By Dr. Bruce Mills, Chairman of the Board of Directors for The Gray Center

A number of summers ago, when my son Jacob was nine and my daughter Sarah ten, we planned a Sunday afternoon adventure to the downtown library.  Giving order to the unordered space of a weekend afternoon always seemed an adventure.  Would we pack the right portfolio of Jacob’s sketches, the Poohs or Madelines or Big Birds?  Would we remember the right number of colored pencils for Jacob’s drawings and the just-right shade of yellow-orange to color Ernie?  Would the library have a copy of the video or book that Jacob had been requesting all morning?  Jacob.  Jacob.  Jacob.

And yet this particular afternoon in mid-June, quiet and brilliant blue, seemed the kind of adventure that left us smiling and acquiescing to Jacob’s desires.  This day he planned a “photo shoot” of the stuffed storybook characters perched atop the bookshelves in the children’s section: the rabbit of Alice’s Wonderland, Pooh, a dragon from a story I should know.  And so, we searched for the camera and made a special trip to Walgreen’s for film and planned enough time to drop off the pictures at Target’s one-hour photo.  It would be a grand adventure.  And, through it all, Sarah laughed and held her brother’s hand and entered his vision with all the joy that the hope of one calm day can instill.

The library was not open.

At first, Jacob just wept, letting his shoulders and back hunch forward much like the crying poses of his animated characters—but, quite suddenly, he screamed, ran toward the sliding glass doors, and, strengthened by his anger, nearly forced them open.  Sarah stepped forward to try to comfort Jacob, but I warned her back.  As we looked on, he began to scratch his face and neck, leaving streaks of red beneath the tender lines of both jaws.  For the next ten minutes or so, we coaxed him foot by foot toward and into the van.  Once in the back seat, however, he flung himself down and began to kick the windows.  I yelled and reached back, grabbing at his shirt and arm.  And then he went after Sarah.  For a moment, she shrunk back but then she started hitting him and crying and yelling, “I hate you!  I hate you!”  Finally we opened the door and let his fury back outside.  On the sidewalk, Jacob kept lunging toward me, his hands intent upon scratching my face or arms.  In the refuge of the van, Sarah called my wife on the cell phone and, in ten minutes, forty-five minutes from the start of his outburst, she pulled up and took Jacob home.  His anger now subsiding, he began to sob.  “Jacob was so sad,” he said.  “Jacob was so sad.  Jacob was so sad.”

My daughter held her own kind of sorrow, and she holds it still.  This sorrow has no ritual of completion, no baptism or anointing, no confirmation, no rows of chairs and cheering, no dawn or dusk in which to confess or bear witness.  Who will know that in this one hour she held her brother’s hand and felt her arms ache to comfort his desperate body, felt her voice tighten and curse, felt her fists against Jacob’s chest and back, felt guilt and love and the yearning to begin anew?

I want you to know what no one can know—that the wind caught Sarah’s hair and held it off her face for just a moment as she sat next to me on the sidewalk, that she let her small fingers touch the blood on my forearms.  I want you to imagine the many things that we leave unspoken, the memories that we must hold in faith because we do not as yet discern their meanings.  And I want you to know that I am still reaching out to my daughter and that we do not yet understand the loss that Jacob instills in us and the tenacious love that wounds with so much caring.