7. David Kessler: My Own Grief

When I was nine years old, my family was living on the Gulf Coast a few blocks from the beach, where hurricanes are a summer event. Every year there were new storms with new names, but they required the same preparations and inspired the same fears. In that particular year, 1969, Hurricane Camille changed my world forever.

Over a hundred of us spent that night under the steel porch of the elementary school gym, which had been converted to a shelter by the Red Cross. It was the loudest night of my life. I mostly remember the crashing sounds and the howling winds. I knew that there was death and destruction in that noise, and that somewhere out there cries for help were going unheeded.

Then, suddenly, there was nothing. No wind, no rain, no sound. Complete silence. We were in the eye of the storm. As the storm moved past us the winds started up again, this time from the opposite direction. As the howling and crashing sounds returned, we wondered how we could possibly survive the night.

As day broke I wondered what our house would be like. I hoped my parakeet, Blue Eyes, would be okay, but as we drove to the house, I ­didn’t recognize where we were. When we rounded the corner of our street I saw concrete and water where the house next door should have been. The front yard of our house was filled with rubble, stones, and debris from other houses. Some of the trees were down and some had fallen on the side of the roof. When I saw that the front door and the windows were gone, I knew my parakeet, Blue Eyes, was in trouble.

I ran to my bedroom so fast and yet it felt like slow motion, since I was aware that there was no furniture and the floor was covered with mud. There was no bed, no cage, no place to look for my bird, Blue Eyes. I stood alone in my previously familiar room that was now filled with sadness. I ­didn’t or ­couldn’t imagine all that I had lost, but I could feel it. That was my first encounter with grief. I had lost my room, my bird, and my house. I had no idea where my neighbors were. All I could do was have endless discussions about “Surely a bird can survive in wind and fly away.” I remember annoying my parents with question after question until I started having a sidebar with anyone who would listen.

Someone finally said to me quite harshly, “­Don’t you understand, David, that everything is smashed and ruined, the cage is gone, the bird could never have lived.”

That hurt, but it helped. I ­didn’t know why, but I could end my search and begin to feel the loss. With the help of the Red Cross, we were able to rent another house and rebuild our lives, but things would never be the same.

My mother had dealt with health problems throughout much of my childhood. On New Year’s Eve of 1973 I walked into my mother’s bedroom where she had been ailing. I gave her a kiss and said, “This will be the year you get better.” Within days she was transferred from our small local veterans hospital to a much larger, better-equipped VA hospital.

My father and I stayed at a hotel across the park from the hospital, but we were mostly in the hospital lobby, since she was in an intensive care unit where she was allowed only ten minutes every two hours for visitors. One morning, we had just eaten at the hotel and were on our way to see my mom when there was sudden activity in the hotel lobby. People began running out. Shots were being fired. There was a sniper on top of the building. Within seconds, there were police everywhere while people rushed into the buildings for cover.

We eventually made our way over to the hospital and saw my mom for the ten A.M. visit. She died alone an hour later. The doctor very reluctantly agreed to let my father see her but said that I could not, for I was too young. My heart sank. When the nurse came to lead my father to Mother I went along, hoping not to be caught.

The nurse led us to Mother’s bed, where her body now lay lifeless. I remember thinking how much more at peace she looked without all the tubes and machines attached to her. I also remember how removed from her I’d felt during those last visits, with an oxygen mask covering her face, three to four IV lines, and the dialysis hookup. Imagine how hard it would be for anyone, much less a child, to complete or say good-bye or have any kind of intimacy in this stark institutional setting.

I was relieved to at least be face-to-face with my mother without all the machines and tubes. Still, I felt little privacy, for the other seventeen patients in the ward were there. And the nurse stood right by us at my mother’s body, never leaving us alone, prepared to whisk us out when our brief allotted time was up. Before the day was over we were on a plane heading to bury my mother. I never felt so alone.

I knew this was not how death was supposed to be. The loss was never really dealt with. There were a few times I saw my father crying and he found me crying also, but it was never talked about and we never cried together. Although I was too young to articulate it, I knew that my grief deserved a place but had none. Far from the average childhood day, there had been death, shooting, police, and airplanes. My little psyche had its hands full. So how does a child integrate all those things?

He ­doesn’t. But it was a huge cost to me and my family. I ­didn’t deal with it for years, and when I did, I was fortunate enough to choose a profession that was about my acknowledging and healing my grief by helping others through illness, death, and grief. Yet not everyone has the opportunity to channel their sadness and loss into a positive outlet. I am painfully aware of how easily my loss could have devastated my life. I saw many others who had similar experiences and ended up involved in drugs, crimes, and even suicide. I often felt that “There but for the grace of God go I.” My career is living proof that we teach what we need to learn.

In my late twenties I visited the Auschwitz concentration camp. On that day my level of understanding of grief and loss stretched way beyond anything I had ever experienced. I saw thousands of pairs of children’s shoes, old luggage covered with travel stickers and ID tags, eyeglasses, and other personal items. It was incomprehensible that there had been a person or child connected to each of these items. Standing safely in the gas chambers, where millions were killed, took me to a depth of sadness I did not know was possible. I had known only personal loss. Now I knew global loss. For months I felt angry. Later I realized that my anger was part of my grief.

In the mideighties I was working in home health care. The AIDS epidemic was growing and hospitals were not treating people well. Nurses were afraid to deliver food inside the hospital rooms for fear of catching something. They would leave meals at the door, and sick patients had to be well enough to get their own food or they ­didn’t eat. The fear of AIDS often left patients medically as well as emotionally neglected. Early on there was no knowledge of necessary medical care, and there was also little human care.

Los Angeles was one of many epicenters of the epidemic, and the entertainment industry was hit hard. Home nursing care was the answer, since hospitals and hospices had reasons and a reluctance to step up to the plate. Hospitals ­didn’t want people with a communicable disease of unknown origins in their beds. Hospices had a system that was built under the Medicare system for those over sixty-five years of age. AIDS patients were too young.

My agency, Progressive Nursing Services, took a lead in caring for men, women, and children with AIDS. I joined my friend Marianne Williamson when she decided to start a meals on wheels program, Project Angel Food, for people with AIDS, since once again, the existing meals on wheels program was designed for the elderly. Because of my work at the nursing agency and building Project Angel Food with Marianne, AIDS seemed to be all around me. It felt like a war zone. The people we served were dying, the people we worked with were dying, and our friends were dying. I was overcome by numbness and loss. I could not have sat around and just felt my grief; it would have been too overwhelming.

I was lucky I had a mission to put my work into. It was one of the saddest times of my life and the greatest opportunity I was ever given to serve. At its peak, I remember going to a funeral every weekend, where I learned the importance of memorials and how vital it was to have a time and place to grieve for each individual loss. People thought of AIDS as only a gay disease back then, but we knew differently because we were caring for women and children from the beginning. We knew this deadly virus did not care about who its host was and that it would spread rapidly here and in Africa and around the world.

It seems that when the universe wants to get your attention, it usually starts with the young men in a society. War is one example; AIDS is another. It somehow happens that to teach hard lessons, you must affect the vitality of an otherwise strong man, his mother, and the family. It taught me a lot about disenfranchised grief, which is grief that is unacknowledged and unvalued. Families would not show up to grieve their children dying of AIDS and disowned many of them at death. I remember calling the parents of a young man who had died of AIDS and informing them as gently as I could that their son had died. The father denied having a son. I thought I might have dialed the wrong number, when he said, “The moment our son said he had AIDS, he was not our son anymore.” With that he hung up the phone and we were left to raise money for his burial.

And so, besides disenfranchised grief, I learned from AIDS that when you add a taboo to a death, the grief expands dramatically. In the midst of a global epidemic with which I was consumed, my father called from Sacramento and said, “I had a dream last night that I’m going to die soon. Can we spend some time together?”

When my father was facing death in the late 1980s, I was determined to have a better experience of death with him than I had with my mother. I brought my dad into my home, making sure that he was surrounded by loved ones and cared for at all times. My father talked openly about dying. My emotions were mixed. I was sad but also glad that he was prepared to move on with peace of mind. His openness and acceptance of the situation helped me find completeness with him that had not been possible with my mother. The anticipatory grief we shared brought us even closer in our relationship. I was able to lovingly hold his hand as he died. As a result, the grief around my father’s death was easier to bear than that around my mother’s.

By the midnineties, AIDS in the United States had become a manageable chronic illness rather than a death sentence, my parents were gone, and I had witnessed the worst of mankind at Auschwitz. I needed a way to express all the loss I had seen and felt. My first book, The Needs of the Dying, became that outlet. It enabled me to review all the aspects of loss of which I had been a part. But there was still something missing, something else I needed to heal—trauma.

I saw in my own loss that it was hard to separate out the grief from the trauma, since grief has elements of trauma in it and trauma has grief in it. I explored this by being trained and volunteering for the Red Cross’s Aviation Disaster Team. I also became a specialist reserve police officer for their trauma team. Like a lot of other people, I was a product of my accumulated pasts and losses, which paved the way for who I have become today. That little boy who was not able to be with his mother when she died, saw police in action, and took his first plane ride all on the same day, the day that changed his life forever. That little boy back then sorely needed someone like the man I had become to help him. Like many in my profession—and other professions—my experiences and training were called forth on the saddest day in American history.

September 11, 2001, my phone rang, my beeper buzzed, and I received a fax from the American Red Cross stating that I, like so many other disaster volunteers, was being activated.

I knew there was a huge network in place that was being activated around the country to help. I wanted to get on the next plane to New York to be at Ground Zero, but all flights were grounded. The next call was from a friend who told me that my good friend Berry Berenson Perkins had been scheduled to fly from Boston to Los Angeles on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center.

I went from shock, denial, and feeling that I had to get to New York to help, to being completely paralyzed. I ­couldn’t do anything until I found out if Berry was alive. Not knowing if my friend was alive or dead and having no way to get to New York made minutes feel like hours.

I spoke with her son, who confirmed that Berry had indeed been on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center building.

After I did my best to explain the situation to my two young sons, I began my work. I started meeting with grief-stricken pilots and flight attendants who had possibly lost coworkers and loved ones and were afraid to get back in the air. Within a few weeks, I was at Ground Zero and was told to help in the morgue.

On my way to the makeshift morgue I was struck by the grayness. It was like Auschwitz, but this was happening now. The smoke was in the air, the smell was horrifically overwhelming, and the grief was palpable. The shock of the morgue was that there were no corpses on the clean, unused tables. Each time a bell rang signifying a body had been found, everyone stopped. Some stood at attention, others prayed, and I braced myself for what I might see. The first time the chaplain brought me into the interior of the morgue for the arrival of a body, one finger was all that was brought in. The next day I met with a fireman’s wife whose husband’s body had recently been found. I knew nothing we had been through in our lives had prepared us for this experience. I was honored to be able to help.

As I recall the grief in my life, I think back to my first experience of death, my mother. I remember that little boy wanting to be with his mother as she died, but he ­wasn’t allowed. A few years ago I had the opportunity to go back and visit the hospital where she had died twenty-five years before. I stood at the ICU door, which had not changed a bit, and cried. A nurse walked up to me and said, “Would you like to go in and visit someone?”

I looked at her kind face and said, “No. The person I want to see is no longer in there, but thank you so much for asking.”

In my life, I continue to heal my own grief. It ­doesn’t go away; I just learn to live with loss, and I am now able to honor and remember the past without pain. Just like Elisabeth, but decades later, I had the privilege of visiting Mother Teresa in Calcutta. I will never forget what she said to me: “Life is an achievement and death is part of that achievement. The dying need tender, loving care, nothing more.”

It is that life and love, found and lost, that is also part of the achievement.

When we first lose a loved one, our lives feeling meaningless. As we experience the five stages of grief, we are returned to a life with the possibility of meaningfulness that was unimaginable when we first dealt with the loss. I believe that grief and its unique healing powers take us from meaninglessness to meaningfulness again. If there is a sixth stage, I would call it “meaningfulness,” or “renewed meaning.” We do not get over our loss, we ­don’t find recovery; we may find renewed meaning and enrichment for having known our loved one.

In working with Elisabeth and experiencing my own grief, I am reminded of life’s fragility. What I have taught in my life about grief is not as important as what I have learned from it: Those whom we have loved and who loved us in return will always live on in our hearts and minds. As you continue on your journey, know that you are richer and stronger, and that you know yourself better now.

You have transformed and evolved.

You have loved, lost, and survived.

You can find gratitude for the time you and your loved one shared together, as short as that seems to have been. Time helps as you continue healing and live on.

Yours is the grace of life, death, and love.