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Points of Exit (continued from preceding page)
check on them in the night. I could drive myself crazy with this kind of wondering. Fortunately, I’d learned by then enough self-compassion to see that I could not carry the weight of all those “what ifs.” Besides, none of them could change this hated outcome.
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What came next surprised me. In one of the first ses- sions I had with the trauma therapist I saw after Benjamin’s death, she asked what my spiritual tradi- tion says about what happens to us after death, then shared the beliefs of a different tradition she knew. She explained the idea that each of us has many pos- sible exit points from this life, with different factors determining when we leave, including what we’ve come here to accomplish or learn, and perhaps some personal choice. Exit point options are set before birth, and a person might leave at his final exit point, or leave earlier for some reason, such as avoiding
a more painful death later on. This made me think about the whole idea of possible exit points in my life, and in Benjamin’s.
I thought about the time I’d been so sick with measles in childhood, the risks I’d taken by hitch-hiking in college, the motorcycle accident I’d survived because I wore
a helmet. I recalled crashing my friend’s Volvo station wagon on a dark highway in rural Virginia as we drove home from college for winter break, the car landing upside down in the median, no one hurt because the Volvo’s roof didn’t collapse as an American car’s roof surely would have. I remembered the close call of my second son’s birth, when my uterus ruptured and we both could have died. What had kept me here each time? What did this mean about Benjamin’s early death?
I didn’t believe that he would have chosen to leave us so soon, but maybe age 23 was his last possible exit point. Or maybe it was easier for some reason than a later one. I wondered whether the Natick Mall inci- dent had been an earlier exit point for my son. What other exits had he bypassed? None that I knew of, but then with all those years of adolescent risk taking, parents kept in the dark, maybe there were some I didn’t know about.
The surprising thing was that this kind of wondering comforted me. I didn’t embrace the idea as a new world view, but it became one of many possibilities
to consider. One more of the legions of questions I’d never had to examine up close until my son died. Like considering whether to consult a psychic so I could say to Benjamin all the things I would have said if we’d had a chance to say goodbye. Like considering the ghost stories people shared with me: my best friend explain-
ing that she could see Benjamin standing behind my chair during our lunch at the Good Earth, looking
very worried about me, or a relative telling me that Benjamin spoke to him as he drove past the cemetery, imploring him, “I’m okay, please tell my mom that I’m okay.” Like greeting Benjamin as I passed by his empty room, feeling silly at first, then later sitting in his chair every day, telling him how much I loved him. Like standing out under the stars on frigid February nights, speaking to him from my heart.
I considered what Judaism says about the existence of an afterlife, read ideas about death from the Kab- balah, researched reincarnation and near-death ex- periences. I mulled over Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings, where he asserts that there is no death, for anyone. Considering it all.
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Parents who have lost a child, especially the newly bereaved, find ourselves in constant search mode. Frozen in hypervigilance, we ask ourselves, Where
is he? I need to find him. If he can’t be here with us, I need to know where he is. Wired into us as parents, this searching is part of our biology. When we met with our rabbi after shiva ended, the first question
I asked him was this: where is Benjamin? Of course he didn’t have an answer for me. He offered different Jewish points of view, even showed me, with some dismissiveness, a book written by a fellow rabbi about reincarnation. He spoke of his own experi- ences of accompanying the dying, his sense that
after some essence of the person, the neshama, left the body, the body was “no longer them.” He told me about seeing his late grandmother alive in his young son. But he offered no place, no GPS coordinates that might pinpoint my son’s location in the universe. I hadn’t really expected any, but I had to ask, and a part of me had hoped.
Maybe all this philosophical considering was my ef- fort to regain some sense of control, the very human need to make sense of something as incomprehen- sible as the sudden death of a 23-year-old. Or maybe it was in the spirit of “continuing bonds theory,” the idea among grief researchers that the bereaved must create a new kind of ongoing relationship with the deceased in order to recover from a loss. Because Benjamin and
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