“Rob, you’re amazing! We’ll call it the Grandpa Tour!” I was already imagining how cool Quinn would think this was and how it might set free some of his sorrow. We could take your dad’s ashes and throw them in places he always talked about, his old neighbourhood, the woods where he went bird watching.” We could go to Toronto in June when Quinn gets out of school. “We need some kind of ritual for your dad.
All we did was hold a memorial at my mother’s house one afternoon. Somewhere we’d missed something in helping Quinn deal with his grandpa’s death, and realized we’d probably made a mistake in not having some kind of funeral. I started reading books on grieving children and found I could relate to something Barbara Coloroso wrote in Parenting Through Crisis: that confronting the reality of death directly and honestly with children is painful at the best of times but especially today in our death-defying, cure-everything-now, fix-it-fast society and with so many rituals of our ancestors abandoned.
Who was this depressive child weeping into his pillow every night? Was it death that terrified him? The realization that this is all going to end some day for all of us? Was he afraid of his own death? Of ours? Quinn had always been a regular, happy kid-he loved running and playing soccer, knew the make, model and year of every vehicle passing, had gobbled up the Harry Potter books, and skied with his grade four friends after school. I told him he’d always have the memory of his grandpa and that he led a long happy life.īut it didn’t help much. We tried everything to comfort him, told him that Quinn was lucky to have been close to his grandpa, that grief is the price you pay for loving someone. Six months had passed since my dad had died and still Quinn was crying himself to sleep. He stopped walking and what he said tore a rip in my chest: “I’m not happy. Sudden tears pooled his eyes, spilling down his cheeks.
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