Joanna Elizabeth Skinner
October 19, 1972 – October 31, 1991
I have been debating all month whether to put this on my blog. I thought… shall I remain known only for my sewing tips, my molas, jewelry, prints and quilts – or shall I include some of me, because I am, after all, more than just an artsy craftsy grandmother living in Panama. I decided to share.
I included quite a few quotations from books I found helpful during that first year. I used them because these authors were able to put into words exactly what I was feeling when my own words just couldn’t be found.
I wrote this letter a year after Joey died. I don’t even remember if I mailed it to anyone.
When your children are alive and well, but not with you, you think about them often, but not all the time. I think about Joey almost all the time. She is my first thought when I awake, and my last thought when I fall asleep, and when I awake at night and can’t sleep, I think of her. During the day I may be distracted for awhile, but not for long. I miss Joey every minute of the day. A month, a year, five years, with that I could live. But not this forever.
But … I have survived the first year of forever, perhaps I can survive another.
At first I was preoccupied with readjusting the details, changing the scenario, imagining that something went differently. Perhaps I would turn the corner, wake up the next morning and it would have all been a horrible nightmare, a mistake. I know better, but it is, even now, so hard to believe.
I used to have nightmares in which one of the children would die, I would wake up in tears with an awful, overwhelming sense of loss. Even though I knew it was only a dream I would always get out of bed and go to the girl’s bedrooms to touch their little faces and stroke their hair – the sense of relief was sublime. As painful as those dreams were, they did not come close to the soul crunching shock of the real thing. Now there is no relief, grief occupies my life out to the edges. But I am gradually becoming accustomed to it’s constant presence. It is no longer a shock or a dreaded specter, it simply exists, like a familiar shadow.
Nothing in life, or indeed in your wildest dreams, can prepare you for the loss of your child. People thoughtlessly say things like “I know how you feel, my grandmother died last year. ” I want to strangle them. Your grandmother lived to be a grandmother, my child died 12 days after her 19th birthday. She will never graduate from college or ever achieve her childhood dream to be a veterinarian. She will never know the special love of a husband and children. She was my pride and joy. All the hopes and dreams I had for her are crushed. I lament all that might have been and now will never be.
From “Lament For a Son” by Nicholas Wolterstorff (with obvious changes in gender).
“There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where she was, there’s now just nothing. A center, like no other, of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is gone. Only a gap remains. A perspective on this world unique in this world which once moved about within this world has been rubbed out. Only a void is left. There’s nobody now who saw just what she saw, knows what she knew, remembers what she remembered, loved what she loved. A person, an irreplaceable person, is gone. Never again will anyone apprehend the world quite the way she did. Never again will anyone inhabit the world quite the way she did. Questions I have can never now get answers. The world is emptier. My daughter is gone. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled.”
” Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that’s when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn’t quite it. Perhaps what’s over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that. Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.”
What I am struggling with now is “letting go.” That’s what we were trying to come to terms with, even before the accident, when we left Joey behind in North Carolina and moved to Florida. We had never been apart before and it was hard on all of us; she missed us as much as we missed her. But we knew in our hearts that we had to let her go – to grow up, to find her own way, to make her own decisions, to learn from her own mistakes. For 19 years we did our best to prepare her for the day when she would have to “go it alone.”
From “I Will Not Leave You Desolate” by Martha Whitmore Hickman.
“Perhaps as parents must let their adolescent children go, in the faith that they will return under new terms, so we may be able to relinquish our children into death, hoping that in ways we do not foresee they may return to be with us, to bless us with their presence.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh says in her book Dearly Beloved:
“Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone, his own burden, his own way.”
She was correct. You cannot lean on each other as you mourn, because you cannot lean on something bent double from it’s own burden. Each must bear his own pain, your mate cannot bear it for you or shield you from it. I have never felt so alone.
I have begun toying with the idea of writing a journal, not for publication but for family and friends. I have read every book I can get my hands on by and about bereaved parents. Some are excellent, some good and some downright terrible. I have highlighted the bits that I like, that echo my own feelings. I thought it would be an interesting and worthwhile project to combine them, along with thoughts of my own, and poems, prayers and quotations I have been collecting.
I am confident that Joey lives on somewhere and in some form “in the life to come.” But she also lives here on earth in our hearts and in our memories. I feel I should leave a written document for those family members yet to be born that will never know Joey. Parts of this letter will be a start.
In all my rambling I haven’t touched on how Joey’s death has changed my view of God and the world, and believe me, it has. I don’t think you can go through any kind of tragedy and not be forced to look inside yourself and reexamine your beliefs. One of my favorite books is “When Bad Things Happen To Good People” by Rabbi Harold Kushner.
Let me quote from the introduction – these are my exact thoughts.
“Like most people I had grown up with an image of God as an all -wise, all-powerful parent figure who would treat us as our earthly parents did, or even better. If we were obedient and deserving, He would reward us. If we got out of line, He would discipline us, reluctantly but firmly. He would protect us from being hurt or from hurting ourselves, and would see to it that we got what we deserved in life. Like most people, I was aware of the human tragedies that darkened the landscape – the young people who died in car crashes, the cheerful, loving people wasted by crippling diseases … But that awareness never drove me to wonder about God’s justice, or to question his fairness. I assumed He knew more about the world than I did.”
Then came that night in the Haywood County Hospital, in Clyde North Carolina, when they told us our beloved child had died. This is not how the world is supposed to work. How could this be happening to us, to Joey, if what I believed about the world was true. Well – after much soul searching thought and lots of reading – I am of the opinion that the world is not as I so naively once believed it to be.
Another quotation, this time from a very good book “When The Worst That Can Happen Already Has – Conquering Life’s Most Difficult Times” by Dennis Wholey. It is a collection of first person testimonials about conquering and benefiting from life’s most difficult times. These are also my sentiments exactly:
“The biggest wall mankind builds is in front of the gate labeled “randomness.” We try to brick it up completely because we cannot stand the thought that adversity might be random, and that cancer of the esophagus or the bowel, or leukemia, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, or bankruptcy, or divorce, or the death of a child or a spouse could happen to almost anybody at any time. We build this great, huge wall in front of that view to block it out, and we decorate it with all kinds of views about the way life works, about God, about divine plans and architects, and anything that disguises from us the possibility that terrible things can happen randomly. This is probably the absolute center of my view of adversity. Yet if I dare suggest that randomness actually makes up it lot of the world, I find it a very unpopular view right now. Even though I’m talking common sense, it’s quite repugnant to a lot of people.” (Robert Buckman, M.D. a medical oncologist)
When people infer that Joey’s death was “God’s will” I cringe. I’ve concluded that people blame God because they need a reason for everything. I cannot believe that hideous tragedies are all a part of a divine universal scheme of reason and meaning. Sometimes there are no reasons. And sometimes people make mistakes. Joey made a mistake – she was driving too fast and for some reason we shall never know – she chose not to wear her seat belt that day.
And finally another quote from my favorite book “When Bad Things Happen To Good People” by Rabbi Harold Kushner.
” … we will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.”
