New road map needed after death of child

Dec. 2, 2002


I don't hate Scottsdale. I should, but I don't. I hate the roads, and I hate the speed. But I love the place I call home. Someone took my road map last year on April 6, coincidentally the day my daughter Erica died in a car accident on Pima Road. This was also the day that my compass, both moral and philosophical, was no longer useful to her and one that I am working to make applicable to my new existence without her.

In any journey in life, we use our children to define and chart our own course, looking at jobs, college, dating, marriage, children, sickness, health, tragedy and triumph as things to look forward to, things to dread, things to ponder, all part of the life cycle, as we have come to call it. Immediately after Erica's death, I started to deal not only with my own loss but to figure out how my relationship with my wife, Hope, would grow, stall, expand or implode, reading a statistic that 80 percent of marriages fail within five years after the death of a child.

Marriages following any tragedy are put under a tremendous amount of pressure, and it takes two very unique individuals to find their way, determine their purpose and execute the course of action for the remainder of their days. What I discovered was with such life events removed, it's important to make your own "markers" to replace the ones that were taken.

You and your partner become the new cartographers, the new Rand-McNallys of your own destiny, creating new roads and signposts, incorporating the cherished memories of a life now gone with a new world, of new ways, new ideas, new paths and new dreams.
People say "you can fall out of love with a partner, but you never fall out of love with your child." You never do, but if you allow a tragedy to compromise your love with someone who has stood by you in good and bad, there become two deaths in your life, one avoidable, the other not.

The emotions run the gamut in the aftermath of a huge loss for which we are never prepared. No one has written the definitive guide on how to handle it, as it is different for everyone. Sadly, the only way to understand is to live it, and we members of this "club" pray that no one should ever have to experience it. But as long as we do, we can create our own new markers of which we can really chart our own journeys. For us, it is making new events to look forward to, to celebrate that which we do have and commemorate that which we have lost. There is a choice between living your life and living out your life.

Some people are born with an ability to make choices in their life, and some have choices thrust upon them. What one does with that choice, that fate, determines their character, their resolve, their commitment to live their life. It isn't easy. But we owe it to those we loved - to remember them - not recall them and, along with the people we do have, strive to make a difference with the love we have left.

Erica would have been 20 on Wednesday. I don't hate Scottsdale. It's where my daughter came to live and, regrettably, to die. Every day, I have the pain of her absence, the strength of her memory, the love of my wife and a life ahead of me. I am home.

Barry Kluger