A few months ago, my wife was diagnosed with a deadly cancer that will kill her sooner or (a bit) later and is causing a lot of pain along the way. I’m not only married; I have school-aged children, too. While I keep one eye on my wife I keep another on my children. They’ve got open eyes, and they’re not blind. How they react to the news of their mother’s mortality isn’t as simple as a “boo-hoo” and is not resolved with a Hallmark cliche or the cloying “God loves you.” I can’t summarize the emotional journey my kids are making in a word or a sentence or paragraph or page. They’re thinking and feeling so much, and most of it is not in a literal or direct way about their mother. I don’t know what happens next as they wade through grief, and I’ve been told no one knows because it’s different for every soul. So how do I prepare them? How do I strengthen them? How do I protect them?
I’m beginning to figure out that I can’t protect my children. They are inevitably going to be hurt in staggering ways, and they will have to find their legs and stagger on to somewhere and something else. It won’t be easy. It will be slow. All I can do is love them, not fix it. All they can do is survive, not be fixed.
In the midst of all this, I am so glad that a friend of my 10 year old daughter gave her the book Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur. I’m so glad my daughter asked me to read it to her at bedtime. Aubrey, the main character of the book, is 11 years old when her father and sister are killed in a car accident. Aubrey’s mother, depressed and delusional with guilt, abandons Aubrey, who must live with her grandmother and figure out what to do next. This quandary is not philosophical or religious or otherwise grand in scope for Aubrey as the book unfolds. Aubrey’s choices are as simple yet as difficult as “how do I breathe now?” or “will I stay in bed?” or “will I eat today” or, later, what do I say to people, to adults, to other children?
Aubrey’s outward slog is alternated with an inner monologue in which she writes letters to her dead father, her dead sister, her absent mother, and even her sister’s imaginary friends. Aubrey learns to find and write the truth — you are gone, you are dead, you will not grow up like I will, you chose to leave me — at the same time she faces the harsh reality that there may be no miraculous third act. Her mother will not be who she was. She will not get a replacement wonder daddy. She will have to be old before her time and move on with broken parts.
This book is not an after school special with a message and a happy ending. It’s alternately ambiguous and direct, accepting and naming pains that don’t tie up neatly with a pretty bow. For my daughter, that’s good, because nothing she is facing in her life now ties up with a pretty bow, either. Love, Aubrey doesn’t promise her what she can’t have. It gives her and every grieving child of her tender age a more real and important gift: the knowledge that in all this, she is not the only one.
