Chapter 10 - The Land of the Living

Chapter 10

When you have a dead child one of the toughest questions to answer is, “How many children do you have?” At first it never occurred to me to not answer honestly, that I had three, one was gone and two are left. Answering that way left me way too vulnerable. Of course they wanted to know what happened, in fact most people wanted all the gory details - was I obligated to tell them? No, I finally realized. If I didn’t want to share the most personal and gut wrenching experience I had ever had with them, I didn’t have to. I answered two after that, I have two children. I got really good and automatic with that answer. If I was telling someone I completely trusted and I wanted them to know then I told them. At first it felt like a lie and a denial of Thomas but then I realized I had to protect myself, I was fragile for many years after he died. For many years after Thomas died I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic – how many children did I have? Two boys? A boy and a girl? Who's alive? Whose's not.

When I finally opened up to other people about Thomas’s death I was shocked to find that almost everyone has lost someone close to them. Intellectually this makes sense but not many people had shared their story with me until I started sharing mine. Sort of like people often smile back, if you smile first. In fact the amount of tragic stories I have heard since then is staggering. It is not the stories that have become remarkable, it is the people who tell them, who live with them, who suffered them. Each time I hear another horror story I think, I could not survive that. I have two really special friends and they each have had a child murdered. Murdered. I can’t think of anything more horrific. No matter how bad my story was there was always someone's whose was worse.

Lana, one of my oldest and best friends in Port Townsend was telling me about some new people she had met. They were friends of friends and had just moved up from San Francisco and her name was Deborah too. I meet Deborah at one of Lana’s fabulous dinner parties and liked her and her partner George. Sometime later Lana tells me that Deborah had a daughter that had been murdered. Whoa. That was beyond what I could comprehend. A sickness, an accidental death, but a death on purpose, oh how unthinkable, how really tragic.

I saw Deborah again and I knew Lana had told her about Thomas and our car accident, just like Lana had told me about her, but she and I never talked about it. The next time we were at Lana’s for dinner, we ended up in the kitchen alone and she starting telling me what happened. It just poured out of her. I don’t want to recount for you this tragic story, I wish I had never heard it myself but someone must help her carry the great weight of her grief. Her daughter was 8 when she died, and she had no more children. She said that for the first few years she was a mess. She said she could not function and had no life. Somewhere about 5 years later she said that her daughter came to her. She is not a woo woo kind of person. She said that her daughter was standing before her as big as life, full color, she was still 8 years old and she said, “Get it together mom! You are embarrassing me!” Wow. I can so totally hear one of the kids saying that. She said that after that day she began to heal, to walk the long road back to the living.

Cameron my son and Thomas’s little brother has had his own devils since he was in the accident with us. He was only two years old when the car he was in went off the cliff and he never saw his brother again and his mother started acting weird. A child physiologist at the time explained to me that Cameron was so young that he did not have the inner psychological structures to deal with an event of this kind. He did not have inner dialog that could begin to incorporate this. I didn’t realize the depth of what he was saying, I was in deep shock and grief myself. Poor Cam, when I finally came out of myself a little it was to take care of Beth, instead of a cool older brother he had a useless, pretty much, baby sister. He was a sweetheart though. The photos of him during that time show a beaming smile, always full of love.

Cameron was a cool kid. He was always taking things apart and putting them back together. Legos was his favorite medium for a while. He made the most amazing things with legos, even when he was little. Cars, planes, space ships were among the first creations. Once when he was about 8 the toaster oven didn’t work one morning. The next thing I know he had it taken apart, he saw what was wrong and he fixed it. Cameron was fun, we rode bikes, took hikes went on vacations where his adventurous spirit was contagious.

I tried to shelter and protect him but he told me in no uncertain terms when he was 5 that he would rather be dead like Thomas then to not really live. His idea of really living then was fast bikes and skateboards. I use to comfort myself with the idea that I had lost one son, what were the odds of losing another. The other day I was up at the pioneer cemetery and I saw a gravestone surrounded by a fancy old fashioned iron fence. I was drawn to read, Julius Weaver, 7, Scott Weaver 5, sue weaver 9 month all with the same death date and one word: drowning. What were the odds.

When Cam was 17 he headed down to California to spend some time with his dad. I knew he wasn’t coming back to finish high school or live with us again. I wanted to do something supportive and healing for him before he left. A woman I knew introduced me to a physic friend of hers who used a technique she called “Rapid Eye Technique”. This was something that was developed for autistic children. A pin pong ball was suspended on a string and swung back and forth in front of the child who was asked to follow the ball with their eyes. As with hypnotism, the conscious mind follows the ball and leaves the unconscious mind unattended and able to come forward. Evelyn did not use a ball, she waved a rod rapidly back and forth in front of the subject. I had a free session and found it very helpful so I made an appointment for Cameron. He was very interested, as he is very intelligent and curious. I went and observed his session. Evelyn talked with Cam for a while, small talk, then she explain the process and that he was to watch the wand. It was quiet for awhile. She asked Cam to go back to the accident, what had happened? I was so shocked at what he described. He said he and Thomas were going down a long tunnel together. At the end was white light and lots of friends and then Thomas got to go on and he didn’t, he had to go back and he was mad. He is still mad. There were other things he said but nothing sticks in my mind as to how close I was to losing both of them. Evelyn gave Cam a tape of music that was special for him and we said good-bye. I don’t know if it was my imagination but Cameron seemed happier, lighter and sat a little straighter after that.

My daughter who it seems I would not have had if Thomas had not died, has also been impacted by the brother she never knew. It was obvious to her from the beginning that I was terribly saddened by the loss of her brother. She was fascinated about him. That was really good for me. She celebrated his birthday and his death day, not in a sad way but a profound simple kid way. She has always been very respectful of my grief.

It is odd how events have conspired to happen in a way that has promoted my healing. The most unusual was an independent film I was in. I got a call from Rick Schmidt the winter of 1991, he had heard that I had been in a small local independent film and he wondered if I would be willing to look at his script and consider acting in his next film, “American Orpheus”. I was delighted, the small film I had been in earlier was very fun and I was excited to be asked to be in another one. Rick was the real deal, he had been making low budget feature films for the past 17 years. He was a director of national and international fame and he had just moved to Port Townsend from San Francisco.

“American Orpheus”, started with the idea of exploring love and death in a modern version of the Orpheus legend. In the legend, Orpheus was a musician who descended into the netherworld to reclaim his wife. The legend is famous for the line “don’t look back”, for the Gods allowed Orpheus to walk out of the underworld and his wife would follow if he “didn’t look back”. The story goes that just as Orpheus walked into the outer world, he looked back to make sure that his beloved wife was still with him and because she was not totally in the outer world yet, she vanished forever. Rick’s turn on the story was to make Orpheus a single mom. He focused on the bond between the mother, Fay and her young daughter. At the beginning of the film the mother and her daughter move to a small coastal town to flee from the child’s father. "Fay"the mother is afraid that she will lose the child to the father. She is betrayed by her sister’s boyfriend, the husband tracks her down and the inattention of a babysitter leads to the death of the child. In this version there is a happy ending as the mother goes to the underworld and brings her daughter back.

How I fit in is that I was doing silk-screening in my garage at the time and Rick wanted me to be the mother’s employer in the film and shoot a few scenes in my shop while I was printing and teaching “Fay” about the business. He thought it would make an interesting scene with my six color wheel going around. Rick’s technique of using non-actors to play characters similar to themselves gives his work an element of realism and improvisation.

Before filming began Rick learned, I am not sure how, that I had a child that had died young. He asked if I would be willing to talk about that in the film. He would add a scene where “Fay” comes into the shop to talk with me after her daughter has died. I was very nervous about this but felt there were a few things I could say, things I had said to my friends over the years. The most poignant part for me was that the day we shot the new scene was on the 8th anniversary of Thomas’s death. Anyone who has worked on a film knows that by time you see the schedule, it is already wrong. Rick had scheduled several days to come over but he was behind. The day we shot way July 11, 1991. During the take I said to “Fay” that this was the anniversary of my son’s death. Later Rick asked me what had prompted me to say that. I told him that today really was the anniversary of the day he died. Rick was shocked and asked if I was ok, we can stop he said. I was ok. That line is not in the film but the power of that day is. I was very happy with the scene. After “Fay” and I talk, the camera follows me out to my yard where I am hanging out clothes in the sun. Beth my daughter was then seven years old, she is standing beside me holding her kitten. There is something so positive and uplifting about that last shot.

The film premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands. I wanted to go of course but there was no way I could. The United States premier was at the Seattle International Film Festival in the Neptune, a nice old theatre by the University. We were going; Beth and I each got a new dress for the opening. We took the ferry to Seattle and had a fancy dinner out. When we got to the theatre we were ushered to the front of the line and sat with the cast and crew, middle center. Wow seeing myself of the big screen was something, but seeing my little Beth holding her kitten in the sunshine in that theatre brought tears to my eyes and a quiet peace to my heart. The film went on to win a Gold award for best low budget feature at the Houston International Film Festival 1992. I got good reviews and if you Google me, I show up under “Film Actress”. Most important is the shared moment with my daughter we will both always remember. Remember the film honey? Ya ma, you asked me last year. She's 22 now and has more important things to do. That film was my story, it has taken me many years to see that. I lost my son to the under world but I have a son and daughter that followed me into the land of the living.