Shadow of Absence

Death, Longing & the Nowness of Eternity

I was four when my beloved Grandma Lula died. Ten months later, when I was five, my father was killed in a mining accident. Three and a half months after that, my oldest brother, aged fourteen, drowned in a nearby pond. My thrice-bereaved mother fainted at my brother’s viewing. I saw her fall and thought that she, too, had died.

For the record, I was eleven when my other grandma died and twelve when my last remaining grandparent passed away.

In other words, I was a child well acquainted with death.

There was trauma associated with these deaths, to be certain—especially those of my father and brother. But for me, a five-year-old little girl, that trauma wasn’t so much linked to the deaths themselves—or even to the sudden absence of these pivotal people in my life. Rather, it was the grief of those around me that was most destabilizing. This grief—especially that of my mother, the central figure in my young life—frightened and bewildered me. My world, which had felt predictable and safe, suddenly seemed wobbly and precarious. This instability, compounded by the fear that I could easily lose my mother too (a well-meaning relative informed me at my father’s funeral that I was now “half an orphan”), caused me to draw inward and seek a sense of constancy through attempting to control my small domain. I became fastidious and precise in the arrangement of my few belongings (toys, shoes, books)—and heaven help the sibling who moved anything from its appointed place!

Death became a concrete reality for me. It was not, as for most children, a vague abstraction existing in some nebulous by-and-by. When I was six, a year after the deaths of my father and brother, my mother asked me to keep an eye on my eighteen-month-old baby sister one afternoon while she finished up some tasks inside the house. I got distracted (as six-year-olds are wont to do), and my sister toddled away and fell into the irrigation ditch near our home. My mother—propelled into action by an unembodied woman’s voice saying: “Evelyn! Your baby!”—found her seconds later floating facedown in the water.