Grief and the Very Young

The little boys were at church today with their grandparents.  Their father is too distraught to do much of anything.   When I saw the boys walk in to the church my heart lurched.  Their mother died just over a week ago, after a brief illness.  I had no idea what to expect.  Sad, crying little boys?  But during the first part of the service they seemed fine, typical 7 and 5 year olds in church.  

The time came for us to take them back to the Sunday school with us.  It was a small group, only 5 children, everyone else gone for summer.   We sat in our usual circle and passed the chalice to talk about our sads and glads.  I held my breath, prepared to offer words of comfort for the inevitable sads.  But they didn't come.  The boys were in great spirits talking happily about their life.  I was both surprised and relieved.  

We all sat at the table and created sculptures from plasticene, and talked about our summer, and what we were creating, and about school starting and about funny things that had happened to us.   The boys remained cheerful and no mention was made of the mother they had just lost.   And it occurred to me that they are too young to fully comprehend their loss.  Not in the way we adults do.  Not the finality of it.  Not the devastating sadness of a woman taken too young, from little boys who need her so much. Not the anger at the injustice of it all.  Children's lives are immediate.   They live in the moment.  And there will be many painful moments  of missing their mom.  Bedtime, when they get hurt, when something reminds them of her, when daddy says no and they don't have mommy to appeal to.  And they will feel sad and they will cry, but it will be momentary.   They will find themselves feeling angry and they will act out, but they won't understand why.  

As they grow, her memory will fade, but they will grieve her differently throughout their lives at different stages of development.  They will grow up with only distant memories of her.   She will live in their psyche, and in their hearts, but they will mostly remember her through stories others tell them.   I am so grateful for the blessed innocence of their youth, that protective layer that lets them continue to believe that nothing bad can really happen, that mommy isn't really gone forever.   And I wish for them a happy life, full of love and nurturing and in their heart that little ember from the love of the one who was there at their beginning.

A few months ago I attended a Blanket Exercise to raise awareness of the Aboriginal Truth and Reconciliation commission that has been talked about in the news lately.  About 30 of us gathered in the back hall at our church.  We all sat in a circle and the facilitator spread several blankets all over the floor in front of us.   There was a brief introduction of what we could expect and then the exercise began.

We were all instructed to find a blanket and stand on it.  The blankets represented all of the territories that were occupied by Indians before the Europeans came over (literally all of North America).   We were encouraged to walk freely among the blankets.  We heard about how the Indians had lived together peaceably on the land.  They hunted and fished for only what they needed to survive.  They worshiped the land and celebrated and gave thanks for its bounty.  And they gave back.    


And then the narrators read through the time line of all that happened once the Europeans came.   They saw these peace loving natives and saw only weakness.   They offered treaties that were misleading and full of lies.  They gave them blankets that were deliberately infected with small pox that killed hundreds of thousands of natives.  Each time something happened, each time a treaty was broken, a blanket was removed from the floor and the people had to move on to other blankets.   Some people had to sit down because they had died from small pox and starvation.  Some had to leave their blanket because they had been sent to residential schools.  Some families were separated because the boundaries of their land were changed.  One of the facilitators was walking around us, making sure we weren't standing on one single piece of blanket more than we should have been standing on.   And by the time the exercise was over, very few blankets and very few people remained.   There was huge gaps between the blankets.  Some were empty.  some had so many people on them they could barely move.  

To say that this was a profound experience would be an understatement.  I have never been so deeply moved.   Afterwards we sat back down in our circle and had a debriefing.  A "talking shell" was passed around giving each person a chance to share their thoughts and their feelings without interruption.  And the choice was given to pass and say nothing.   Quite a few people passed.   Most people only spoke briefly and poignantly about how troubled they were, how ashamed they were that all of that had happened.   Very few of us had realized the terrible injustice done to the people who occupied our country first.  We didn't learn it in school.   We were given the white washed European version of history.  How wonderful it was the Columbus came and discovered a brave new world.   Nothing was said of what they did to that land and the people on it.   We learned about the 'savages'.   And we saw in t.v. shows that the Indians were bad people and if you played cowboys and Indians as a child, you never wanted to be an Indian.  I left that day feeling a deep sense of shame and sadness.   Too often today we see natives as being drunken, lazy, people living on reservations, that pay no taxes and sell cheap cigarettes.  To think of all that they had had, it's no wonder they may angry and bitter.   To have been sent away to residential schools where their whole way of life was erased from them and they were made to learn the white man's ways. Any aspect of their upbringing, of their culture, their language was beaten and brain washed out of them.  When they returned to their families after being at the schools, they found they didn't belong anymore.  They had become too different.  Some families rejected the "white" children and wouldn't let them return home..  And yet they weren't white enough to be accepted in to the culture into which they had been indoctrinated.   It was a terrible tragedy.  And so desperately unnecessary.

I had no idea what to expect when I signed up for this Blanket Exercise.  I saw the sign up sheet on the bulletin board at the church, and I thought it was a native ritual much like a drumming circle.  I had missed the service leading up to the exercise, so I had no idea what I was in store for me .   When the talking shell came around to me I was almost speechless and I wanted to pass it on.  It took me a few seconds to find my voice.   What struck me the most about this exercise was the total helplessness I felt while standing on that blanket, hearing about all of these atrocities, having all of these things happening around me that I couldn't stop.  And the devastation left on the floor at the end of it all.   The Europeans came to a land occupied by friendly, peaceful people who loved the earth and respected it.   who believed in the Great Spirit and honoured Mother earth.   They knew no other way.   The believed and trusted that the Europeans were honest and fair. They were dazzled by their fancy tools and technology.   And they were tricked and abused, and slaughtered time after time after time.   Of course they fought back but their primitive weapons, their bows and arrows were ineffective against the weapons of the Europeans.   And as I sat there digesting all of this I felt the native blood that runs through me, the blood of Joseph Brant, who was a very important figure in the history of our country.   And I also felt running through my veins the Scottish, English, and Welsh blood of my other ancestors.   Unsettling to say the least. I am both victim,  and perpetrator.  And I am not alone.  There are many people like me with such a history. 

 I think everyone who has a chance to take part in a blanket exercise should do so.  It will open your eyes.  It will make you stop and think about how you came to have everything you take so much for granted every day.  And you may feel anger, or shame, or sadness, but you will not feel pride.