These Faces

The faces inside the back room of the old Catholic church just south of Boston are like cratered candles molded by grief: the flames sputter, nod, go out, come back again, manage to flicker on somehow in the long journey of bereavement that for many of them has only just started. You're afraid the slightest hush of air might blow them out. These faces all seem to say with one telltale expression that there's no hiding from the loss, a loss large enough to swallow each one of them without a sound.

Some are veterans, old pros, their children dead for seven years or more; others are brand new to the keening, salt-water waves of grief, their children dead less than a month. The deaths come in every form: suicide, car accident, overdose, drunk driving, disease and mishap, drive-by shootings, or falling from buildings. But all of them hang their heads in the same, recognizable way, just a slight degree off center, looking down into a place where most people will never go. I'm here at the request of a friend who lost his wife and first son a few months ago, but it's clear to me I'm way out of my league, a wide-eyed interloper who has no business sitting in on their stories. And yet here I am. The group is called Compassionate Friends for parents who have lost their sons and daughters. The chairs are set off against the walls around a large table with literature of every kind on losing a child; the windows look like they haven't been washed for months, maybe even years. The room is dark with its mahogany furniture and just as sturdy, the glass bookcases looking back at us in the dull reflection of gossamer panes.

One by one they go around the room and introduce themselves, telling the rest of us when their child died and how, in brief, matter-of-fact explanations shorn of any commentary and at the same uncanny volume, the words coming out of their mouths with a slow, deliberate sadness they've been treading since their child's death, like cosmic weather reports from the center of tragedy. They're mostly working-class folks, with Boston accents shaving off the r's, one with eagle tattoos on his forearms and another with an oversized pocket protector, their hands useless and folded in front of them, as if they will never be able to touch anyone again without trembling misgiving. The mother whose twenty-two-year-old son died in a car accident three weeks ago can't keep from crying, but her tears are unlike any I have ever seen: they seem to well up from deep inside her like some eternal spring that's been waiting to flow all of these years. She can't get through her introduction, so her vacant and arrow-faced husband speaks for both of them in a monotone voice as if he's reporting from the moon: "Our boy Richie was killed three weeks ago by a drunk driver. He was twenty-two." And as they introduce themselves one by one, it's like they hand each other an invisible baton as old as the world.

I want to tell them how beautiful they are, how inexplicably round I find them and their countenances, the way some of their loping shoelaces communicate their grief in a way words never could. I want to touch the electric chord of their sadness one jolting truth at a time—not to fool myself into believing that I know what they are going through, but because there's nothing else, no other action or gesture in the whole universe, that anyone can do. I want to let them know somehow what witnessing their grief means to me, how this same roundness I sense in the room is like so many invisible hoops coming together just above their heads to partake of the infinite pity, the one that goes on forever into the heart of love's mystery. I want to remember these faces and honor...