Tears For Mother’s Day Holiday Difficult For Parents Who’ve Lost Children
Like Hallmark commercials and orders to florists, telephone calls this time of year concern Mother’s Day. But often all Louise Zaagsma hears when she answers is crying.
“Did you have a child who passed away?” she says after a moment. “What was her name?”
“The biggest thing you can do is sit and listen,” says the volunteer with the Spokane chapter of the Compassionate Friends. So listen she does, even at 3 a.m.
Like the arrival of spring, “buzz days” come around each year for bereaved parents: the anniversary of the death, birthdays, graduation, Father’s Day - and Mother’s Day.
Calls to the Compassionate Friends, a support group for bereaved parents, siblings and grandparents, increase as the holiday nears. Anxiety over the day may be worse than the day itself, driving people to feel grief even if the child was 50 or died decades ago.
Buy flowers in memory of your child, Zaagsma suggests to one caller gently. Write your child a letter. Plan ahead.
“Do what you have to do for yourself.”
What Zaagsma does is this: skips church. She is a church-going woman, but Mother’s Day services are too painful. She gets up early and lights a purple candle amid flowers and photos of two of her three children.
Her son Christopher died of sleep apnea at Gonzaga University at age 18 and daughter, Carrie, 14, was diagnosed with a brain tumor a month later. Sunday, Mother’s Day, marks the 10th anniversary of Carrie’s death.
“After Carrie died, I didn’t have a purpose, a reason to be.”
Her second marriage was ending and her surviving son, Chuck, had just graduated high school and joined the military. Zaagsma withdrew into her grief. Her own difficult childhood and troubled marriages compounded her losses.
She began drinking heavily, took pills and tried to cut her wrists. One day she found herself on the frozen surface of a nearby lake, jumping up and down, hoping the ice would break.
Severely depressed, she was committed to Eastern State Hospital, then spent four years in an adult family home before she was well enough to live on her own.
Now 55, she lives and works in a mobile home in the Spokane Valley. The phone rings at all hours, but she’s never crabby. Part of that stems from her belief that she is doing what God wants her to do, much of it is just her nature.
“I have purpose again, I have a reason for being.”
She works from a living room with no living room furniture. Instead a giant sewing table, a loom, knitting machine, sewing machine, ironing board and cloth fill the space. Bits and strips of cloth, blocks of gingham and cotton, print and plaid, are stacked neatly, layer on layer, on shelves from ceiling to the floor.
It is donated fabric that Zaagsma sews into hundreds of quilts. She makes eight to 10 baby quilts a month for the Crisis Pregnancy Center and the Spokane Police Department Chaplain to carry to calls involving children. She also makes quilts and mittens for her church, Opportunity Free Methodist.
She prays over the intricate pieces, “That each mother who unfolds it and baby it enfolds will know that someone cares.”
Once a month, she leads meetings of The Compassionate Friends. With no dues and no membership fee, the friends meet in a room loaned by Washington Trust Bank in the Spokane Valley, N. 100 Pines. The group is currently trying to find another meeting space that is free and handicapped accessible.
She handles telephone contacts herself. The number of calls ebbs and flows with the seasons, cresting in August as bereaved parents face “back to school” sales and school buses. (“If you want to buy school clothes or supplies, buy them and donate them to the neighborhood center.”)
Christmas is another difficult time. (“We recommend catalogue shopping or starting new traditions, one family hangs the lost child’s stocking and fills it with written remembrances.”)
She warns people of the crises they never see coming, such as heavy snowfalls. After her children died, she couldn’t find the flat headstones at the cemetery for the drifts.
“I was screaming, frantic, what kind of mother am I, I can’t even find my kids?”
She advises friends to never tell a grieving parent, “I understand exactly how you feel,” or say, “Call us if you need help.”
“They don’t know how to ask for help,” she says. “Just bring the food, and put in it the freezer. Come get the laundry.”
Mostly she tells people not to forget. She’ll spend today with her grandson, Joshua, and her surviving son. Sunday, she’ll get up early to face the grief alone.
You want people to remember your child,” she says. “You want to know people are remembering them at graduation or prom night.”
She glances away.
“Nobody calls. People are afraid they’re going to make you feel bad, but it would give so much joy.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (1 Color)