The Senior Year ? Darcy and Grief | Missing My Will

?The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can?t give it: you are like the drowning man who can?t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ???C.S. Lewis,?A Grief Observed

??[T]here is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?????C.S. Lewis,?A Grief Observed

Although her presence has been implied throughout CaringBridge and Missing My Will, we have not blogged specifically about Darcy because her privacy has consistently outweighed our need to process in writing. Now, however, her life has accelerated into a black hole of grief and angst that we hope a spotlight will help to dissipate.

Will died on Memorial Day and Darcy became a senior four days later, which also means that her graduation will now occur four days after the first anniversary of Will?s death. Tom and I find ourselves in some unwelcome parallel universe in that we poured ourselves into helping one child die well only to have to turn around and help the other child prepare to become independent. As sorry as we feel for ourselves, our sorrow for Darcy?s loss is even greater.

The self-help books are not terribly useful in their details about how teenagers process grief or how to support them. Actually, they aren?t helpful whatsoever. According to the experts, teenagers talk and open up most to their friends, and teens might not feel the sum of the loss until their mid-twenties. Remember, the experts write delicately, grief is individual. When things settle down, I will recommend that Darcy pen her own ?Teenagers and Grief? manual because the market appears wide open.

Let?s start with the mythical fabulousness of The Senior Year, which is akin to the delights of Valentine?s Day or the stress-free family vacation (yes, that?s sarcasm), and isn?t making it any easier for her to trudge through the grief. She?s been told that The Senior Year is supposed to be carefree, boisterous, and fun. ?The best time of your life.? We?ve tried to reassure her: ?At least you can be certain that you haven?t peaked during high school.? Although she agrees, the situation still makes her understandably cross.

Grief is claustrophobic. There?s no escape, but Darcy would very much like to get away from the house, the school, Pflugerville?this life. While her statements to this effect are justifiable, it hurts me to hear her actually say it. If I strive to be mature I know that first and foremost Darcy misses Will as well as our whole family and the future we had expected. It?s not that she doesn?t love us or want to be with us, she just wants to stop hurting.

My pseudo-psychological analysis also wonders what it is like to be 17 years old and to know for sure that you are not immortal. She didn?t have the option to postpone thinking about mortality. When I taught 8^th grade, I loved using play version of The Diary of Anne Frank, but I dreaded the moment in the play when the attic?s inhabitants wait and listen to the Nazis breaking into their hiding place. ?Why don?t they just climb out the window and escape?? my classes would insist, frustrated with the lack of activity on the part of the trapped Jewish residents. I knew that they had to believe in their own invincibility in order to help with their transition to adulthood, but their myopia made it impossible for them to fully invest themselves in the poignancy of the scene. Darcy lived Will?s cancer through every step and held him as he died. She has irrefutable evidence that life is finite, and death is not reserved for the elderly. In fact, what is the point of life after all? Work as hard as you can and die anyway?

The best way out for Darcy is college, but the other grief symptoms are keeping that option from being appealing. Some of those symptoms could be senioritis instead of or in addition to grief. How does that get sorted out?

Throughout Will?s illness, Darcy coped by keeping her life as normal as possible. While everything else spun out of control, the bell for first period always rang at 9:00 and classes fell into place until the bell rang again at 4:15. Like us, she found comfort in organization, and for the first time in her life, she cleaned her room regularly and obsessed about having materials lined up before going to bed. Her grades, which were lovely to begin with, improved throughout her junior year.

Last spring, as she was deciding how to structure her senior year classes, she decided to drop out of band for her senior year. We hesitated but her reasons were compelling and well thought out. For an extracurricular activity, she joined the PALS, a class of student mentors, and then she everything else she registered for came with AP before it. Without band, she felt she would have time for thorough studying.

We kind of floated through the summer and bounced around the house, trying not to think too much. At the end of the summer, as school approached and summer reading and behind-the-wheel practice, among other things, hadn?t occurred, Tom and I set a date and threatened to pull all of Darcy?s electronics if adequate progress had not been met. When the date arrived and we hadn?t seen even a good faith effort, we asked for the electronics, and Darcy, appalled and in disbelief, made the convincing argument that what she had done and what she had been through qualified her as mostly adult and, besides, the things that Tom and I wanted completed came with their own ?natural consequences,? such as a low grade or not being able to drive by herself. Just to make her point, she plowed through all 672 pages of A Prayer for Owen Meaney in about four days. Tom and I backed off.

The school year started smoothly enough with all of our best intentions in place. Darcy told me that her goal was to read every assigned page. She went to school in carefully coordinated outfits, and she and her best friend went to the homeowner?s center to work out during their off period each day. Tom and I went on walks several times a week and Darcy usually went jogging at the same time. We were a little gimpy but most things were getting done more or less. Then the routine started falling apart a bit.

One Sunday night in late October, I found Darcy in her room in tears. The problem was physics. She was behind in her work, hadn?t done the corrections from the last test, and was facing another test the next day. ?Please,? she begged, ?please let me not go to physics tomorrow. I?ll get caught up, make everything up, and it?ll be fine. Lots of kids do this.?

When homework backs up, the deadline is nigh, and Darcy?s self-frustration picks up speed as it crashes down the slope, she will list all of her perceived inadequacies, which become difficult to shovel out. The problem grew exponentially beyond the physics test as she beat herself up because she didn?t have her driver?s license, hadn?t applied to colleges, had no clean clothes, had missing assignments in other classes, and on and on and on.

I so wanted to be able to grant her wish to skip class, ease her pain, and make her smile again, but Tom and I talked and we knew that she really had to go to class. We had tried the don?t-go-to-that-class solution ourselves, we had seen other students try it before, and we knew for sure that it doesn?t work and it?s not a precedent to set. We denied her request and told her to go in before school for last ditch tutoring. The next morning, I saw her go up the stairs in the school slowly, despondently, and I knew the weight that was pulling her down.

I myself had a terrible day at work that Monday. I couldn?t focus and I snapped at people. I could only think of Darcy and how badly I wanted to fix the situation for her. I hurried home at the end of the day to find Darcy interacting normally. ?What happened?? I asked. ?Oh, I went in and he helped. I think the test went fine,? she replied and returned to the internet. I was simultaneously relieved and frustrated. I did subject her later to my finest lecture on how I hoped that she would remember how miserable she was the night before and to please ask for help earlier and stay on top of her work.

When I unwound a bit, I recalled a time when Darcy was in kindergarten. She marched up to me one evening and informed me that she needed to switch elementary schools. When I questioned her, I discovered that she was supposed to be making an alphabet book in class with a picture from a magazine on each page to represent its letter. Darcy, who was close to reading chapter books by that point, had not been getting her work done, so her solution was to just change schools. We talked it through, I emailed the teacher, and Darcy got busy on her alphabet notebook, although she expressed frustration to me a couple of days later that the picture of the knot she found couldn?t be used for the letter ?N.? Everything?s going to be okay. She?s going to figure this one out, too.

At some point this fall, we realized that Darcy wasn?t exercising after school anymore and it was getting even harder to pry her from her bedroom. She was having a difficult time sleeping and Tom, the night owl, would hear her get into the shower sometimes in the middle of the night. Darcy?s best escape is her room, and she?s spent a lot of time there. Darcy, though, is an extrovert and I worry that her room has become more of a prison. She?s shown that she can manage her schoolwork in the past, but now we worry that Tumblr and Home Stuck (an online, interactive novel) has sucked her into its depths. On the one hand, she isn?t drinking or using drugs or engaging in other unsafe, addictive activities. On the other hand, she?s not happy, and she?s not getting her schoolwork done.

With Darcy and Will, we have tried to follow and support their emotional needs as they arise. We ask them what?s wrong or how they?re feeling, but we haven?t tried to suggest that they should be feeling one thing or another. Just like we would never have gone to Will and said, ?You should feel sad,? we aren?t going to tell Darcy how she should be feeling.? Will was eight, though, and his emotions lived very close to the surface. As a teenager, Darcy has a more difficult time recognizing the feelings until they overwhelm her, which means that Tom and I also get blindsided by the intensity of the emotion when it explodes.

We had thought that we were on an upward trajectory because we had worked through some grief the Thursday before Thanksgiving. Darcy became a puddle in the car on the way to her piano lesson, eloquently expressing her depression and loneliness. ?No offense, Mom, but you and Tom have your jobs and you pretty much know what your lives are going to look like. I don?t.? She described her lack of motivation and her inability to focus. She can?t follow the explanations in class in their entirety, and she doesn?t see the point of studying most of the things she?s studying. She tries to practice the piano but either she gets caught up in the emotion and starts crying or her fingers get tangled up and she starts crying. ?I don?t know what?s wrong with me,? she sobbed. ?That,? I assured her, ?sounds like grief.? With remarkable acuity, she then told me about the guilt she feels when she?s irritated with her friends because the irritation is unwarranted. ?Look at me,? she said, ?I don?t even care what I wear to school anymore.?? While that might sound superficial, this evidence is noteworthy.

One of Darcy?s loves is finding eclectic and interesting clothing. She adores a long hunt through Buffalo Exchange, Plato?s Closet, or Goodwill. We enjoy her enjoyment of putting together textures and colors. Patterned tights with shorts in the winter and one-of-a-kind jackets and socks. She is unique and fascinating and her attire reflects that, so I did understand when she was trying to tell me about her chaos of her insides when she used clothing as evidence. ?Mom, I started the year putting together fun outfits for the week, and now I don?t care. I just throw on jeans and a t-shirt at the last possible second every day.?

And that is the condensed version of what grief can look like. I think that I should get my money refunded on the self-help books that didn?t get more specific than ?grief is individual.?

The piano teacher, Tom and I helped her get balanced, and she seemed to be functioning again. As it turned out, that meltdown was merely a glimpse of what the end of the Thanksgiving break would bring.

The day before Thanksgiving, we took off for Arkansas for the first time in two years ? we hadn?t been there since pre-cancer ? with some trepidation and a great deal of counseling. As much as we wanted to be with our loved ones, it was going to be difficult to be on the well-traveled path to Fayetteville without Will?to arrive without Will?to be there without Will. Moreover, a third instance of cancer in two years had recently occurred in the family, and we were all trying to be supportive of the latest patient.

Darcy was not only struggling with her own grief, but I had the feeling that she was trying to protect us as well.? Her manners and attention were impeccable and her answer to ?What would you like, Darcy?? was either ?That sounds good to me? or ?Whatever you want.? She even sat at the table listening to the after-meal conversation, which is the part I always fled from as a teen myself.

Tom and I knew that she had the rough draft of a ten-page English essay due the Monday after Thanksgiving even as she was racing to get her UT application with its three essays submitted by December 1. We bought a charger for the car and double-checked the availability of data on our mobile plan to make sure that she had what she needed to work on the projects.

College applications have been weighing on her for months now, and the most difficult part are the essays. ?First, since she?s in the top 8% of her class, she doesn?t need to write the essays for automatic acceptance, although she can?t apply for scholarships without them. Second, she missed the early application deadline so she was beating herself up over being behind many of her friends, and it?s understandably difficult to express the necessary confidence in a piece of writing when you feel lacking in yourself. Third and most significantly, the generic essay topics stink, and Tom and I didn?t leave it for her to guess that she needed to write Optional Essay 3. We don?t want to use Will?s death as an excuse for any of our poor performances, but we do think that it?s helpful to explain to others what is going on with us along with the hope that we will figure out to how contain the pain and become fully productive again.

• Personal Essay 1: Write an essay in which you tell us about someone who has made an impact on your life.
• Personal Essay 2: Choose an issue of importance to you.
• Optional Essay 3: There may be personal information that you want considered.

As her distress deepened, Darcy wryly pointed out that each of the essays could be about Will.

We came back from Arkansas on Saturday in order to get ourselves together for Monday. Although I found her tearful over the ?Optional Essay 3? at one point, forward progress seemed to be going along at an acceptable pace. The UT application was submitted in full and she turned her attention back to her English essay. I went to bed.

As usual on Monday morning, Tom and I left for work long before Darcy needed to get up.

At 8:07 am, Darcy had the mother of all meltdowns. I know it was 8:07 because that?s when I received her text: ?Mom I am not feeling good. Last night I tried to write this essay and I ended up panicking because I couldn?t focus and staying up and I cried a lot and I basically do not feel very good right now at all. I would like to please stay home at least for first period? I?m sorry I just really do not think I could make it through class. Please give me mental health day. I keep spiraling and freaking out and now I am tired and shaky too.?

I left my meeting and called Darcy who was crying too hard to be coherent. Still, I had the fortitude to insist that she head to school. If class was impossible, she could visit the nurse, counselor, or social worker. Then I left messages with Tom to give him the heads up as to what was incoming to the high school, which is where he works. I called our therapist and Darcy?s therapist who said unequivocally, ?Yes, she goes to school. Making her go is your mom job.? Ugh. Then I received a string of hysterical texts from Darcy whose wrath and sadness had found a target.

Darcy found our sticking point on the idea of ?mental health? days. It seems to be becoming more acceptable for students to take a class period or an entire day off, usually if they are tired or not prepared for their next class. Tom and I aren?t supporters of this practice. Darcy, however, sees mental health days as a trust issue. Unlike other parents, we don?t trust her to not go to class when circumstances warrant it. To sum up, we have reached an impasse on this issue. She understands that, especially as we are district employees, we aren?t going to excuse a day off. We understand that when she says she?s in trouble, she means it.

Suffice it to say, that day and the next day did not go smoothly and our therapists are definitely not paid enough. Tom kept his head together, but Darcy and I managed to escalate the disagreement into a loud and hurtful affair? I think Tom phrased it most delicately when he noted, ?You two do not fight fairly.? We spent most of the week talking to each other, talking to therapists, and even talking to our family physician to try and figure out how the best ways to help Darcy and all of us begin working for our new collective and individual futures.

In some ways, it was a relief to have everything, including the exaggerations, out in plain sight. Even if Will hadn?t died, Darcy and I would still be having issues right now. Knowing that Darcy needs me and needs us helps give me purpose, which helps with my grief. She needs me and Tom to model how to work through grief, even if it?s messy. She needs me and Tom to teach her organization and time management. She needs me and Tom to show her that love finds its way through hurt and anger. ?I need to get my act together so that I can support her because she deserves to find herself and live her life.

I hope that she goes off to college knowing two things:

(1) She, Tom, and I are a team. We can depend on each other for honesty and support no matter what, even if that support means bearing the consequences. Most of all, growing up and becoming independent doesn?t mean leaving the team or having the team leave you. My thinking on this point started with the idea that she can always come home and has progressed to ?even when you leave home, you won?t leave us and we won?t leave you.?

(2) Her life is worth living. Her passion, compassion, and experience will bring her joy and satisfaction as she improves her world. Part of what grief is forcing us to do is to find ourselves. What is the bottom line that gets us out of bed in the morning? We see glimpses of the old Darcy when she is mentoring a one of her elementary school PALS or she is advocating for social justice for people who did not fit society?s heterosexual norm. Be conscious of when you feel alive and engaged, we tell her even as we remind ourselves of the same thing.

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Source: http://missingmywill.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/the-senior-year-darcy-and-grief/

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