As with all posts on this blogs, materiel changes in the descriptions of clients have been made to insure confidentiality.
It happened somewhat suddenly. She's a 10 year old child with high functioning autism who has been coping pretty well with her parents' divorce last year. We were discussing, again, the death of a grandparent a couple of years ago - a topic she often revisits, her child's view of heaven where grandma is, where grandma will greet her when it's her time to go to heaven. The topic of prayer came up and she casually mentioned her prayers for a child she knew from her school who had been injured in a freak accident and was in the hospital.
Mom mouthed to me that the peer had actually died that morning while her daughter's head was turned in my direction clearly hoping to avoid the discussion right now when suddenly, innocently, she turned to her mother and asked if her friend would live. Mom was caught a bit by surprise, just as the accident and death of the classmate had caught her by surprise. She gathered herself strongly, softly, and told her daughter that her friend had, actually, died that morning.
The pain was honest. Immediate. She cried out after double checking what mom had said the way we do when we're preparing to absorb something for which we are unprepared, and then buried her head in her mom's lap, crying and talking at the same time about how sad it was. She then came to me, her arms spread open looking for the physical validation of life a hug provides and cried on my shoulder before returning to the comfort of her mom's arms.
Mom went on to note with sadness about another child who had died in another freak accident a couple of years before. Coincidentally I had known of that tragedy via another client who had known that child. It all came back to me; the description of the circumstances of the child's death, the mother's attempts to cope, my client's struggle to absorb the reality that mortality brings to the forefront in the face of a tragedy. A surprising and sudden turn of events that moved us so deeply.
And all three of us were suddenly tearful together. My 10 year old client, openly crying at having to learn the lesson of death again. Her mom, having had to tell her what no parent wants to tell a child - the inherent message that challenges the assumed safety we expect from life. Me, adjusting to the rapid sequence of events that afternoon; the tragic death of my client's friend and my concern as to how this sweet little girl would cope with the complexities she suddenly faced; the coincidental review of the another child's death with the immediate recall of the pain that loss brought to another client.
It was not quite bittersweet - there is nothing much sweet about death. Yet as I consider the meeting now, there was such love in mom's eyes for her daughter, and the daughter's seeking comfort from her mom as she struggled to comprehend the frailty of existence. My fullness of emotion at the depth of connection this child with autism has to her friends and family. Maybe, as I think of it, there was an unlikely and unexpected kind of sweet to the moment.
