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Readers of the Drug Safety and Health News blog know that my Mom died suddenly of meningitis (see here for the story) when I was four and half (actually I was four years, eight months and eight days old; currently I am “47 1/2″ in little kid language but I just say “47″). Anyhoo it pops out in my blogs here and there and to be honest I felt like I was putting myself out there or taking a risk somehow by talking about it.
Me and my Mom
After she died my father soon remarried and it was not a topic of frequent conversation, shall we say. When I walked around saying “Where’s Mommy, where’s Mommy?” everyone would shush me because my father was dating my future step-mother and they didn’t want her to hear me.
At the age of four I didn’t have a very clear idea about death. It was like one day she was there, and then the next day someone drove her away and I never saw her again. To me it was like she just went away for a while. It was only over the next few years that the finality of it all gradually sunk in. Also my little brain couldn’t comprehend why she should just die for no reason, and since I thought I was the center of the universe, I thought I must have been a very naughty boy indeed for my Mommy to have gone away. I also missed her, and wanted to go to that “death” place and see her.
That is why when I had a dream of her a year or two after she died that it was a little scary for me. I dreamed that I was walking through a forest where everything in the forest, every leaf on every tree, was very familiar to me. I walked up onto the porch of a small house in the middle of the forest and opened the door. She was standing there behind the door, looking at me but not saying anything. When I woke up I had the feeling that I had dreamt that dream every night for my entire life. I also had the feeling that it was so real that I couldn’t tell if it was just a dream or not, or maybe something like a vision. At that age I wasn’t sure if God existed but I thought I better hedge my bets so each night I got down on my knees by my little bed and prayed, with the idea that if she was up there in heaven maybe God could pass along what I had to say to her. Here is my old bedroom from a recent photo (I went back there for the first time in 42 years last fall):
Little Dougy's bedroom at the old Fishtrap house.
Do you think she came back to life as a cat? I fell down these stairs from my bedroom when I was four. Ouch! We moved away from this house when my father remarried and I didn’t remember the fall until I went back there for the first time in 43 years last fall.
That really hurt!
We had a lovely house on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound in Washington State that was built in a Japanese style. There was an oriental garden in the front. You can still see the overgrown bamboo. I think the fact that my mother was into Buddhism might have something to do with that, but I can’t get anyone to talk about it. You can spam my brother Steve Bremner and see if you can get something out of him.
Fishtrap house with remnants of bamboo and Japanese garden.
The Japanese have a certain logic to their architecture that is informed by their Buddhist background and beliefs. Like the porch is a passageway between the interior of the home and nature.
Japanese porch
This story got too long, so you can read more in Part 2 and Part 3 later this week.
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Thank you for sharing this part of your journey Doug, it’s brilliant. It has inspired me to think about going back to my old house (where I too left when my mom re-married). I think it was brave of you to go to the house…being ready for possible flood of memories. Many people avoid that uncomfortable possibility, and I imagine it served you well for healing.
Yes, it was also important to see it because it was scheduled to be drastically remodelled but hadn’t been touched since I lived there and I never went back. All of a sudden I had this urge to see the house and I think that was why. I was inspired to write this after reading what you and others wrote about early loss and it of course got longer and longer so I am gonna be posting in ‘installments’ as a coherent narrative with links to old posts that told just one part of the story.
I have been quiet, but I am liking the things you write more and more. Glad you are sharing this.
Best
Aubrey
I’m glad you have that photo, Dr. B. The joy you brought to your mother is so obvious on her face.
Interesting dream. And those stairs DO look wicked.
Thanks Doug, I look forward to the series. You know it makes me think of something my Grandmother always told me “you have to know where you’ve been before you can know where you are going.”
“When I walked around saying “Where’s Mommy, where’s Mommy?” everyone would shush me because my father was dating my future step-mother and they didn’t want her to hear me.”
The four-(and a half!)year-old gets shushed, because of the needs of the grown-ups: “Don’t!” Wonder what they’d do today. Label you with “child-bipolar”, and shush you with Risperdal? – Although it means that I, too, am 47 (and a bit more than a half, sigh), I’m glad, I’m not a child in these truly interesting times, we live in.
Beautiful picture, you and your mother.
“When I walked around saying “Where’s Mommy, where’s Mommy?” everyone would shush me because my father was dating my future step-mother and they didn’t want her to hear me.”
The four-(and a half!)year-old gets shushed, because of the needs of the grown-ups: “Don’t!” Wonder what they’d do today. Label you with “child-bipolar”, and shush you with Risperdal? – Although it means that I, too, am 47 (and a bit more than a half, sigh), I’m glad I’m not a child in these truly interesting times we live in.
Beautiful picture, you and your mother.
(Sorry for the double-up. The server told me it couldn’t connect. Didn’t know, posting had succeeded anyway.)
Seems a pretty unfair statement, Marian, to children and families affected by bi-polar disorder.
Yes, bi-polar disorder really can manifest at a young age, despite what is spewed on anti-psychiatry/anti-medication/anti-science blogs all over the Internet. We are simply getting better at understanding and recognizing the “age-appropriate” symptoms. Same is true with other conditions.
Then or now, families take different approaches in such a situation, some with more compassion for the child than others.
It seems to me we’ve gotten much more cognizant in recent years of the impact of these events on children, and most people try to be sensitive to the child. Back when Dr. B. was a boy, bloodless surgeons maintained that babies didn’t need anesthesia for surgery because they didn’t feel the pain. (Of course, the field of surgery might self-select for those on the low empathy scale, especially at that time, when surgeons were unquestioned gods.)
Of course, there will always be people whose own brain-based deficits in empathy or appreciating consequences will cause them to act insensitively to others. That’s why it’s important, IMHO, to increase awareness of these disorders and not to paper over them with Big Pharma conspiracy theories.
Gina: I knew, someone around here would disagree. (And I didn’t even write “ADHD/ADD” – although I had it in mind… ). So be it.
Hmmm, I’m not sure what that has to do with it, Marian, the fact that you didn’t write ADHD/ADD.
Maybe you’re right….children who “act out” while grieving the loss of a parent might have a higher chance of being diagnosed with ADHD or Bipolar disorder when, in fact, they don’t.
But I suspect that happens only when the professionals assessing the situation and, it must be mentioned, the adults who are selecting those professionals and thus controlling treatment, have something wrong with their own brains — lacking empathy, perhaps, or lacking brain-based capacity for assessing the complexity of a situation.
Or just being stupid, narrow-minded, one-trick pony, dogmatic, selfish twits. Perhaps that will be added to the DSM in future revisions.
For the record, though, there are many children caught in the genetic-generational drama of parents behaving badly. And their bad behavior exacerbates the neurobehaviors that they have genetically inherited from their parents. If a clinician misses this genetic connection, that clinician will overly attribute the child’s dysfunctional behaviors solely to trauma.
These issues are not simple.
Gina: IMHO there’s no such thing as “bipolar”, “ADHD”, “schizophrenia”, “depression”, you name it. There’s trauma, and there are different, learned, ways to deal with it. I don’t doubt, that trauma can have – and often has – an impact on brain chemistry/structure, or even genes. Nevertheless, this doesn’t justify a labelling of the traumatized individual as “defective”, and it certainly doesn’t justify the drugging of the individual. While society (families), released from any accountability, continues the traumatizing abuse.
Your visit to your old house, Doug, reminded me of a visit 3 years ago I paid to the Connecticut house I lived in when my daughter Jessica was born and where she spent her first few years. Jessica died at age 31 of colon cancer some 5 years ago. After we moved to Arizona, I didn’t see that house again in the following 35 years. Having seen a lot more of Jessica in the 2 years she was getting treatments for the colon cancer than in the preceding many years, my head was filled with images of Jessica ill. My grief therapist suggested that a trip back into Jessica’s childhood might help me put some fresh positive images in my head. It was a very interesting and positive experience (I didn’t get any fresh negative memories like your fall down the stairs. . .). I’m glad you got to see your old home before it was renovated.
Jennifer
Well I commend your journey and I thank you for the support you have given me, Jennifer, as I have written about the topic of grief. I think they are all awaiting us in the great beyond, but, hey, what do I know.
Thanks for the courage of sharing this on the public stage. Your mother was beautiful, and by your description, an exceptional woman. No surprise that she has an exceptional son. I look forward to future installments.
[...] their post, they took advantage of the fact that I had previously written about my mother, who died when I was four and a half years old, an event that was deeply traumatizing for me. They [...]
Thank you for posting up the link to this Doug. Oh how I felt for that little boy – being told to keep his pain locked inside so as not to upset the adults. But I think that was the way it was then. My father died of lung cancer when I was ten and I don’t think I even spoke about it until I was eighteen and went to college and met a girl whose father had also died when she’d been that age. I cried for the first time then and sometimes I think I’ll carry on crying, on and off, for a loss which I never quite understood.
I love that idea of the porch as liminal space – a threshold, a transition…and sometimes I do think that the threshold between worlds can be very thin, particularly in dreams. Some people say that when we meet the dead in our dreams, we are visiting them in the astral. I have no idea, but it can be comforting.
Your mother looks so beautiful – and so clearly loved you (shines out from that photo). I found your return to your old house so poignant – and the way the garden had overgrown too… Ah, I could go on and on but must needs stop now.
Janexx
Thanks for commenting Jane. Sharing our stories is part of the process of grieving but I think I agree with you – I will probably go on and off crying over these things for the rest of my life.
[...] other thing Anne doesn’t talk about is our terrible chilhood, how our mother died suddenly when she was 7 and I was 4. How many people who had that happen to them do you know who are leading [...]
I incorporated this blog post and the story of my mother into my latest book, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.
http://www.amazon.com/Goose-That-Laid-Golden-ebook/dp/B0057ZF1MK