Ways of grieving

My last post expressed just a sample of my devastation at the loss of a family in our community. We weren't enormously close, but we shared a birthday party with them in June, some playdates, a great bottle of wine, and coffee. Close enough that I really liked them, and really wanted to spend more time with them. But they're gone now, ripped away from us all. And there's not even a criminal to be angry at, or a negligent anyone to blame. It just happened.

This has hit me far harder than I thought it would. I still choke up in tears at random times, and while I want to print out pictures from the birthday party for Shane and the family, I can't bring myself to go into that section in my photo library.

I have spent some time contemplating grief today. I have only had a handful encounters with death, and they have all been very different.

My grandfather died of cancer when I was 16. He was ill for a long time, and my greatest regret that my last attempt to show him that I was there by squeezing his hand turned out to be extremely painful for him. He was gone the next morning.

My dad died five weeks after our wedding, after a brief but grim illness with cancer of the pancreas. My dad was my counsel, my foundation, the person I turned to for advice, the person who I could trust no matter what (along with my mom), and the person who surprised me with spots of spontaneity in his very measured and accounted for life. We spent his last day with him in hospital, even though he was unconscious, caught between the stark reality that he was never going to wake up, that those ice-blue eyes were never going to twinkle again, and relief that his suffering was over. I miss my dad every day, I wish he was here to know my boys, but he was sick and in pain and he was old and it was the way of life that he be released from that. My heart doesn't ache for him, it treasures his memory.

Andrew was my best friend at varsity. For a while I was in love with him, but I soon saw the folly of that, and we went back to being buddies. A successful law practice, a huge inheritance and a failed marriage later, he was a drug addict and an alcoholic. I watched him destroy all that he had created, I and others tried to intervene, but we learned the hard way that no-one can fix an addict unless they want to fix themselves. After some particularly harrowing encounters, I remember driving to work one morning sobbing my heart out, because I believed that it was a matter of days before someone found him dead of an overdose. As it turns out, he semigrated to Cape Town, disconnected from everyone he knew in Joburg, cleaned up, and became a pretty awesome photographer. A month short of being clean for a year, he died in a kloofing accident. It felt like I'd already mourned losing him, like his death came as no surprise. We'd seen him the month before when he was here to photograph a friend's wedding, and he told me the root of his addiction. It was an intense and shocking conversation that started about 10 minutes before I had to leave for work, and we never finished it. My mourning for Andrew is more about the conversations I wish I'd had, the apology for judging him when I had no right to. It's about missing the sunsets on atop his roof, and how he challenged me to push limits. It was with him that I drove a Porsche at 256kph, and with him that I climbed to the top of the water tower at Knockando. He knew how to pique my defiance, and I miss that. Besides, now I'm all responsible and stuff, being a mom.

And now Monica, Rogan and Milla. Three beautiful people, young, precious, gentle, so full of potential. Taken in the most cruel and dreadful way. I cry for what could have been, for them, for their husband and father, for her parents, the children's grandparents. I drive past that house every day on my school run, and I can't help but be reminded of the detail. It's some comfort that they didn't even know what happened, but we do, and we can guess just how little was left by the time the fire was extinguished. The raw tragedy strikes me at odd moments. I'm the tough one, the calm one, the one that just deals with stuff. And even though these three souls were not a big part of my life, they were ripped from it in the most brutal way, and I am grieving for them and for Shane's loss, for his future that was torn from him. It catches me when I least expect it, and my heart aches, and I become overwhelmed with a sense of grieving that I'm not quite sure how to deal with.

Perhaps I need to keep it simple and embrace Daniel's take on what happened. We had a psychologist come and explain what had happened to the children at his school, all of whom were fond of Rogan - he was destined to be Popular. She told them that Rogan and Milla had been in an accident, and that they would not be coming back to school. That the children were not to worry about them, because they were safe now, and happy. Daniel's a smart kid, and he's figured out that the fire he saw all over the front page of The Star was Rogan's house burning.

"Don't worry, Nana." he said, when she drove past the house, previously unaware of where it was. "Rogan is safe with God in Heaven."

Oupa, Dad, Andrew, Monica, Rogan, Milla. You're safe, and you're happy. But I still miss you, each in your own way.