Make it Come to Life : Prologue to a memoir

A view from a train window can kick start a fascinating story. Look what it did for Walt Disney. On a journey from Manhattan to Hollywood in 1928, Walt looked out his window as large towns gave way to wheat and corn fields. And there, under an apple tree, Mickey Mouse showed up. Perhaps Mickey waved a white-gloved hand, or maybe he just smiled. Walt captured him on a sketch pad and the stories began. Walt’s gone now, but his cartoon mouse has traveled all over the world and lives forever.

Although I grew up on trains in Osaka, Japan, my creations weren’t the kinds you sketch, but printed words. I looked out the windows and instead of a mouse, four teens appeared on a boat. They needed an ocean to take them to a remote tropical island where they would get lost, build campfires at night, eat mangos the size of footballs, and have fascinating adventures with the natives. I put them in a rowboat (at age eleven I was not the smartest seafarer which meant neither were my characters) and let a storm fester with just enough wind for their vessel to wash against the shoreline of the island. I named the island Blue Hama (I suppose I didn’t have the knack for good names at age eleven either).

Later, when I had crushes on boys with names like Ethan and Harold, I looked out the window as trains took me to and from school, and saw handsome boys on bicycles near parks where they met pretty girls named Belinda, Camithia, and Sylviana. I bought spiral notebooks at the local stationer’s near my home in Awaji, knowing that each notebook would be the place where a best seller would be brought to life and I’d be rich and famous before I turned twenty.

Each train ride from Awaji to Karasuma—the station closest to my international school—took forty-seven minutes. That’s a lot of time to peer out of windows. In the afternoons, the train was less-crowded and when I got to sit down, I lured my characters, bringing them from outside where they began along the tracks, to inside the pages of my notebooks. I gave them words, obstacles to conquer, and lots of love in their hearts.

If Walt and I had ever crossed paths, or if we’d been seated on the same train, he might have used his pencil to draw me as a kid. Two blond ponytails sticking out from just below my ears, plaid skirt, red tights that bagged around my ankles by the time school got out, and a pair of black patent-leather shoes that were magnets for doggy poop. In my hand would be a yellow number 2 pencil sans an eraser on the end because erasers never last the lifetime of pencils. The pencil would be scratching out my messy words (I had what was known back then as sloppy penmanship) over the lined notebook’s pages, and my ears, although not as prominent as Mickey’s, would be stretched to listen for the conductor’s announcement of my train station.

I spent my childhood on trains. And when I wasn’t on one, I was running to catch one or if I missed it, waiting for the next one on the platform.

Every parent has some story they repeat and repeat, passing it onto their offspring. That’s how those tales of suffering get handed down like certain unwanted family heirlooms: “I had to walk to school in the snow.” “I had to walk up hill in the snow both ways.” “I had to walk in the snow both ways with no shoes.” Mine is: “I had to ride the train to school every day for forty-seven minutes. And that was just one way!” And like any other parent, I’m always subject to the indifferent attitudes my children display when my story is told.

When the Amtrak thundered over the track that day in 1996, I no longer rode the train to school. I was a grown woman of 35 with three of my own children. My middle child, Daniel, aged three, was by my side as we watched the silver cars streaked with red, white, and blue. One after another, after another, racing along, going somewhere. We stood, silent, as one does during the singing of the national anthem or during a prayer. The track was just beyond the slide and swings and the shade of the massive oak tree where we’d had a picnic lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because those are the easiest for moms to make.

The sound of a train has always tugged at the wild hope chord of my heart. A train symbolizes a way toward a happy destination, but more—the actual journey, looking out the window, passing places you’ve never set foot in, capturing vistas that are quaint, majestic, or even spiritual.

Daniel seemed to understand my need for reverence, he paused from playing with Caleb and tickling his baby brother Ben to be captivated with me.

But once the train was out of sight, he left me for the slide. He climbed up the ladder and at the fourth rung, stopped. “Where is the train going?” he asked.

“To the next station.”

But my reply didn’t seem enough for my son. “Where is the next station?”

I know that Moms are supposed to have all the answers, it comes in a kit they hand you at the hospital after delivery, soon after the umbilical cord is cut. Since the park was just miles from the state capital, I offered a guess and said, “Raleigh.”

“The train’s going to Raleigh?”

Why not? “Yeah.”

“Where’s Raleigh?” Daniel asked.

“Oh, about two miles from here.”

Satisfied with my answer, Daniel continued his climb to the top of the slide. From there he lifted a hand from the railing to wave at me. Just as my motherly instincts kicked in, and with them, the familiar phrase that all moms are taught to say, “Be careful!” Daniel said, “Bye, Mommy! I’m going to Raleigh.” And down he slid, his blond hair flying with the speed of an oncoming train. At the base of the slide sat his friend Caleb, whom Daniel managed to only nick with his shoe. “Sorry, Paleb,” Daniel apologized.

Caleb, unalarmed, continued drawing in the sand with two sticks, one in each hand, swirling them around as though stirring a pot of stew.

It was April, a warm and sunny Southern day. Baby Benny played in his stroller, his chubby hands wrapped around a stuffed blue dog, one that Daniel let him borrow. We often came to the IBM Park on clear days because kids and the outdoors are a freeing combination and moms should get away from houses that need cleaning. Everyone is entitled to some kind of liberation. On days when I babysat Caleb so that his mother, Susan, could work on her music duties at our church, he came with us. Susan packed him lunches in brown paper bags—chocolate pudding cups with peel-away lids, fat ham sandwiches, fruit gummies, and homemade cookies.

“You want that? How about this? Paleb, are you gonna eat this?” Daniel would sort through Caleb’s bag, pulling each item out, shaking it in front of his friend’s face, and asking. That which his friend did not want, Daniel, happily indulged.

They tell you in the Mom’s Kit that your children will always prefer the lunch of another child. Something to do with the grass being greener on the other side of the fence, which boils down to other moms are cooler because they know what kids really like. Sometimes, when I encouraged him, Caleb ate his ham sandwiches. Daniel eyed those sandwiches and every bite Caleb took as he solemnly chewed his own peanut butter and jelly. I eyed those sandwiches, too. Mother and son wishing we had a mom like Susan to make us lunch.

About three weeks later, when a train whistle sounded and a freight train clamored past us in the park—oil cars, refrigerated cars, a car with graffiti—Daniel waited until the caboose was only a dot on the landscape. Then, turning to me where I sat on the grass with Benny who was getting sand in between his bare toes, Daniel said, “The train’s going to Raleigh.”

I smiled. “Oh, is it?”

“Yes. Raleigh is the next station.”

Years later—eighteen to be exact—I was seated in my grandma Stubbs’ mauve recliner, one I had inherited after her death. I looked through old photographs, color prints that mark time. It was a parade of matte and glossy visits—Easters with baskets bigger than my children, the Christmas we got the puppy, birthday cakes decorated with thick butter cream icing, our first night in the new house on Monticello—all made their appearances, chronicling the passage of the years. Rachel, Ben and Liz had all walked in and out and back in the new house many times again and again, even the puppy that grew into a senile beagle, made her way through and out the doggie door. But there would be one person who would never walk through the laundry room door inside or out. No one would ever see his smile or hear his laughter. He was gone, and yet he was everywhere. He was in every story we remembered and told.

The afternoon in my living room of remembering gave into the evening. Through the winter stillness, a train whistle sang—low, mellow, permeating the air. I didn’t stand, but my whole being was attentive until the song turned into only a murmur, as I envisioned its journey down the familiar tracks, tracks I could not see, but knew too well.

“Where is it going?”

Oh, Daniel, you know.

“The train’s going to Raleigh.”

And back again. And even beyond. There is so much to be discovered.

The story was already there, I just had to find the best way to make it come to life.

Grief as a Gift

It's been 9 years since I wrote the following for the Open to Hope website. Seems so long ago, and yet, just like yesterday.  I hope this piece will speak to those of you who are dealing with new grief.

Opening Grief as a Gift

Written by Alice Wisler on Sunday, March 8, 2009

By Alice J. Wisler —

Some view grief as a dirty word.

It’s associated with pain, hardship, suffering, endless days of crying and never seeing the sun. It’s hard – tough on the body, spirit and mind. No one wants to have to go through grief. All hope to avoid it.

The Oxford Dictionary defines “grief” as the media does – intense mourning. I know that’s true because when Daniel first died, the agonizing pain was intense. To walk into a store was painful. Seeing my surviving children and knowing that from now on Daniel would not be with us on earth again crushed every nerve.

But the dictionary, like the media, fails to take the meaning of this word a step further. Grief is defined as though it is a process with an ending. This leads our society to believe that one day, you lose your grief, as you have lost your child. As the years have gone on, I am under the impression that my grief, and that of fellow bereaved parents, will hold no ending. As long as we live on this earth without our children, we will miss them, love them, mourn for what might have been and therefore, grieve.

Granted, grief may not be as intense. For this, we are grateful. If the rest of our lives would entail the fierceness of fresh grief, how could we ever breathe normally again or function as civilized members of society? No one can live on a wild out-of-control roller coaster of emotions for all of life.

Nan Tanner, editor of Inspired to Journal, writes: “I am functioning on my guts right now. Whatever I feel like doing, I do it. I’m in a no-nonsense frame of mind, and I like it. It’s empowering, and I can feel it’s a direct result of loss and grief.”

Tanner, who has suffered the loss of her father, put it quite well. I know that feeling of boldness that new grief can give you. Nan says she feels like steel.

It is amazing to me that while we are crushed by grief, we are also empowered by how it can make us determined to stand up more for what we believe in, not take any slack from anyone and be in that no-nonsense frame of mind.

Is this a gift? Could it be that grief, with its endless component, is really a gift to be opened and dealt with, and used for our benefit?

Recently, just before Daniel’s would-be-tenth-birthday, a college friend who knows that since Daniel’s death I have collected watermelon objects, sent a box filled with dishes and other items – all with the red, green and white motif. Being able to cry when I opened my watermelon package was a gift. Writing a poem later that week in memory of Daniel and using the watermelon theme, was an added bonus. Sending the poem to friends and other bereaved parents was a tribute to Daniel. Praise for the poem and remembrances of Daniel were given to me.

People establish funds, scholarships, start newsletters, write books and plant trees – all in honor of some loved one who has died. Mourners put their grief to work in order to honor and carry on the love they hold for the one they can no longer embrace. Grief is not always in the obvious and expected form of tears. Some might think that a person no longer with tears is no longer in grief. Many tears do not reach the eyes but are forever present in the heart.

So what is grief? It is a mixture, a hodge-podge, a collection of emotions that range from one end of the scale of human feelings to the other end. Grief causes us to act and react.

As I listen to the crickets and bullfrogs near Daniel’s memorial tree, I pen some of my thoughts on what grief has been for me:

Grief is laughing with your children and wishing for the absent one to make the circle complete.

Grief is crying in your car at stoplights.

Some days grief makes you brutally honest; other days, grief muzzles you.

Grief reconstructs your heart.

Grief is sadness, hope, smiles and tears – rolled tightly like a snowball.

Grief makes you search past the stars and the moon for Heaven.

Grief strips you of everything you were pretending to be.

Grief gives you new priorities.

Grief opens hidden treasures from deep within your soul.

Grief allows you to empathize more deeply with others who ache.

Grief makes you unapologetically bold.

Grief is a daily companion, best dealt with by admitting you do walk with it, even after all these years.

Grief is the price of love; grief is a gift.

Allow yourself time to listen to the sounds of the night and write what grief is to you.

~ Alice J. Wisler, Daniel's Mom.

Fellow Grievers, be that advocate!

When an appendage is removed from a person, a lot of adjusting has to take place.  After the surgery and sutures heal, sometimes physical therapy is needed.  The patient has to learn to adapt without a finger or arm or leg.  Eventually, a new lifestyle is mastered.

As parents with children removed from us through death, we have to learn a new lifestyle, too. We adapt.  We adjust. We cope.  But some days we cry and wonder why the world seems to want to shut us out.

There is no way that a parent who has not lost a child to death will ever understand the pain, the agony of absence, and the multitude of emotions that are attached to living without a son or daughter. It's just impossible.  I've never lost a limb (in the real physical sense) and I would never pretend to understand my friend Stella, who lost both legs when she was hit by a car.

Yet other parents feel the need to act like they get our pain.  They sit with their healthy children surrounding them and tell us not to be so sad.  "It'll get better."  "You'll be okay."   "He's in a better place."

You want to fight back and tell these parents that they don't get it.  But instead of trying to get them to understand your grief, there are more dynamic ways you can choose to spend your time.  Educate.  Be an adcocate.  Teach others in a way that they might be able to comprehend.  Share with them how they can help you to make the world a better place.

Did your child die from an overdose?  What leads to a life where one might die in this manner? What misconceptions do people have about teens and drug usage? Become an advocate for better awareness in this arena.

My son Daniel died from cancer treatments at age four.  September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, a month when I reach out via social media to let others know that kids can get malignant tumors.  Kids can be born with cancer from no fault of their own or from their parents'. And yes, little children do die from cancer.  Parents are empathetic in helping me get the word out because they realize that cancer shows no mercy to age, color of skin, or socio-economic ranks.  If they are realistic, they know that any child can get cancer, just as any child is capable of dying from any disease or sudden accident.

I''ve written articles for magazines and newspapers about what striving for a cure means to me as a mom whose three-year-old was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, and what it means to thousands of parents across the country. I wear the gold ribbon as a visual to show my desire to fight for better clinical trials and for a cure for childhood cancer. And I think of  my sweet bald-headed Daniel who called himself a Brave Cookie.

Find your place of passion and let others know about it.   Use your energy, be fueled by it, even if it stems initially from angst at others' ignorance.  Be that advocate in your child's memory! Let your lifestyle be one that encompasses the need for change.

Why Spring Can Make You Sad

Spring. Buds, blooms, color. Thick coats of yellow stuff. Pollen. It's invaded, giving me a headache right between my eyes. Tears come at unexpected intervals.

But I love the flowers and warm weather, so it has to be more than allergies that make me sad this spring. Spring comes in full force in North Carolina. It starts with daffodils at the end of February, and by April, central North Carolina is a decorated beauty queen.

Yet sometimes that can be too much color at once. It's not just color, it's other things. Oh, it's always other things when it comes to the death of a child.

It's Easter----that special holy day that sometimes falls at the end of April instead of in March (March is when nature is just easing away from winter and not as colorful). But when Easter falls on April 20th as it did this year, well, that's almost too much to take in.





The dogwood and azaleas show off their gorgeous flowers and my mind sails back to memories of laughter, eggs, and a three-year-old boy with a mouth covered in chocolate and hands equally as stained. It's Easter 1996. Who knew it would be his last Easter egg hunt, his last Easter to ask about angels pushing away the stone at Jesus' tomb?

Grief is part of my life now. Grief became a resident when Daniel took his last little breath. I hate it when people think you can get over it. Grief follows me everywhere now, although not as obvious as it once was. Sometimes it wears a camouflage cloak or hides in the shadows. I think it's been tamed, like a domesticated kitten. But when spring is at its finest and the smell of wisteria is in the air, grief lurks like a wild animal. It claws at my heart strings. It makes me have to go out and buy another box of tissues.

We didn't know he had cancer during our festivities that Easter of '96. It was a month later when the swelling in the left side of his neck would have a name other than, "Maybe allergies."

We were naive and innocent back then. We didn't have a clue that spring could be just as harsh on the heart as winter.

Now I know that spring, in spite of all her stylish beauty, can fill a mind with ugly reminders of a cancer diagnosis. How I wish that cancer had not knocked on our door that spring.

I like to remember Daniel at age four as an energetic kid. I like to look at photos of him with hair and smiles. But the truth is, cancer stole all that at the end. Daniel was a bloated child, unconscious, comatose, and covered in bed sores when I held him last.

Some memories I have to swing at, push them away.

Some memories are more sad than sad.

This Easter I cried. I sat in church as the choir sang and something happened. For the first time since Daniel's death, I felt comforted by those words people are always trying to comfort you with: "You'll see him again in Heaven." All of the times before when people had tried to comfort me with, "You'll see him again," I struggled because I wanted him here with me now. I also believed that my life with him as my little son had ended; there would be no more of me being his mother, watching him grow, teaching him how to read or how to ride a bike. Did people not realize that? Were people too ignorant to grasp that family reunions where families will recreate the life from earth in the heavenly places isn't going to be?

But there in that pew, I thought, it won't be a repeat of earth, but at least I will see him. And Daniel and I will be two people among billions of others, all free from pain and tears, all in new bodies.

So I sat in the pew trying not to let the tears soak my dress, thinking about meeting Daniel as an older person, as an equal. In Heaven. And the choir sang that Jesus is risen.

It's a mixed up life we bereaved parents live. It's joy at having had our child, but it's a big ball of sorrow right in the gut at losing him. Joy and sorrow. And grief. You have to know that grief is not a bad thing. It is an inevitable resident after the death of a child. And being sad at spring doesn't mean you can't enjoy an iris blooming in your garden. It just makes you more in tune with how life works and how love is.

And sometimes you have to take a break from all the color.

~ Alice J. Wisler 2014 ~ For more about living through grief and loss and love, read Getting Out of Bed in the Morning: Reflections of Comfort in Heartache..

Grief at Christmas: Finding that Simple Quiet

Hang on, it’s begun. I heard my first Christmas carol on the radio two weeks before Thanksgiving and neighbors, as well as store owners, must have heard it, too. Lights and tinsel are popping up everywhere. The holidays. Watch out. I recall being in Burma (back when we called it Burma) and the simple Christmas Eve with communion. There was a loaf of bread and a chipped glass of wine inside a modest church, no blaring music about Santa, not a spruced-up fir in sight.

“What’s wrong with her?” others whisper as they joyfully join in the carols and stand in line at Target to purchase ornaments for the tree. “It’s a season to celebrate, to sing, to eat, to decorate the house, and to be happy with your family. Get with it!”

That’s the problem. Many can’t. Many Americans are unable to embrace good cheer and lift their glasses to festivities with family and friends. The holidays, for many, are a sobering time, a time of sorrow, of joy-less-ness, of memories of what used to be and what is not now.

It’s not that we don’t want to celebrate, it’s that our naivety has vanished; our eyes have been opened. For me it came when my four-year-old son was presented with an abundance of gifts at the hospital. Generous givers entered his room and the rooms of other sick little boys and girls on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. They handed out toys. If only, I thought as my weak child opened each gift, one of these gifts was health.

Daniel died six weeks later. The next Christmas I had no desire to get excited about much of anything. The memory of his thin body injected with medicine, seated on the sterile bed opening gifts was just too painful.

I had to buy gifts though; I had three children who had each given me lists. One afternoon, I reluctantly wandered into a store and was drawn to a small porcelain manager scene, a broken one. Someone had glued it; the line of glue was right above the donkey’s ear. Feeling it was symbolic of my new life, I bought it. I would start a new tradition. This broken and repaired scene with Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the donkey would be my new decoration in memory of my son.

Years later, I was able to find a morsel of hope in a few Christmas hymns as I realized that the season was, of course, not about lights or parties at all. Those had the potential to steal from the season, making one feel that if her calendar wasn’t filled with party invites, she was unable or unworthy to enjoy the meaning of Christmas.

I held my decoration and rubbed my finger over the thin broken line. As I did, I felt the brokenness from my own heart. A baby born in a manager came into the world to heal that crevice, and offer peace, love, salvation, and hope. Why did our society let all the noise of commercialism get in the way of that simple, and yet very profound message?

“I am sometimes asked how I get through the holidays now,” a parent whose son died wrote to me. “Do I ever feel the Christmas Spirit these days? And after ten long years, I can finally say that the Christmas Spirit somehow always finds me. It might only l last a little while, but it’s there.”

May our grief open our eyes and hearts to reflect on that first manager scene when hope was born. May we find time to ponder, to listen, and to rest in the quiet. As we continue to miss loved ones, may we pray for strength to reach out to those around us who have lost hope so that they can experience even a little while of the Christmas Spirit.




~*~*~*
Alice J. Wisler lives in Durham. Her new book on grief and loss is Getting Out of Bed in the Morning (Leafwood Publishers). Read more at her blog: http://www.alicewisler.blogspot.com/

Here we are again . . .

Summer is winding down and everyone is busy with school starting. Walmart's aisles are filled with overwhelmed parents and active children as pens, notebooks, and markers are tossed into shopping carts.

I wish I had a seventeen-year-old, wanting an over-priced binder and new clothes to wear to school. I wish that I had one more kid to send off in the mornings. One more child to ask each afternoon, "What happened at school today ?" so that I could hear him say, "Nothing."

Daniel would be seventeen tomorrow, starting his senior year of high school.

Instead of wishing him a good day, I will visit the grave and brush the twigs off of his headstone. Instead of buying him an iPod or a new cell phone, I'll purchase colorful helium balloons to send off into the blue sky.

On the attached note, I'll write as I have every year, Miss you, Daniel. So happy that you came into my life. I love you always. ~Mommy.

I wish I had a seventeen-year-old to sing Happy Birthday to.

Instead, it will be another birthday without him.

Seems after thirteen years of watching balloons lift into the summer air, I would be calloused and used to this. But every birthday, it breaks another piece of my heart.