Grief on the Spectrum

The eight-year-old has learned to navigate an awful lot in her short little life.

We’ve learned social skills. We’ve practiced using words to describe feelings that don’t always come with names. We’ve learned how to recognize big emotions, how to regulate them, and how to find our way back when the world becomes a little too loud.

If you’ve ever had the privilege of loving someone on the autism spectrum, you know that so much of life is spent learning things that seem to come naturally to everyone else.

There are hurdles. Mountains, really. Some we climb together. Some she conquers all on her own. And some we are still standing at the bottom of, trying to figure out where on earth to begin.

And then there is grief.

The vast, aching void that love leaves behind when it has nowhere familiar to go.

How on earth am I supposed to explain that to her?

Our sweet Sadie girl passed away today.

And while I knew my own heart was going to break saying goodbye to the most mischievous, patient, unconditionally loving Labrador to ever grace our little island, I was wholly unprepared for the weight of having to tell my big girl.

I picked her up from school and gripped the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turned white.

And from the backseat, she giggled.

She told me all about her wonderful day. Every little detail. The things that made her laugh. The things she couldn’t wait to tell me.

The sun was shining. The birds were singing. The humidity was mercifully low.

A perfect day in third grade.

And I knew something she didn’t.

I knew that in a few short minutes, I was going to take an ordinary, beautiful day and divide it into a before and an after.

Before she knew.

And after.

There is something particularly cruel about being a mother in those moments. Knowing that you are about to break your child’s heart, and knowing that loving her means you have to do it anyway.

And then we were home.

I wish I could tell you that I found the perfect words. That all those years of helping her understand the complicated things in life had somehow prepared me for this one.

But they hadn’t.

Because grief doesn’t follow the rules we’ve spent years learning.

You cannot put it on a feelings chart. You cannot breathe your way out of missing someone. There is no social story in the world that makes the permanence of death feel any less permanent.

And the familiar comforts don’t quite work here.

“She’s still with us.”

“No, she’s not, Mommy. She’s not here.”

And she’s right.

She’s not here.

Her bed is empty. Her familiar sounds are gone. And no amount of explaining that she will always live in our hearts changes the very real, very devastating fact that she isn’t coming back through our door.

My girl understands things so literally. And for once, I find myself wishing I could borrow a little of that certainty.

Because I don’t understand it either, sweetheart.

I don’t understand how a creature can spend years filling every corner of a home with love and mischief, and then suddenly leave so much silence behind.

I don’t understand why the world keeps going about its business when ours has become so terribly still.

And I certainly don’t know how to teach an eight-year-old to make peace with an absence that I haven’t figured out how to carry myself.

But here we are.

Another unfamiliar shore on our tiny island.

Another thing I cannot fix for her.

I can teach her to recognize grief when it comes. To notice the way it settles in her chest. To give it a name, even when that name is simply I miss her.

I can teach her that sadness isn’t something she’s doing wrong. That she doesn’t have to hurry through it or find a way to make it smaller for anyone else’s comfort.

That she can laugh at a memory of Sadie and cry about it five minutes later. That both things can be true.

And when she asks me the same impossible questions over and over, I will answer them over and over.

When the answers aren’t enough, I will sit beside her in the terrible unfairness of it all.

Because maybe this is one of those mountains we aren’t meant to conquer.

Maybe some things aren’t meant to be overcome at all.

Maybe we just learn how to carry them.

I know this loss will likely live with my big girl for a long, long time. It may find her in unexpected moments, on perfectly ordinary days, when the sun is shining and the birds are singing and everything else in the world seems just fine.

And I hate that I cannot spare her from it.

Oh, how I hate that.

But I can promise her this:

While I am teaching her how to notice it, how to see it, feel it, hold it, and eventually move through it, I will carry it with her.

Every heavy, heartbreaking bit of it.

Until she learns how to carry it on her own.

And even then, if it ever gets too heavy, she can hand some of it right back to me.

That’s the thing about this little island of ours.

Nobody has to carry the hard things alone.

Not even when the hard thing is goodbye.