THE QUILT PEOPLE

Susan Sterling

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged

from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment

is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share

them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong

to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (quoted in Molly Fumia, Safe Passage)

It’s a startlingly beautiful Saturday afternoon in late September in central Maine, summer-like weather, the leaves just beginning to turn, the bereaved families at Camp Ray of Hope in shorts and T-shirts. On the pond, campers are fishing and paddling around in canoes. Just past the lodge, a young man leaps into the cold waters to swim.

In the camp dining hall, Sandra Kervin works with her sewing machine, surrounded by scraps of fabric and ribbons. She’s leading a workshop for children and adults in making “memory pillows.” Nearby, at another long table, children decorate white baseball hats with stickers and glitter markers. On the walls behind Sandra hang three large quilts.

Late in the afternoon my husband stops by for a brief visit. He meets me at the lodge porch where I’ve just spent the afternoon leading journal workshops. Many of the participants have been young widows with children, and working with them, giving them a chance to write and talk about their grief, has been both exhilarating and heartbreaking. I pack up the leftover journals and pens, then take my husband back along the camp road so that he can see Sandra’s family quilt, hanging in the dining hall. I’ve tried to describe this quilt to him before, but I’ve failed to evoke its beauty. A quilt made from her son’s clothes, I said. His jeans, his fishing license, his car key, his baseball cap.

The hall is noisy with children’s energy, but standing before the quilt, both of us fall quiet. Like my husband, I had a hard time visualizing Sandra’s quilt before I saw it and did not imagine I would be so moved. After the deaths of my mother and younger sister, I tried to find my way along the path of grief with words, reading and writing. Sandra has stitched her way.

Images of a road, or a path, often appear when mourners talk about their experiences of loss. If grief is a journey, then the itinerary at its most heartening involves getting from here to there, from devastation to acceptance. By “there” I don’t mean “closure,” that deceptive term that suggests painful experiences can be shut away in a closet labeled “The Past.” The journey is long and arduous, particularly when death is sudden or unexpected or violent. What one hopes for is the faith that life still has meaning. The path is highly individual and never clearly set out. It might most accurately be depicted with a related image, as a trail one makes oneself through a dark and lonely wood, hoping to glimpse a clearing.

Having found myself wandering in these dark woods—once as my mother lay dying from cancer, and eight years ago after the probable suicide of my younger sister—I listen with admiration and curiosity to the stories others tell me, sometimes with envy for the beliefs they’ve found or reaffirmed. Some stories, like that of Sandra Kervin and her family completely draw me in.

The Kervins’ son Jarod died by suicide, a particularly devastating death. Though I find the phrase “survivor of suicide” misleading, suggesting someone who attempted suicide and didn’t succeed, the term accurately evokes the trauma experienced by family and friends of the victim. Even if those who take their own lives feel they have no choice—indeed, they often tragically believe their family and friends will be better off without them—the death rarely appears inevitable to those left behind. Feelings of anger and guilt and abandonment invade them, as if love should or could have prevented what happened. Survivors relive, over and over, the last days and months, even years, before the suicide, seeing now the signs that were missed, which they believe they should have recognized.

As an added pain, the bereft suffer from the stigma that still shadows suicide. Often, family and friends will keep secret the reason for the death, or lie about it. For years, suicides were not allowed to be buried in the hallowed ground of a churchyard. My sister, who was fervently religious and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church, told her husband in a moment of despair the night before her death that she had thought of suicide, but she “didn’t want to go to hell.” Perhaps because of the stigma, relatives and friends often shy away from those bereaved by suicide or urge them to return quickly to life as it once was, as if the death had never happened.

After my mother’s death, I came across these words of the French writer Albert Camus, which I placed on my desk and then returned to often after my sister died: “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” The word “finally” reminds us that there is nothing sudden about recovering from a loss, no quick balm, no magical jolt back into life. Going on often begins with the smallest of gestures. First there is a taking, and then, after a long time, a giving and reaching out to others.

To begin, then, a real road: this one leading east from the central Maine town of Waterville, across the Kennebec River and up along the Sebasticook River to the small town of Albion. I first travel along this road one evening in late September 2006. It’s dark, the early dark of fall in Maine, and I drive too far past the sharp bend in the road that Sandra has given me as a marker and arrive a little late. The Kervins’ ranch house is set back from the road, and on the same piece of property, not a stone’s throw from the front door, is the apartment—a converted garage—where eighteen-year-old Jarod Kervin was living when he shot himself on November 29, 1999.

A light is on outside the porch. I knock on the door, and when there’s no response, let myself in. Sandra opens the door leading to the kitchen. “Ed and I must have fallen asleep watching TV,” she explains apologetically. She takes me into the living room, which is lit by two large red candles. A television glows in the corner. There’s a brief flurry while we establish whether I’ve inadvertently let out one of the two cats. (I haven’t—the cats, one white, one calico, saunter in a few minutes later and stretch out on the living room rug.) Sandra telephones their younger son, Adam, who comes over from the apartment next door where he is now living. It was Adam, then twelve, who found Jarod’s body there seven years ago. Now, like his older brother, he wants his independence but wants to remain close to his parents, as well, and it is a measure of how far they all have come since those dark days that the site of their tragedy has been transformed back into a young man’s refuge.

The Kervins’ daughter Lori and her 18-month-old baby, Ariel, also live in the main house with Sandra and Ed. On my first visit, the baby is asleep in a back room and Lori is at work. Lori was three weeks from her fifteenth birthday when her brother died. She lived on her own for a few years, but now she is back home, working evenings at Kohl’s department store in Augusta, about half an hour away. Those evenings, Sandra and Ed take care of their granddaughter. During the day Sandra works at Inland Hospital in Waterville; Ed also works in Waterville, as the manager of the Dollar Tree.

I know Sandra from the Survivors of Suicide group, run by Hospice, that I co-facilitated in the fall of 2001, when she was a participant; two-and-a-half years later we led a similar group together. I have heard in some detail what we in Hospice call her “story”—that is, her version of Jarod’s death and its aftermath—but I don’t know Ed’s or Adam’s or Lori’s stories, and I don’t know much about their lives before 1999. So on my first visit in September, and then on a second visit in November, I ask the Kervins about their beginnings. I am curious about this family that has come through darkness and now describes their lives as in many ways blessed.

Sandra and Ed have not moved far from where they spent their childhoods. They both grew up in Waterville—Ed in an Irish-American family (his mother was half-Irish, half Franco-American), and Sandra in a Franco-American family. Sandra’s mother died in 1988, eleven years before Jarod’s death, when Jarod was seven. Ed’s childhood stopped abruptly when he was quite young. His father died when he was seven, his mother when he was fourteen, after which he lived more or less on his own, finishing school and then joining the service. Since then, his two brothers, his uncle, his aunt, and a cousin have died, as well. Only his sister is still living. “At fifty-three, I’m the tail end of the family,” he says. Still, none of these losses helped him with Jarod’s death. “There was so much tucked away in the closet,” he says of his growing up. “There was no one there for me when Mom was dying. I didn’t want to open that door.”

The couple met when they were both working at Inland Hospital in Waterville, Ed as a physical therapy assistant, Sandra in Central Services, where the hospital’s instruments and needles are sterilized. They married in 1980. Eventually, Ed went into management and worked at Sam’s Club and Service Merchandise in Augusta and then at the Dollar Tree in Waterville (where, at Adam’s suggestion, I found journals for the participants in the Camp Ray of Hope workshops).

The Kervins describe Jarod’s suicide as totally unexpected. They saw no warning signs, no previous struggle with depression. The night before his death, he spent the evening with the family in their living room, talking and watching television. When he didn’t appear the next morning or answer the phone, Ed sent Adam over to check on him. Sandra had already left for work, and though she noticed the bedroom light was on in the apartment, not the living room light, which was unusual, and though Jarod didn’t come out to say goodbye to her, as he almost always did, she didn’t think much of it. Entering the apartment, Adam glimpsed his older brother’s body, then ran back to the house, crying out, “There’s a gun on the bed and blood everywhere!”

Ed ran next door, grabbed the gun out of his son’s hand and threw it on the floor, then fled the apartment and called 911 and Sandra. The 911 dispatcher told him to go back in and check for a pulse, which he did, though he knew, from the stiffness of Jarod’s hand where it had held the gun, that his son was already dead. “That was,” he tells me, “maybe the hardest thing I had to do, going back in.” A deputy from the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Department arrived and called for backup. The police descended on the apartment, going through everything in their investigation. Though some communities now have trained teams who will go to a home where a suicide has taken place and assist the family, such help didn’t exist in central Maine in 1999. The Kervins stood off to the side, in shock. “I have two words to describe the loss of my son,” Ed tells me. “Total devastation.”

The months after Jarod’s death were chaotic. Ed doesn’t remember much after the police came, except that for 47 of the next 48 hours he paced back and forth from one end of his living room to the other. He didn’t know what to do. The police told him that Sandra shouldn’t see the body, and so when she next saw Jarod, he was lying in an open casket at Veilleux’s Funeral Home in Waterville, looking as he always had, except for a little swelling under the eyes. The workers at the funeral home did, according to Sandra, a fantastic job covering up the impact trauma. She had been surprised that the casket was open for the visiting hours, but it was important, she says, because a lot of people came to see him. The Kervins had been asked to bring Jarod’s clothes, and Ed brought Jarod’s new Reeboks. “My son will need these to walk through the Gates of Heaven,” he told the funeral home director.

Ed and Sandra had sympathetic bosses who told them to take what time they needed to deal with the loss of their son. Still, the family all felt abandoned, unable to help each other, Jarod’s death rending the fabric of their lives. In the chaotic months following, Sandra says she could see her family, once so close, falling apart, all of them grieving in different ways. But numbed with sorrow herself, she could only watch. All she and Ed could manage, it seemed, was to clean the house. The house was one thing they could control. They cleaned and cleaned. Fortunately, their really bad days seemed to alternate, so that when Sandra was having a difficult day, Ed was able to function, when he was flattened by sorrow, Sandra could take over. One of the managers where he works recently asked him how he got through that time. Ed ascribes his survival to his religious faith and Sandra: “I have an incredible spouse, and my faith runs very deep,” he said.

The death, which came three weeks before Lori’s fifteenth birthday, was especially disastrous for her. She felt she’d not only lost the brother she loved, but she’d also lost her parents, her whole family, the home she’d always known. The house was filled with pain and no longer felt safe to her. Her parents were not who they’d been. She ran away several times. The Kervins always brought her back home, troubled and angry.

Not too long after Jarod’s death, someone gave Sandra the phone number of Dale Marie Clark, then director of bereavement services with the Waterville Hospice, but Sandra was skeptical, associating the organization with work with the terminally ill. “What for?” she asked herself. “He’s already dead!” Eventually she called Dale, and at her suggestion, Sandra joined a Hospice group for grieving parents, but after two meetings she stopped going. It was just four months since Jarod’s death, and she wasn’t ready. Lori and Adam did, however, receive one-on-one bereavement counseling through Hospice, as did Sandra. The family limped along. Then, sometime in the summer, Dale came out to the house in Albion, appearing, as is so often mysteriously the case with her, at a moment of intense despair, as if knowledge of the family’s descent into darkness traveled to her through the cosmos. She persuaded the family, in particular, Ed, to come to Camp Ray of Hope.

Another road then, this one both real and spiritual, appears in my conversation with the Kervins. The road leads to Camp Mechuawana, a Methodist camp on Lower Narrows Pond, near Winthrop, Maine, where Camp Ray of Hope has been held on the third weekend in September for the past eleven years.

I first experienced this road on a rainy Friday night in 1999, two months before Jarod’s death and eight months after the death of my sister. The weather was damp and cold, and driving into the campgrounds with my daughter, I just wanted to turn back to our home in Waterville. All that winter and spring and summer, I’d felt a persistent grayness in my life. My husband, children, and friends had been wonderfully supportive (my daughter, then fifteen, had even offered to come with me that weekend). But being with other people could turn unexpectedly painful and bewildering, and I found it impossible to believe I would connect with anyone at the camp.

The Kervins felt the same apprehension when, the following September, they traveled that same road. Six years later, as we sit in their living room, the candles flickering and the cats sleeping on the floor between us, Ed describes their reluctance, similar to that of most first-time families, and their feelings of fear, uncertainty, and resistance. It was Sandra who dragged them all to Camp Ray of Hope, Ed says. He and Adam and Lori were just along for the ride. “What do I want to go to camp where everyone is sitting around crying?” he asked himself. “Then, when I got there, and we went into groups and people were laughing, I thought, I don’t belong with these happy people!”

Sandra says she was numb most of the weekend. “Someone told me,” she says, “that we had ‘The Look.’” She hadn’t a clue what this meant, but the next year, when she and Adam and Ed returned to Camp Ray of Hope for a second time, she recognized a blankness on the faces of the recently bereaved, and understood. What she saw were people who appeared haunted and bewildered, unable to fathom a world that would inflict such cruel losses. She understood that this was what she and her family had looked like, and that, a year later, they no longer did.

At Camp Ray of Hope, campers meet in groups of peers both Saturday and Sunday morning, each group led by two trained facilitators, and the groups are sometimes further arranged so that campers can be with others who have experienced a similar loss—a men’s group, a widow’s group, a group for grieving parents, a group for adolescent boys. Sometimes the groups find their own reason for being. The fall I attended, I was assigned to a group with two women whose sisters had both recently lost young sons. We were clearly together because we didn’t fit in any of the other adult groups—the leftovers, really. But at our first meeting we realized we had much in common as grieving sisters and aunts, and labeled ourselves “the sisters’ group.”

Beyond the groups, the weekend offers a variety of activities to grieving families, and, even as reluctant campers, the Kervins and I participated in many of these, as did my daughter. There are craft workshops for children and adults, massages, Reiki, and manicures, a No-Talent Show, a night walk without flashlights in the woods, canoeing and fishing, singing and s’mores around a campfire, a non-denominational worship service under the pines at the edge of the pond on Sunday morning. After lunch on Sunday there is a closing ceremony in a clearing in the woods, during which the families hang ornaments that they’ve created in honor of those they’ve lost on a small evergreen tree, and each family is given a monarch butterfly to release. Everyone stands in a circle, a community of the grieving.

Of their first year at camp, the Kervins mostly remember the experience of finally being with people who understood their grief—“new people, wanting to listen,” as Adam describes them. He and Lori went into groups for pre-teens and teens, while Sandra and Ed met with other parents who had lost a child.

That weekend, the Kervins began to do what Ed describes as “the intense work that you need, but don’t know you need.” They met other parents who had survived sudden, unexpected tragedy. “A child is a gift from God,” Ed tells me of his feelings then. “To lose a child is the worst thing that can happen to you. We were hoping desperately for a hand.”

It was in the parent group that another father, who had lost his seventeen-year-old daughter, gave Ed his first words of hope. “Your pain will never go away,” he told Ed, “but at some point in time it will become less severe.”

Sandra sensed in the other campers their sincerity, their deep knowledge of pain, “a certain magic.” She and Ed returned home, feeling they could go on. Something seemed possible that hadn’t seemed possible before.

As the Kervins talk, I remember feeling the same sense of life opening a crack after Camp Ray of Hope. Our fast-paced American culture isn’t kind to those who mourn. You have the funeral, flowers, a flurry of letters, and then—slam bang—you’re expected to get on with your life as if nothing had changed. But this isn’t how grief works. After my sister died, a friend, a minister, wrote me that he saw mourning as a long process of finding a place for the dead in our memories. Everyone at Camp Ray of Hope understands this—that grief takes work, attention, and time, but that sorrow can be eased by sharing your loss with others and by creating meaningful rituals.

I came to Camp Ray of Hope because of my sister’s death, but I had actually brought with me a whole suitcase of losses. In addition to my mother four years earlier, cancer had claimed a close friend the previous winter, a month to the day before my sister’s death. Then, in July, one of my oldest friends, an aid worker in Zimbabwe, was murdered in her home in Harare, possibly for political reasons. The world appeared intent, suddenly, on revealing itself as a place of random cruelty, piling up examples of violent and too-early deaths personal to me, just in case I’d missed the horrific accounts of wars and famines and accidents in the newspaper. I hadn’t, but it’s different, of course, when death creates great gaps in your own small world, and your family, once so comfortably ordinary, becomes one to whom tragedies happen.

The spring following my sister’s death, the suggestion of a friend that I contact Dale Clark at Hospice proved a lifeline in keeping me from falling into deep despair. By the time I came to Camp Ray of Hope, I had, as Sandra and her children would a year later, a sympathetic bereavement counselor who listened week after week to my struggles, and I was receiving bereavement correspondence. But it was only in September, at Camp Ray of Hope, that I glimpsed what could easily appear a cliché, but which for so many participants proves deeply true—a sense that life still had meaning, a ray of hope. I understood that, while sorrow would never leave me, joy just might find its way into my heart again.

In the winter, two months after Jarod’s death and eight months before the family would attend Camp Ray of Hope, Sandra unexpectedly discovered another lifeline. One afternoon in January, Lori begged to be taken shopping, so Sandra reluctantly drove her into Waterville, planning to wait in the car. Instead she found herself going into Mr. Paperback and asking one of the three clerks behind the counter if the store carried a book about a son’s suicide that she’d heard about, My Son, My Son, by Iris Bolton. The clerk confided in Sandra that her own son had completed suicide in April, adding that she wanted to make a quilt out of his clothes someday.

Sandra remains amazed by the way this encounter might so easily not have happened—why this clerk, when she could have asked one of the other women? The thought of making a quilt captured her. She had learned quilting from her mother; quilting was something the two of them had done together all the time. Returning home, she told Ed she wanted to make a quilt out of Jarod’s clothes. “I can’t picture it,” Ed said, but he gave the project his blessing.

That winter, she started the quilt. Some days, all she could do was just sit on the floor of Jarod’s apartment and hold a piece of his clothing and cry. She moved the pieces around. She asked Lori and Adam and Ed to each design a square. Lori’s square consisted of photographs of her with her older brother. Adam chose a note he’d written to Jarod the previous summer. Jarod had saved the note, which the family found in a drawer after his death.

Because the boys often played ball together—Jarod coached Adam’s Little League team and helped Ed coach Adam’s soccer team—Sandra took apart the baseball they’d often thrown and sewed the parts in a square with Adam’s note. Ed chose a white shirt with matching suspenders and tie that he’d given Jarod, his first dress-up clothes. Sandra transferred Jarod’s driver’s license, fishing license, and the photographs, as well as the note from Adam, onto cloth and made them part of the quilt.

When she was finished, it measured six feet square and held hundreds of pieces of cloth from Jarod’s clothes—his jeans, his shirts, his undershirts, his athletic socks, the logos from his T-shirts. At the center, she set his graduation picture from Lawrence High School, framing it with strips of cloth from the clothes he was wearing, his white T-shirt, his blue striped shirt, his blue jeans. In some of the patches, she arranged the pieces of clothing to suggest the way Jarod had worn them, the shirts open at the neck, the jeans coming down a bit in back, revealing the band of his boxers. “It was worse than a jigsaw puzzle,” Sandra says. “Nothing was square.” The quilt took five months and was the most intense piece of work she’d ever done. When it was completed, the Kervins had an open house and quilt signing on what would have been their son’s 19th birthday, June 30. Jarod’s friends and family friends and co-workers all came and wrote memories and messages of appreciation to Jarod on the quilt’s back.

Two years after Jarod’s death, in the fall of 2001, the Waterville Hospice offered a Survivors of Suicide group. (This was the group I co-facilitated, where Sandra and I first met.) Sandra decided to try a group again. She’d helped get her family as far as they’d come; now, she agreed reluctantly, she needed to work on her own grief. She was quiet in the group. Some sessions she still didn’t feel like talking. But she stayed through the end, bringing to one of the last meetings a poem she’d come across that gave her consolation, “I’m Spending Christmas with Jesus this Year.” The other group members, who had lost partners, a twin sister, and a father-in-law, found the poem so comforting that they requested copies.

Sandra and Ed took Hospice training to become volunteers in the fall of 2002; since then, they have gone to conferences for suicide prevention and for survivors and have led groups for bereaved parents both at the Hospice Community Center and at Camp Ray of Hope. They’ve become especially involved in helping those bereft by suicide, part of their mission to take away the shame and stigma of the act.

“We are willing,” says Ed, “to go anywhere, anytime, to talk to anyone.” They always bring the quilt. “We’re known as the quilt people,” Sandra tells me. They wrote about the quilt for the anthology, “Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul,” where the story was one of 69 chosen for publication out of 5,000 submissions. Sandra finds it telling that theirs is the only story in the book to mention suicide, despite the fact that 30,000 people take their own lives each year in the U.S., where suicide is the 11th most common cause of death.

Adam has also become very involved in Hospice. When I emailed Sandra to set up our first meeting, she wrote back asking if I could come on an evening when Adam could be there. “I hope you’ll write about him,” she said. “He’s so much a part of our story.” Last spring, Adam took Hospice volunteer training, and this September worked for a second time at Camp Ray of Hope with a group of adolescent boys, who were all about the same age he was when Jarod died. “People said to me, ‘I’m here in case you fall.’ Now it’s time to reach my hand out,” he explains of his decision. His first year working at the camp, he hadn’t yet had Hospice training, and Sandra worried about that, but the director, Sue McConnell, who’d asked Adam to volunteer, assured her he’d be terrific, because he’d “lived it.” “To have watched him struggle with the death and his own grief, we sit back in awe,” Sandra tells me.

In their search to make sense of Jarod’s death, “a reason for it all to happen,” as Ed says, he and Sandra have found a direction for life after Jarod in reaching out to others and educating whoever will listen about suicide—how it can happen unexpectedly, how no family is exempt, how wrong it is that a suicide be stigmatized. They see themselves as continuing to honor Jarod’s memory in their presentations, not letting him be forgotten. “There’s another way to look at suicide,” Sandra says of their message. While what they hope is to prevent a suicide, they also try to understand and respect those who choose to end their own lives. “It takes great courage to do what they do, not to turn away at the last second,” Ed says to me. “It’s got to be the most difficult decision to end a life, to struggle alone on your own battlefield. Think about what they have to muster inside to do that.”

It’s six weeks later and mid-November when I visit the Kervins again. Sandra already has the Christmas decorations up in the living room, Christmas figures on the mantel, a wreath ready to put on the door, a crèche, and the house looks and feels festive. When I arrive, Lori’s daughter Ariel, now 20 months, is finishing her supper. Sandra and Ed and I sit in the living room, while Adam and Lori wander in and out, and Ariel runs around, bringing me her books. I had asked Sandra if I could see the quilt again, and so she takes it from where it’s folded on the back of the couch and spreads it like a colorful rug across the carpet. It is, as it turns out, the first time Ariel has seen the quilt, and she sprawls across it, as if it’s a huge picture book, pointing to various pieces and asking her favorite question, “Wassat?” She recognizes her mother, her “Grampy” and “Memere,” her uncle Adam. Sandra points to pictures of Uncle Jarod. The grownups deter her when she wants to yank at the car keys dangling so enticingly from one of the squares, but otherwise the quilt is hers to explore.

The Kervins feel it’s crucial that people not let a death, and particularly the manner of death, obscure the reality of the person who once lived—for them, a hard-working, generous, loving young man, a wonderful son and brother. “I wish you could have known my son,” Ed tells me, and I assure him, though it’s only a small bit of knowing, that because of the quilt and the memories and stories it evokes, I have a picture of their son—a thoughtful young man who loved sports and was admired by his parents and siblings. Although Adam and Jarod were six years apart, they played together often, especially outdoors, tossing a football in the backyard even in the snow. Jarod would tease Adam by calling him “Weiner” because he was then so small; for Adam’s birthday, two months before his own death, Jarod gave him a card with “weiner” written all over the front, which Adam still treasures. It’s also clear that right up until his death, Jarod led a packed life as a student and worker. He was a first-year student in a four-year program in business administration at Thomas College in Waterville, and hoped to own his own business someday. In addition to his studies, he worked 30–35 hours a week at the local grocery store and with Ed on Mondays at Service Merchandise in Augusta.

What happened to Jarod, what happened to them, says Sandra, could happen to anyone. The suicide mustn’t be allowed to shadow the richness of all their son gave them. They now understand his death as a chemical imbalance in his brain, arising like a sudden mental illness. A priest who came to the house the day of the death suggested to the family as much, and for a long time, Sandra angrily dismissed his words. But she and Ed came to share the priest’s theory after much reading and research, and after studying the letter they found in Jarod’s apartment. Sometime during the night before he killed himself, Jarod wrote them a two-page letter on his computer, saying he loved them and explaining why he was taking his own life. He wrote the last paragraph by hand, which Sandra and Ed see as his way of leaving a personal text, “a last bit of love.” They found a box of tissues next to the computer, damp tissues in the wastebasket by the desk. “It must have been so strange and sad for him,” says Ed.

On this visit, when Sandra spreads the quilt out on the living room floor, Lori, who was working in September when I visited, joins us. She has two new jobs now—at the Flower Cart and at the Dollar Tree, both in Augusta. (The Dollar Tree is a family theme—Adam is now assistant manager at the Dollar Tree in nearby Skowhegan.) Lori has not followed her younger brother and parents deeper into Hospice involvement. She went to Camp Ray of Hope with the family six years ago, when she was fifteen, and though she says it was a “pretty powerful weekend,” hasn’t returned. “It’s good for first-time families,” she tells me.

Lori is remarkably honest about the pain she felt and still feels about Jarod’s death and its aftermath, the feelings of abandonment she had as a teenager, the anger and resentment she still carries about the loss of the family of her childhood. Her family, she tells me, totally changed. After Jarod’s death, her parents weren’t who they had been, “not even close.” Living together again in one house is a rough patch that they are all hopeful about making their way through. Yet, despite the rawness she still feels, becoming a mother has given Lori insight into and empathy for her parents and what it must have been like for them. “Now that I have a kid,” she says to me, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose one.”

“We couldn’t be there for you, because we couldn’t be there for ourselves,” Ed says to Lori about the time after Jarod’s death. As Lori talks, I think about how vulnerable we all are at fifteen—just beginning to establish an identity apart from our families, and yet still needing the comfort of home when the outside world appears hard and unforgiving. And yet for Lori, home had become a place of pain.

“Death can tear apart a family,” she says to me, and while her presence in the room might seem to belie this truth, it’s clear that for her the tearing apart is still the most important part of the family’s story, and without this aspect, there would be something false in the telling. Sandra has patched together Jarod’s life for the family in her extraordinary quilt, but this is, Lori indicates, her mother’s quilt, not hers. It was her mother’s idea that she do a square, she tells me, shrugging, when I ask about her contribution. She just found some photographs.

A quilt can cover things over, hiding as well as comforting. While Ed and Sandra wish Lori would join them on their path through grief, they don’t attempt to conceal her dissent. They understand that her experience has been different and, loving her as they do, they do not stop her from sharing it with me. Her pain is clear and poignant.

Lori asks me what I know about the ways people grieve from my work as a Hospice volunteer, and I stumble over my answer, talking about how individual grief is. It’s only later that I remember a quotation to share with her, from a little book by Molly Fumia called Safe Passage: Words to Help the Grieving Hold Fast and Let Go:

“The season of our grief is our shutting down time. We prepare the cottage of our hearts for the winter, securing our windows to the world, stocking our cupboards with what will sustain us during the cold and dark. Carefully we rebuild our inner fire, and huddle in its warmth while the storms of winter pass, awaiting a spring that will come as surely as the steady passage of the days.”

In this context, you might say that Ed and Sandra and Adam have glimpsed the spring, while Lori is still feeling the cold of winter, awaiting the spring as she bears witness to grief’s persistence.

Or perhaps her daughter Ariel is the spring for all of them. It is moving to watch her, this child who has brought life back into a grieving house, as she acquaints herself with an uncle she will only know through stories. It strikes me that Ariel is Lori’s gift to her family, as Adam’s Hospice work is his. Ariel can never replace Jarod, but with this baby, Lori has brought her family another child to love. The first time I saw Sandra holding Ariel, at the Hospice Lights for Life gathering in December 2005, she was relaxed and happy, and her eyes carried a light that I’d never seen before in the four years I’d known her.

For the Kervins, Jarod is still so much a part of their family that when they had a family portrait done a few years ago, they knew they had to find a way to include him. Working with Elm City Photo in Waterville, they first had a color portrait done, then transposed Jarod’s graduation photograph in black and white. In the foreground, Ed, Sandra, Lori, and Adam stand close together, smiling, while behind them Jarod seems to hover, much fainter, “an astral projection,” as Lori says, as if he were keeping watch over them. The portrait sits on the mantel, and visitors to the house tend to look, then take a second look, says Sandra. A workman recently commented to her, “I think you have a ghost in your picture!” When she explained they’d lost their son, he was embarrassed, but Sandra assured him she was glad for a chance to talk about her son. “It’s an honor and a privilege to continue to be Jarod’s parents,” Ed says.

At the end of the evening, I find myself telling the Kervins another road story, this one about my sister, who drove off into an ice storm on the night of January 14, 1999, pulled her car over on the shoulder near a Waterbury, Connecticut exit of I-84, and stepped or possibly slipped into the path of an 18-wheeler. The newspapers presented her death as a tragic accident, my sister a casualty of the ice storm. But the previous year she had been hospitalized twice for depression and a psychotic breakdown, and I’d been too worried about her for too long not to believe she’d found a way out of a life that—despite the love of her family and many friends—had become unbearable.

The Kervins are empathetic. Sandra says that she feels lucky that Jarod left a letter, so there is no ambiguity that his death was a suicide.

My sister was very devout, and she and I often talked about my own drifting away from the Christian beliefs in which we were raised. She was concerned about me, but tried to understand. Shortly after her death, a woman in the Episcopal church my father had attended for more than fifty years stopped him after a service and offered what she surely hoped were words of consolation. “God must have needed her more than she was needed on earth,” the woman said. My father was appalled. More than her husband and her three sons? he wondered, perhaps asked out loud. He couldn’t believe in or continue to worship a God whose plans included leaving a young family so bereft, and within a few months, he stopped going to church. He is still, he told me recently, unable to look at an album my sister made for him of his 75th birthday celebration, when our mother was still alive and all the children and grandchildren were there. “It makes me too sad,” he said.

Unlike my father, the Kervins have not lost their faith in God and in divine providence—that everything on earth happens for a reason (though the reasons may not be fully understood, or only at a later time). When I tell them this story, they identify not with my father’s turning away from God, but with the persistence of his pain. “It never goes away,” Sandra agrees, “but we’ve learned to live without Jarod.” They try, she says, “to hold everything in a positive light.”

This past summer, she had an encounter that also reminded her of the ways in which many people fail to understand the stubbornness of grief. She was at work at Inland Hospital, talking with a Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress disorder who was struggling with insomnia. Sandra shared with him that she still has many sleepless nights herself. “Some nights are like that,” she sympathized. Also in the room was someone who knew of Jarod’s death. He looked at her in astonishment. “You’re still bothered by that?” he asked.

Recently, my husband showed me a poem by the German poet Heinrich Heine. Heine evokes the mythical figure of Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders, and describes him as one who must bear the unbearable, “das Unerträgliche tragen.” I think of that image when I think of the Kervins, who like my father—and of course like me and the rest of our family—have struggled with questions of meaning after the loss of a beloved child. How does one bear such sorrow and remain open to life? How does one heal?

“Heal” is an Old English word meaning to be made whole. So perhaps one could say that Sandra, with her quilt composed of scraps of fabric from her son’s clothes, has made something whole out of what had been broken, and that has been part of her healing.

And yet what has been made whole is not unchanged. Another domestic image, that of a broken teacup, evokes this truth in the literature of grief. The teacup may be mended, may even be used again, but the crack remains visible, marking its history. In this context, one might say that, through the grace of Hospice, the Kervins and other mourners have found a way of mending what death had broken in our lives.

For them, there is also great comfort in God’s promise to re-unite them in the after-life with their son. This faith is so common among Hospice volunteers and clients that, soon after I started attending a Survivors of Suicide group, the November after my sister’s death, I realized I was the only one who didn’t assume I’d see her again. It took me three meetings to confess to being agnostic about an after-life. To my relief, everyone was sympathetic, but I also felt their sadness for me, as if, through some misunderstanding, I had to make my way through life truly unarmed and unconsoled. And yet, I don’t feel that way, despite not knowing. I am confident that some time, as my minister friend suggested, I’ll find a place for my sister in my memory that will bring me consolation. After all, what is memory if not a quilt?

Ed says that the memory of what they saw the morning of Jarod’s death has faded for Adam, but not for him. Still, with that devastating image comes a more hopeful one. The image was given him by Dale Clark, now the Director of Hospice. A few years ago Dale, who lost her son Jonathan when he was seventeen, told Ed that she was picturing Jarod and her own son helping other young people make the crossing to “the other side.”

As Ed tells me of this image, I imagine he is seeing Jarod as he appears in his graduation picture—a good-looking, dark-haired young man, smiling warmly, dressed in a blue striped shirt (left open at the neck) and jeans. He walks along another road, in a wooded landscape not unlike that of Camp Ray of Hope. Then he stops where a bridge crosses a stream, waiting for the too-young dead who are coming across to meet him.

“And Adam is here on this side helping other young people who are grieving.” The image gives him great comfort. “I now have a son on each side, helping other young people,” he tells me. “Both are very amazing souls.”