I’ve learned about grief.  Namely, that it washes over you and sweeps everything before it, and there’s no resisting it.  Eventually it recedes, just like elation or anxiety or anger.  But it recedes at its own pace.  Buddhists taught me this, those dang Buddhists with their “this is arising and is known” subjectlessness, and I thought it might be a good idea to pass the lesson along to my youngest child.

“OK, Jamie,” I said.  “I’ll tell you about how sadness comes and goes.  Are you ready?” He sat up and gave me his full attention.  “You know how you like to play in the waves at the beach?” Jamie brightened.  “Mm!” he mmed.  “And you know how a wave comes and knocks you down and it’s so much fun, and the wave tumbles you up the sand, and then you get up and play in another wave?” By this point Jamie was rubbing his hands together with glee.  “Well, sadness and happiness are like that.  They’re like waves that come and knock you down and tumble you around, and then you get up and they’re all gone.”

Jamie froze.  Up to the point at which I’d described playing in the waves, he was thrilled, because playing in the waves is one of his favorite things about being alive.  But then I’d taken this weird philosophical “sadness and happiness are like that” turn, and he didn’t know what to think about it.  Jamie puzzled for a moment, and then said, darkly, “there will be more waves.”

Shit, I thought. It didn’t take very long for him to figure that out, now, did it. Here I was trying to tell him that sadness, like all things, will pass; but he’d gone right past that lesson to the obvious corollary, namely, after this sadness passes there will be more sadness yet to come. 

“Well, yeah, sweetie,” I said, trying to rally, “but some of those waves will be happy waves, when you. . . .”

“How about no waves,” Jamie countered in a growl, waving his arm dismissively and going back to his slumped, head-in-hands posture. 

“You don’t want to talk about waves any more?”

“No.” And with that, he turned on the TV and sent me away.

And that’s the end of my little story, folks.  How I Failed to Console Jamie, and in the Process, Ruined a Perfectly Good Memory of Playing in the Waves.  You know, if I had simply reminded him how much he loves playing in the waves, that alone could have been the damn wave, or at least a temporary counter to his Nick sadness.  But no, I had to go and suggest to him, sharp tack that he is, that once this wave of sorrow had passed there would be endless others out to the horizon as far as we can see. 

But that’s not the point of the story.  The point of the story is that when I left for North Carolina twelve days ago, I told Jamie that he would be the man of the house while I was gone, and he was très cool with that.  As he and Janet dropped me off at the airport, he took his headphones off and chirped merrily from the back seat, “Goodbye Michael!  I will miss you!” I talk to him and Janet every night, of course, but you know, I miss them, and sometimes I am sad.  Nick got back from college last night, too, so the house will filling up again with waves of teenagers.  Fortunately, I take a break from my break this week, flying back up to State College for two days on Tuesday night and returning Thursday night.  So I’ll see them all before I know it.  In the meantime, though, I’m still sad.  It comes and goes, you know, just like . . . oh, never mind what it’s like.

Posted by Michael on 03/13 at 10:04 AM
Jamie • (42) Comments • (1) Trackbacks • Permalink
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