An Inordinate Response to Loss

Elizabeth Uppman

A dappled summer morning, a public park, a cluster of children – and me, screaming with rage. The boy I was screaming at was not even my own. I had caught him holding a bucket of water over my daughter’s sandcastle, and fury had lit me up like an avenging angel.

Through my yelling I could observe everything around me, as if the mild-mannered, everyday me were looking out from inside the new, furious one. I watched the other mothers gather their children, carefully avoiding my eyes. The boy’s mother, who had spent the last twenty minutes saying it was time to go (“…and I mean it this time!”), finally got off her park bench, grabbed him by the arm, and hustled him out of there. He grinned at me as she pulled him away, a cocky grin. But my daughter was smiling at me over the top of her sandcastle, so I went back to my magazine, satisfied.

It wasn’t until late that night that I considered the reaction of those other mothers, how wary they were of me – me! I wondered, for the first time, what had possessed me. Where did all that anger come from? Might it have had anything to do with grief?

I remembered that day in the park when I read this particularly thoughtful sports column. King Kaufman at Salon.com explores the outpouring of grief over the sudden death of Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor. Interviewing a grief counselor, Kaufman asks: “OK, so let’s say I'm a fan of the Washington team and, hypothetically, let’s say my mom died five years ago. And I handled it pretty well. Now I hear about Sean Taylor, a person I never met and don’t know very much about... And I’ve gone to pieces over it. Am I making that up or does that happen?”

The counselor’s answer: “It definitely happens. And as grief counselors, when we see someone have an inordinate response to a loss, we're oftentimes looking at what else is going on.”

An inordinate response to a loss. Well.

A year and a half before that lovely, dappled morning, my 3-year-old son had died of pneumonia. I thought I had handled it pretty well. The nausea was more or less gone, as was the barely constrainable impulse to talk about him, and me, and the world of loss we had lived through. I could now trust myself to appear in public with all my buttons buttoned, and I usually remembered what day of the week it was and how to put gas in the car.

But that upraised bucket was too much. The universe had shown me, definitively, how easy it is to hurt small children – my children. I simply could not to allow any more of it.

I sometimes think of hunting down those mothers in the park to apologize for my craziness. I would tell them no, I’m not crazy – just grieving. Sometimes it looks like the same thing.

Elizabeth Uppman