A Child’s First Encounter with Death by Chris Morrant, M.D.
My first experiences of death were neither sublime nor ridiculous but very frightening. I was eight and my sister was six when our mother developed cancer. She spent many weeks in the hospital and came home for an occasional break. She was frailer every time she returned and hurt us when she shrank from our noisy greetings and from the cards and posters we had painted to welcome her back: “they remind me of the rustle of the nurse’ uniforms,” she said. My fear began when I heard her screaming in pain in her bedroom; her nurse went in and out several times, holding a covered enamel basin and once when the lid slid off, I saw it was full of blood soaked cotton wool.
One day we were practicing a play to cheer her up and became too noisy and excited until my father rushed in and screamed at me: “shut up or I’ll break your bloody little neck.” It probably added a ladleful of guilt to the buckets full we all lug along in life, and I’ve tended to be rather quiet ever since. Our mother slowly became too weak to get up. She looked so emaciated that they would not let us see her and my father draped sheets over the mirrors of her dressing table so she could not see herself.
Eventually we were sent to our grandparents’ house. One morning an uncle took us for a walk and bought us some lovely toys and a little later on our father came and told us that mother had died. He disapproved of tears but I think he wept as he sat there with his head bowed in his hands. “When we cry for someone who has gone to heaven, we are really crying for ourselves who are left,” he said, don’t let Nana see you crying. Cheer her up. Ask her what we’re having for dinner.” So we did and I was surprised to see a single motionless tear on her kindly round face. We had stew and dumplings.
I cannot remember if we talked much about our mother’s illness and death. We were told that she watched over us from heaven, which added an extra drop of guilt for every childish peccadillo.
I grew up boasting that I was unafraid of death (“although I am afraid of dying,” I said, vain at knowing the difference). It was, and is, untrue. I know now that my experiences numbed me and my fear took many forms, like: a fascination with death; a fear of the dark; fear of “the old woman at the top of the stairs” or of something lurking under the stairs, and especially a dread of the dead coming back to life. They say that you welcome the ghosts of those you love and if I feared my mother’s ghost it was because I hated her for leaving me, and hated myself for having failed to save her. Indeed, I believe, deep I my soul, that I feel responsible for her death.
My sister told me, decades later, that once, when my mother came home from the hospital I rushed to embrace her but she feebly pushed me away, crying: “Oh, you have killed me.” I do not remember this happening at all but I do believe my sister. I believe it led me to study medicine, although my motives were mixed: a wish to help; for a need for power and status, I write it with a blush; for the illusion of having some power over disease and death and, overwhelmingly, from a sense of guilt and a need to atone.
I suspect my father and grandparents did their best to shield and comfort my sister and me but unhappy children remember anger and punishment more than kindness and comfort. If we had talked more about my mother’s illness with my father it may have done us good and given us the opportunity to offer him our love and support: children can be helpful and amazingly tactful.
My father was deeply touched by the kindness and gentleness of my mother’s surgeon who easily saw through my father’s pose as bluff ex-artillery officer to the frightened and desperately she young man underneath. My father’s nerves were frayed by the war and his wife’s illness. It was an austere time in England with rationing and our governors’ seventeenth century morality adding to the drabness: there was capital punishment, corporal punishment in schools, homosexuality, abortion and attempted suicide were criminal offences. My father did his best give the temper of the times which included the belief that children could not get depressed and that big boys don’t cry.
My experiences are nothing compared with those of millions and millions of people. I think I have learned that one can try to discuss things more openly with children. Also that even if few of us are eloquent at least we can help in a practical way – do some laundry, whip up a casserole, mow the lawn. God in his mercy has made us all of limited intelligence or we would die of heartbreak daily or go mad from the sufferings of our fellows. Morphine costs a dollar a shot. I think this is only taking the advice of Henry James to his nephew Billy, that the three most important things in life are: “To be kind, and then to be kind, and then to kind.”
Chris Morrant, M.D. was born in England, where he earned his degree in medicine. He has been practicing psychiatry, specializing in psychotherapy, for more than 40 years and is currently in private practice in Vancouver B.C.
Tags: death anxiety, death awareness, teaching children about death
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