Loss and Learning

My beloved 20 year-old kitty passed away this week. It was heartbreaking for me, and interesting for the three of us as a family. In the midst of my grief, I noted a few things that I thought I'd record here, to do with traumatized kids, grief and loss.

When T. was a young child, he lived in a chaotic home. He and his cousins had a kitten, and the kitten died while they were giving it a bath. The kids were very young at the time - probably ranging from 3 to 7 - and they were left unsupervised and told to bathe the kitten in the sink. He blames himself for what happened.

This is one of the first stories that T. told me about himself when we were getting to know each other. He told me more than once, which is very unusual for him. I understood in a visceral way that one does with a child that this story functions for him as evidence that he is "bad". I have always had the sense that this is his "origins" story, the original fall from grace that, in his mind, brought about his subsequent very bad luck.

Ironically, I met him at an event where we were volunteering to wash shelter dogs. I was struck by his extreme tenderness and careful attention to the animals. I realized only many months later when I heard the kitten story that he must have been terrified and traumatized, reminded of the kitten story and afraid that he'd drown the dogs. I recall that his hands were shaking.

When T move in with us he was, at first, very gentle and attentive to my cat. Over time, as he grew more comfortable, she began to annoy him and he let his annoyance show more freely, but he was still generally tender toward her. As she neared the end of her life, and I became more sensitive about her impending passing, he stopped grumbling about her mess and distraction. In the last days of her life, he build a little fort for her out of couch pillows, and monitored her heating pad to keep her as comfortable as possible. He did all of this quietly, with natural authority, when we were not in the room. His goal was to ease her suffering, not to impress us.

I rarely cry but I sobbed the night before she died. T. told me some time ago that he hates to see people cry and it makes him angry. I said, "Sometimes adults can cry in a way that feels out of control and its scary. And sometimes they can cry in a way that is meant to manipulate you. Maybe that's when you get angry. Otherwise, crying is just crying." He nodded.

It turns out he doesn't really mind when people cry. When he caught me crying he nodded in a forgiving way and gave me some hugs. Then he patted me on the head and said, "It's good to let it all out."

We sent him out of the house for the final hours while kitty passed away, because we felt that the atmosphere was too stressful for him. We talked about what would happen, and gave him permission to spend the day at a friend's house. He blew the cat a kiss, and headed out to do teen things. I think he was a little disoriented and upset when he came home and found her gone, but we didn't talk about it much. Her loss has a big impact on the general spirit of our home and it's a big change to absorb. But we all sat down to dinner.

I like to think that this was an opportunity for him to experience one of life's small catastrophes in the context of family, and gain some knowledge of how we help each other through tough times. I saw him learn another lesson, when he realized this week that I have feelings that are independent of him. We are so closely bonded now that sometimes he thinks he controls my feelings, or that all of my feelings are about him. It's hard to develop compassion until you understand and can respond to someone else's experience as separate from (but related to) your own. He did a good job with compassion this week, in his own child-like way.

I think it was also a healthy opportunity to experience what it's like to be in an "adult-led" household; we made the decision to let the kitty go without involving him, and took care of the arrangements quietly on our own. We told him exactly what was going to happen and when, so that he could be prepared, but we didn't ask him to do or feel anything in particular. We tried to show respect for his teen routine, even in the midst of our upset.

I know his experiences of loss have been devastating, traumatic and chaotic - in his young life, he's lost many close relationships, through circumstances he couldn't control. I like to think that this week, he got to witness grief and loss free of trauma and confusion. I like to think also that this experience is one more memory we share, one more private family matter than we will use as a touchstone and reference point in the story of us.

Grief

Living with T. often reminds me of the time after my grandmother died. She was my favorite person. Grieving her death was more profound and complex than I expected. I experienced a sense of wonder, as well as distress and yearning. I was preoccupied. Valuable things seemed to matter more, while invaluable things - a tedious assignment, a boring dinner party - just defied my focus. I was annoyed by friends who used to please me, and bound to people with whom I didn't ordinarily share a close friendship.

Like other children whose early lives are full of trauma, T. has experienced a tremendous amount of grief. He lost his connection to his mother the moment he was born and taken away from her. His father, whom he never knew, was murdered when T. was in grammar school. He lost the younger brother he tried to protect for years when they were separated by the foster system. He lost the extended family who cared for him when he was taken away from them. He lost his friends when he was moved from one foster placement to another. He also lost a lot of his childhood as various adults divvied up his life and compromised his security.

But his grieving isn't just sad. It has many, many dimensions, and I see just the tip of the iceberg. His grief makes him wise in certain ways. Sometimes it also makes him excruciatingly irritable. Often it causes him to be quite controlling - it's as if he wants everybody to slow down and follow the rules, so maybe the world will stop and his losses won't continue to mount. He gets exhausted easily - school in particular is just too much for him sometimes.

He also has trouble letting go and being happy. When he gives in to joy (which does happen much more often these days), the transformation in his face and his energy level catch me off guard. At those times, he is a person I don't often see: a boy. I suspect that much of the rest of the time, the person I see in the day to day is troubled by tremendous guilt and fear.

His grief is palpable this week because he just had an overnight visit with some relatives. The communication with them leading up to the visit was poor, the plan for the weekend was chaotic, and their commitment to T. and their interest in him are both tenuous. We went through with it because he initiated the visit and maintaining ties to them is so important to his identity.

The most painful part of these weekends is trying to manage the way they hand him off from one relative to another even during a short visit - it mimics the way they passed him around from house to house during his early childhood. But he loves them - one of his cousins, in particular, "as a mother" - and seeing them at least establishes a sense of continuity in his life. Of course it also reminds him of hurts and losses I can barely begin to catalogue. So it's complicated.

One upside of these visits is the progress we've made in terms of handling the return landing. Last Christmas, he basically crash-landed after a visit to his relatives and it took weeks to resolve the divided loyalties and displaced anger. This time, he was happy to be back. He can go away and come back. He can have a birth family and an adoptive family. That's a big lesson.

He'll grieve for a long, long time I think. As he gets older, I hope two things will happen: that he'll meet more self-aware people who have sustained significant losses themselves, and that he'll catch a break - wide swathes of life when nothing much changes and nobody important dies or disappears from his life.