The Lonely Trail

Yesterday my good friend Thomas hiked The Lonely Trail, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, encountering virtually no one among the majestic redwoods. Perhaps the trail’s name both promises and procures its silence and solitude. “Lonely” is not normally a word that beckons.

I heard once that bereavement is an inherently lonely journey, which I dismissed at the time. I have plenty of company in my grief. My husband, eldest son and daughter also lost a son and brother. There are friends and family propping us up who are compassionate, understanding, and sacrificially good listeners. Many of them also miss Clay and plenty have also been devastated by the tragedy of his death. I can be profoundly sad sometimes, but lonely?

In fact, over the last two years I have experienced times of intense lonliness. Sometimes the most insignificant events can bring it about. I remember picking up the TV remote one evening just after Clay died to watch an episodes of “Community,” which had become our weeknight routine in Clay’s last school term. He liked Abed; I liked Troy. I was in shock, and maybe I thought that if I stuck to our routine, the nightmare would be over and Clay would come in, sit down and watch with me like normal. What did happen still looms larger in my mind than it merits, and I rather pathetically keep telling the story.

Much to our annoyance, the slim battery cover had been missing from the TV remote for two or three years. Clay and I would turn sofa cushions upside down now and again looking for it, but we’d written it off long before. That evening, as I handled the remote, my fingers felt the seamless back panel, and I instantly clocked that the cover had been found and replaced. I was stunned for a split second, and then something about Clay’s death hit me like a hand grenade. I would never, ever be able to share that small but significant domestic victory with Clay.

That remote control repair carried the reference to so many ordinary moments we’d spent on that sofa. What’s more, his brother Chas told me that on the night before he died, Clay lost something from his pocket when they were watching a movie and took the sofa apart looking for it. Now I realise that Clay himself had found that battery cover, replaced it, but would never have the chance to say “Hey Mom, guess what…”, or give me a high five, or describe where he’d found it. Unfinished business. It really is a stupid thing, one of so many stupid things I’ll have to let go of, alone, and leave behind. Because nobody wants to hear that dumb story again.

Loneliness in grief is not really about being physically alone in your sadness, although sometimes a death brings that, too. Every connection Clay had was individual and will be uniquely missed. No one else can make meaningful reference to a conversation, a music reference, or a car journey that only he and I shared, for example. It’s the same for his relationship with a grandmother, his girlfriend, a cousin, and so on. Theirs, too, is an inherently lonely grief journey. Many memories— big ones and small— will now have just the one, solitary witness.

Nor is it simply about the loss of banter, or the rehashing of “old times.” Innuendos, emotions, or even a facial expression may have been shared, fully known only by the Two. And now, just the One. With no other witness to recognise what was shared, we each walk the “Lonely Trail.”

For me the loneliness can be magnified by being in the company of others who can’t or won’t talk about Clay. It can sometimes be diminished by a vivid dream, or by doing what we once did together, or by writing things down. I think of words on a page as a witness, giving testimony about a mother and son. In the hours after posting the initial blog last weekend, I felt like a valve had been unplugged, letting a little air out of a near-bursting beach ball.

The California redwood forests do beckon the runner and adventurer in me, but not the Lonely Trail. I’m an extrovert and prefer to hike with others. Plus, I didn’t earn the Survival Skills Girl Scout badge, so it could be dangerous with nobody around. I will never therefore experience the awe of standing alone in the ethereal silence of a redwood forest, feeling Lilliputian. That isn’t just the usual awe of seeing a natural wonder. Aloneness seems essential to the awe.

Likewise, nobody would ever choose this path of losing a child. Hell, even to behold the suffering of a bereaved parent is a pretty tough choice. Yet there is something on the path of suffering available only to those who tread it. I don’t have the words for it, but I can sense it in other bereaved parents. Jerry Sittser, who lost his mother, wife, and daughter in a single car accident, says “Sorrow is noble and gracious. It enlarges the soul until the soul is capable of mourning and rejoicing simultaneously, of feeling the world’s pain and hoping for the world’s healing at the same time” (Zondervan: A Grace Disguised, p. 74). While I wasn’t actually looking to enlarge my soul, and while living with soul-enlarging sorrow is actually a lot of work, I will hang on to that hope for now.