Bargaining and Bereavement
Haley Recer
@haleyhelenrecer
Someone once told me that when a young person dies, it’s like putting a period in the middle of a sentence. My family learned this all too well a couple of years ago, when my sister suddenly and unexpectedly passed away from a whiplash-induced stroke. It was one of those freak accidents that you think only happens to anonymous strangers, until it happens to your sister. She had a husband and a one-year-old daughter—she was very much mid-sentence in her life’s story. But that didn’t stop death.
Around the time of my sister’s passing, my mother was roledexing through old stories when she reminded me of one of her favorite memories. For context, growing up my parents were big on estate sales. Many Saturday morning breakfasts were spent bent over the kitchen table, circling black and white ads in the Dallas Morning News with a weary yellow highlighter. We’d plan our route, pack some tuna sandwiches, and pile into my mother’s minivan.
My parents were also big on weekly allowance. If memory serves me correctly, my allowance never grew much beyond $2 over roughly twelve years, so while it didn’t keep up with inflation, I did have some of my own spending money starting at a very young age. This was good, because I learned early in life it was futile to ask my parents to buy any non-necessities for me. “You have your own money,” they’d say, as if I didn’t know.
A tea set was one of those things: I desperately wanted my own tea set, but tea sets (shockingly) fell into the “non-necessities” category. I tried saving, but I simply didn’t have the patience to save up for a full, brand-new set, so I started buying tea cups one by one at estate sales. My mother said the variety of tea cups gave my tea set character. Of course, as a four-year-old, character was not high on my list of priorities, but as I’ve learned, character often comes whether we’re looking for it or not.
One particular morning, I found a $2 teacup to add to my collection. When we were ready to leave, I proudly pulled my allowance money out of my brightly colored coin purse and handed it to the two older women who were running the metal box of cash as they reclined in their fold-up lawn chairs.
I loved buying things with my allowance money. In my four-year-old version of reality, my parents ‘never bought me anything’ so when I purchased something, however small, I felt empowered. “Look, I don’t need you! I can buy a $2 tea cup all by myself” (with the allowance that you gave me because I did a haphazard job of sweeping the porch). Allowance gave me control of my story.
But this particular morning, as we walked back towards the minivan with my new teacup, I began doubting my purchase. The teacup looked significantly less impressive now that it was mine, now that no one else was about to buy it. My older sister, Lindsey, was a much better saver than I was. She never bought anything. She was generally unimpressed with estate sale inventory.
Was this teacup really worth this week’s allowance? An entire week’s earnings? Maybe I didn’t like being in control of my own story so much after all.
I asked my family if they liked the teacup, but my mom didn’t bite: “The important thing is whether you like the teacup, Haley.” Independence can be a slippery concept to a child: they want it, but they still want everyone to tell them they’re doing a good job.
The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them: “I’m not sure I want this anymore. Could you go ask for my money back?” I knew the request was pointless before I had even finished my sentence.
A small smile formed on my mom’s face. “No, but you can go ask” she said, “I’ll watch you from the car.”
I reluctantly shuffled up the steps to the flimsy card table where the same two women were still yapping away in their lawn chairs. “Excuse me?” I mumbled, “Um, I don’t like this teacup anymore. Could I please have my money back?” Despite the ‘all sales final’ credibly scribbled on a piece of cardboard, the women graciously rewarded my courage and I soon had my $2 back in my coin purse.
There are a few perennial lessons riddled throughout that memory, but most pertinent to my four-year-old self was the importance of asking. Ask for what you want. Maybe it’s unlikely, maybe you won’t get it, but it’s worth a shot.
For the week leading up to my sister’s passing, as we waited on brain scans and reports of intracranial pressure, all I did was ask. I begged by Lindsey’s bedside in her hospital room, I prayed with my husband in the evenings as our children slept next to us, in a million little silent moments, I incessantly pleaded: please, please, please—let there be a miracle. This time, the answer was ‘no.’
Shortly after Lindsey’s passing, I became almost obsessive about grieving correctly, if there is such a thing. To me, grieving “well” held the keys of making sure I could keep getting out of bed every morning, that I would still be able to care for my children, that Lindsey’s absence wouldn’t be the catalyst of some twisted domino effect that also robbed me of my own life as I knew it.
So, I did my homework. I read the classic “On Grief and Grieving” by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who came up with the five stages of grief. I read stories about heaven so I could picture where Lindsey was. I took up running to endorphin my way through sadness. I prayed, I prayed, God knows I prayed.
I did all of these things because I desperately wanted to experience whatever grief had for me, so I could be on the other side of it. I wasn’t trying to avoid grief, per se, I simply wanted to get through the tunnel at maximum speed.
I wish I could tell you that because I was so well researched and so well prepared, that her passing simply wasn’t that bad, but it was and some days, it still is. I wept while my daughter watched Frozen, I cried to my OB during my annual visit, I busied myself with diaper changes and slicing cucumbers my children probably would not eat simply because it was the only thing that felt productive. When friends asked how I was doing, my initial thought was ‘my children ate breakfast this morning’ as if that's what I was solving for. For the first time ever, I felt like I was a passenger in my life rather than in the driver’s seat. And Grief himself had taken the wheel.
The first thing Grief did was slow down our pace dramatically. I was looking for the light at the end of the grief tunnel—but everything moved so slowly, I wasn’t sure whether we were even moving towards the tunnel. Despite my best efforts, I remained frozen, in shock, numb. I didn’t know what success looked like, but I knew it did not look like anesthesia.
Sure, sadness was there, but he was lurking in the shadows—as if I shut my eyes for a moment, Grief would pounce on me and devour me. “Come out here!” I wanted to scream. “Just get it over with!” I desperately wanted the pain to happen just so it would be done. We had already lost her—that wasn't going to change. I just wanted to do whatever I could to somehow make the journey a little less gut-wrenching.
But that’s the thing. One of the hardest parts about walking the road of grief is that YOU DON’T KNOW. You don’t know what to expect, you don’t know how you’re going to react, you don’t know what you could possibly do to make it even the slightest bit less painful. And I don’t mean, “You don’t know until it happens to you.” Even over 100 days into my grief journey and I still didn’t understand how it worked, what to expect, let alone what to do.
In fact, all I really knew to do was the next right thing, and then the next.
On some days, grief would leave me weeping into my pillow, begging: Please God, please, can I have her back? What about the rest of her sentence? And then, I would get out of bed and reheat some chicken nuggets. I would weep over an old photo of the two of us dressed up in fur scarves and fedoras, and then I would empty the dishwasher. Completing basic tasks felt like comforting sacraments—a sign that I wasn’t losing my grip on reality.
Though Jesus’ presence was as tangible as it has ever been to me in those days, grief and the elusive healing journey I sought remained mysterious for quite some time. If anything, I had a clear feeling that if someone came to me in the exact same situation a few months behind me, all I’d really be able to do would be to cry alongside her. I would ask her to tell me about the person she lost. I would hold her hand while we prayed. With many, many, tears I would beg God to have mercy on us both. But help her know what to expect? Heal her? Make it any easier? I couldn’t do that.
So for days and weeks and then months, I kept putting one foot in front of the other. Frustratedly frozen, lost at sea, clueless as to how to move through the grieving process, but all the while, changing diapers, cutting cucumbers, and refilling spilled milks. It wasn’t the healing journey I envisioned. It didn’t leave me with some massive insight that undid the pain. But no one could deny I was certainly doing my best. At a time when there was so much I didn’t know how to do, the simple tasks of motherhood became a comforting cadence of things I could do.
Apply sunscreen? I can do that.
Make snacks (read: pour cheddar bunnies into a bowl)? I can do that.
Draw a bubble bath? I can do that.
One afternoon, I am watching my children have an afternoon tea party. They have not one, but two full tea sets, both of which, ironically enough, came as gifts by way of my mother. Watching them play, I am easily brought back to my own childhood with my sister: to picking our Dad’s cherry tomatoes in the summer, to lazy afternoons in our kitchen, to sleeping in the backyard mostly so we could have an excuse to have endless amounts of hot chocolate. Often in these moments, when I am pulled between the ‘then’ and ‘now’, between the part of my story when Lindsey is still alive and the now, when she has gone, I ask myself what she would say to me if she were still here. As one of my biggest cheerleaders in life, I think she would tell me exactly what my daughter is telling my son as he learns how to pour water into a teacup: You’re doing great. Yes, that’s it, great job!
Do I understand grief yet? No.
Do I have all the answers I want? Not at all.
But can I keep going? Yes. I can do that. I can keep going.
Guest essay written by Haley Recer. Haley is a wife and mother, raising three 'intruders' (as her husband calls them) in New York City. With experience in management consulting, fashion, and human rights, her work has been featured by the Business of Fashion, Columbia Business School, and Risen Motherhood. She loves sand volleyball, high-quality dark chocolate, and exploring the many playgrounds of Central Park. You can follow her on Substack.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.