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Letter to the editor

Life after Tim

By JANET BURROWAY
Published December 12, 2004

	[Photo: Rianne Selle]
	Three-year-old Thyra helps to “plant roses” at her father’s burial in Namibia, sprinkling sand from a little spade onto roses as they are tossed into the grave.
	The last picture Tim’s mom took of her son, January 2004.
	Related story:
	My son, my soldier, my sorrow In three essays written over 20 years, a liberal, pacifist mother struggles to understand her conservative son, a proud soldier and member of the NRA. (June 13, 2004)

Editor's note: Today, in the first of a series updating some of our most memorable stories of the year, Janet Burroway describes what she has learned about grieving since the death of her son Tim Eysselinck. A former Ranger and Army captain, he committed suicide in April after finishing work as the leader of a civilian de-mining team in Iraq.

Burroway's earlier essay, "My son, my soldier, my sorrow," appeared in Floridian on June 13. You can read it online at www.sptimes.com/links

It is more than half a year since my son's suicide. Timothy Alan Eysselinck, 40, captain, Ranger, father, hunter, contractor for mine removal in Iraq, Republican, idealist, gun nut, my firstborn, my baby.

I would like, still, to sit staring into the beautiful baffle of trees outside my study window, raging if it takes me that way, letting the tears well if I please, floating, disassociating on the intricate veining of the confederate ivy, which holds each leaf open as the palm of a hand. Instead I invert my own hands on what, for me, truly serve as keys; because this is how I unlock sense in the fleeting world. Because those who have tried to write honestly have helped me to make such sense. Not that any of us intimately ensnared, as either potential self-destroyer or survivor, can write or speak of it with whole honesty. Like the suicide, we do the best we can.

What I can address just now is not Tim's life - though I have done that before, and will again - but the myopic experience of a few months. The first lesson of grief is that it forces self-absorption. So here, crudely organized, take-or-leave-it, use-if-useful, is what I have learned:

About denial. That it takes many forms, few of them a stark refusal of the facts. My daughter-in-law, literally halfway around the world, her own voice blank with shock, said, "Tim has shot himself," and I replied, "How badly is he hurt?"

I saw him hunting on a game reserve near their home in Namibia. I remember that my first image was of a bullet hole in his foot. I remember that in this image the foot was, absurdly, wearing a sock. I called to Peter, "Get on the phone! Tim has shot himself!" and he picked up the receiver and said, "How badly is he hurt?"

Yet it was not many seconds before both of us took in the mortal contraction, "He's gone," and not many seconds after that when we understood that this going had been his intention. In some acid reflux of emotion I said to myself: I knew it; more than once he said he would die young; I won't mind much.

Later I indicted myself for the grotesque rupture of self-knowledge. Later still I recounted it to a few close friends who had happened to wander into the topic of denial; it stopped the conversation cold.

Not everyone deals with trauma by becoming manic, but many do, and I knew enough about myself to know this is my way. In the first days, I became death's social secretary. Lists, calls, e-mails, letters, plane tickets to Africa. There were obituaries to write, music to find and fax for the funeral service in Namibia; poems to choose, photos to forward. People called and came. Family called and cried. Peter and I huddled together but cried little. Three-year-old Thyra was told that her daddy had become a star, and she and I sang together on the phone: "Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . . "

I understood myself to be in a state of shock that I experienced as a constant internal vibration. I understood (I even felt) that this bustle was efficiency as madness. I suspected from experience that I would pay for it later in emotional and perhaps bodily collapse; but beyond the fact that I could not stop, I also felt in some reassuring way that it is the way I cope, and it must be trusted.

I always supposed denial to be a stage of grieving that must be got through. I think now that it is likely a permanent feature of acceptance. I have had to learn that the appropriate emotion is not on tap, that it always comes out of left field, out of the blue, just when I thought either that I was handling everything or else that I was a callous fraud.

We held a memorial for Tim on the back deck of our home in Tallahassee, where I accepted and arranged the food and flowers, hugged and chatted to his friends and mine, read a poem of Randall Jarrell's ("If I could I would sing you to sleep . . . "), and laughed with the colleague who said, meaning to praise my strength, "Janet throws a good party."

I remember it with gentle gratitude. But in that same spot, later - still - the plastic Kmart chaise longue on the lip of the pool undoes me. So often Tim lay on it, inconsequentially bronzing, reading heroic trash. I liked the sight of him there because he was handsome, and because when he was a boy I could not afford a pool, so it was good to know that when he came home he had the pleasure of it. At no time did I consider that sight precious. That he read adventure novels exasperated me. I was sometimes impatient for him to vacate my chaise. Now I rise and plunge into the cold, cleave it with fingers forked, driving myself through the wet, seeing him swim the earth.

About anger. That it has this in common with denial, that both are attempts to stab the hurt away. Anger is the rock dropped in the pond, circling out from Tim (how could he do this to a 3-year-old?) to his DNA and the NRA; to his father, my authoritarian first husband; to the gun culture and its glamorous promises; to the Army that channeled his honor into narrow nationalism; to the war that proliferated explosives faster than he and his 90 Iraqi trainees could defuse them; to the government whose lies shattered his patriotic illusions; to the reptilian greed for territory that can destroy us all.

Then anger topples into its opposite, into awe-full mourning not at my loss of Tim but at Tim's loss of the world. I walk along a deserted beach at dawn under a dull sky, shouting at the surf: You thought you were such a hero, you think it's so tough to pull a trigger, didn't I tell you, all the courage is in keeping on!? - and then sob salt at the ocean: You loved this; everything to do with it, boats and scuba and sun and surf and sand. Don't you remember how you loved it? How could you give it up?

The pattern recurs. Again, again. I do his posthumous taxes raging, because it isn't right that a parent should have to do this; it should be the other way around. Peter and I clean the attic, tossing boxes of paperbacks, mildewed tents, khaki socks, camouflage shirts. I fume that there's so much military gear: handbooks of weapons, posters of mines, canteens, parachute jackets, matches in clever waterproof cases, several hundred pounds of ammunition. In my attic! Yet on Mother's Day, I come across a freshman essay written at the University of Michigan, describing how coming home for Christmas really was coming home for him; how his mother went slightly bonkers over the holidays; how all his life she let him choose how to be himself and so had become his friend - "something not all kids can claim." I sit clutching these two pages of ruled note paper among the detritus of a life: a posthumous gift.

About guilt. That it is neutral and inevitable. That to invite and milk it, chest-beat and wail, is a tiresome choice, a brand of egotism. But also to say, "You mustn't feel guilty; there was nothing you could do," is as useless as to say "cheer up" to someone who is clinically depressed.

No one but the suicide may take responsibility for his act. Yet what people do to and for each other matters. All our relationships are fraught with help and blame and joy and hurt, so it's appropriate to ask: Could I have done something more? Other? The crucial thing? In a way, such self-questioning isn't even guilt, but only, out of sequence, irretrievably too late, the impulse that makes us say, "I'm so sorry, tell me about it. Is there anything I can do?"

Perhaps I did not look clearly enough, did not want to see as unbalanced Tim's litigious streak, his need to test himself, his demand for the perfect computer or the perfectly tailored jacket, the restlessness that took him several times around the globe; did not, for all my opposition to the Iraq war, take seriously enough the stress and danger of his daily dealing with explosives.

I keep on the wall beside my desk a Post-It note with a list of things to do, written at the beginning of the week he died. There are a number of things crossed out, but at the top it still says "Tim." I had called him on Monday and Wednesday but got no answer. Friday I was busy and put it off. Do I think I failed him as a mother in some essential way? No. Do I think I could have prevented his death? No. Do I nevertheless ache to have made that call, asked more and better questions, advised him better, told him again that I loved him, made him one more apple pie? Yes and yes, and forever yes.

About his body. Namibia, April 30; they had only now released Tim's body. A small number of us, intimate family, felt we must see him. I was unprepared, and did not realize I was unprepared, I think, because the dead I have seen, though some were dear to me, have been old people in tufted satin, discretely decorated by the embalmer's art.

But this was a police station on the outskirts of Windhoek: dry desert and a shedlike building covered in scrofulous plaster. The plain box coffin was behind a window slanted so that you looked down on it, and Tim was covered to the neck by a rumpled sheet, his wide-brim Australian hunting hat shoved down as if to hide, though it did not, an indentation in his forehead like the meeting of three ravines. This was not the site of his wound, and I know no explanation for it. Crude makeup on his jaw did not conceal that the skin was bruised. On the bridge of his nose was a bright red spot at exactly the point where he had broken his nose 20 years before in an ROTC game. He was vividly recognizable, but death was also recognizable. He did not look peaceful. He did not look asleep.

I felt faint and, simultaneously, that it was necessary I had come. My younger son, Alex, pulled my arm over his shoulder to support me. Peter put a hand under my other arm, and we made our way out. It had taken perhaps two minutes.

This image of my dead son is "seared into my memory," which aptly suggests the sound and pain of a branding iron.

Weeks later, we took a train to Sussex, the landscape of Tim's childhood, and it came to me on the train that of the many dozens of images I have of Tim, all are alive except for this one breathtaking negative of all the others. Dozens of mental pictures, animated and changing second by second - splashing in his baby bath, coasting on his first bicycle down the drive, dropping his parachuted Action Man over the balcony, playing soldier in the Tallahassee pines, calling from his treehouse, speed-skating, dismantling the motor of his MG, peeling apples, driving me over the mountains of Oahu, making thyme gravy for Thanksgiving, swinging in the kitchen door or down the airport corridor, "Hi, Momma," "Love you, Mom" - and only the one image in stasis, brief, eternal.

About my body. That it is both resilient and permanently changed. The hyperactivity of shock lasted about six weeks and, as I had expected, skewed into angst and sleeplessness. I accepted sleeping pills with some trepidation, but also accepted that sleep was more important for the moment; later, I was assured, I could wean myself.

I had promised to write and film the narrative for an instructional DVD that was scheduled for Tallahassee in early June. In the first days of manic efficiency, I told the producer it should go ahead. I thought it would be a distraction. I wanted to be done with it. But when the crew arrived and I faced the long, intense days that are standard for film production, I could not do it. My mind stuttered and went blank; food sat leaden on my stomach. "I may have overestimated my energy," I admitted, and sent the crew and their hundreds of pounds of equipment back to Chicago.

In June we went to England, where the plan had been for the British and Namibian grandchildren at last to meet. For 10 days, we scouted London with Alex's family and Tim's. We saw Stomp and Princess Diana's Kensington playground and Winchester theme park and the Museum of Science and Paddington Rec; the children adored it and each other.

I was exhausted. I sat shoulders-sagging like an old woman on the park bench while the children played. Having served up a dinner at noon, I would take to bed at 2 o'clock. Wandering the stalls at Camden Town market, my favorite London Sunday outing, I found the weight of my handbag shot pain from my shoulder to my wrist and up the back of my head.

Back in Tallahassee I went to my GP to complain of my lethargy. I said I supposed it was depression, but she was luckily disinclined to diagnose any such thing as "all in my head." The blood work showed I'd had a case of mononucleosis - a teenager's disease! - which I'd already had at 21, and from which I'd supposed I was permanently protected by antibodies. But apparently mono is one of those viruses that always lives in the body, and in great stress the immune system can be overwhelmed.

Now I am sleeping; my energy has steadied if not returned. In October, we went to Chicago and I accomplished the postponed filming. Driving home, we stopped to visit my friend Julia Kling, who said of me that it was "as if the volume had been turned down." I do not mind this, neither the saying of it nor the truth of it. I'm glad to live at lowered volume for the rest of the journey.

About pictures. That they are moving in more ways than one. There's a wonderful short story by John Barth in which a woman takes a telephone call, receives news and crosses the garden to tell her husband. We know that the information is life-threatening and life-changing. We never know what it is. The point is that for the time it takes to cross the garden, until the news is shared, tragedy is in abeyance; time stands still. The night that our daughter-in-law called with her shattering announcement, Peter and I had been to the movies. Two weeks later, back from Namibia, Peter asked what film we'd seen. Neither of us had any memory of it. He found the ticket stubs in his pocket. The film was called Intermission. We looked it up on the Internet. There displayed for us were the stars, the plot, the reviews and an album of stills. We did not recognize any of them. It was total memory-wipe, as if we'd waked in the hospital after an accident.

Today, my response to images seems permanently intensified. I am more easily moved, including more reactive and judgmental. The Barth story has sharpened in poignancy. The standard hospital and cop fare of prime-time TV rings flat and hollow. What's interesting is that I can perfectly well take death, including violent death, on the large or small screen as long as it has what we used to call "redeeming social value," as long as it deals seriously with the human struggle. The casual, technically competent gore that hourly spills from the tube sends me out of the room. Family pictures have, on the other hand, become more tender and significant.

Being the mother of a dead child is in some ways like being the mother of a toddler, wanting, with inevitable failure, to hold the moment, to remember exactly this, to connect in some immutable way with that which is demonstrably mutable and even now going, never to return. I scarcely gave a thought to whether there were images of Tim in motion. Now I discover there's an 8mm film of him at 2, toddling after a friend's bigger boy on Bainbridge Island; a TV interview of me, in which as a middle-schooler he rides around Lake Ella and tosses bread crumbs to the sea gulls; a couple of reels of Christmases; and a CD of a television program done in Iraq last December by Al-Jazeera.

This last was on the occasion of graduation for his Iraqi trainees in de-mining. Tim stands at the front of the 90 men, bearded like them, in a many-pocketed khaki vest, handing out their diplomas. There is a very brief interview in which he praises the men, then some American bureaucrat speaks at greater bureaucratic length, at which Tim's eyes slide ironic from side to side. Then there's a cut to a tableful of weapons, Tim's hand showing a mine; his face again. Watching, I can't help but put my hands out to touch him. But I'm moved in a not unbearable, not even quite painful way, and I realize that it's easy for me to see him alive but almost impossible to see him dead. He is alive to me only in my memory, but in my memory he can only be alive.

About the story. That its end cruelly fixes its final shape. The last line of the story inevitably contains its meaning. You cast back over the scenes to understand the significance, how the parts fit together, how character and chance and history converged, what clues you missed, how differently this or that scene looks in the light of what happened after. I accept that part of the job of grieving is to search, research, try to reach some minimally satisfying sense of why it ended this way. What is hard is that all the old stories have changed their point as well; all my favorite Tim anecdotes are skewed and spoiled.

For instance: the night that I sat on a step in the breakfast room, hair in curlers (I imagine this, surely?), in my robe, an abounding ashtray beside me, waiting up for 17-year-old Tim, to whom I had recently given his first car. He appeared at 4 a.m., shoes in hand, on tiptoe. I flipped the switch and scared the daylights out of him, might as well have brandished a rolling pin like a shrew in a cartoon. Next day I spoke of it to a friend, who put an end to such scenes by saying (always the punch line of this tale), "Not many of them kill themselves. And no mother ever prevented it by waiting up."

The end of a life may allow discovery, revelation, insight, but not as something capable of change. He was in a baby buggy someone had given us, an expensive, shiny thing, parked in my study in the city of Ghent, where he was born. I had picked a fistful of lilies of the valley and stuck them between two chrome bars on the buggy frame. He - fat, gurgling, 3 or 4 months old, in pale blue wool pants like baby lederhosen - flung his arms about at random and happened to hit the flowers. Which bounced. This happened three or four times, and then, as I watched, he figured it out. That it was a part of himself that made the white thing move. He aimed his arm. It worked. Again. Not in full control but trying, doing. I felt thrilled, privileged to have seen the moment.

I have thought of, probably told, this incident many times. But now it no longer exists on a continuum of discovery, capacity, control. It was a moment that meant a future. And now does not.

About comfort. That it is real. That it comes from people. That the effort to reach out, however rote, however demanded by mere etiquette, reassembles the shattered survivor bit by bit. I will never again hesitate to write a difficult card because "there's nothing to say." Eloquence is nice but not required. A postage stamp, an envelope, an e-mail, handwriting, a picture of a puppy or a rose - every ragtag scrap of sympathy and shared sorrow knits into a safety net of unimagined strength. Everyone says this, and anyone who hasn't experienced it suspects a whiff of sentimentality. Don't believe it. The classmate and the teacher, strangers, who showed up at his memorial; the Ranger who posted a tribute on the Web; the former roommate who sent Tim's favorite jokes; his Namibian family who took us in as family; every evidence that his life touched the life of someone else is a piece of the puzzle that means going on.

I do not have religion as a source of comfort, which some will think my misfortune. But for me, both myth and theory are forms of truth, the best we have. I hunger for and revere both stories and the verifiable world-as-it-is.

It turns out that virtually no family we know is untouched by suicide or violent early death. Joanna's brother died in his 20s, as did Laura's, as did Pat's. Bessie's son died in an accident, as did Anne's brother, Lou's sister, Randy's mom. Simone lost a husband, Hans a father, Monika and Stuart and Mitchell each a son, to suicide. Each of these people passed along some insight, some emotional sleight of hand or turn of phrase. And it was help in every case.

I have some kinds of comfort not everyone can count on. The foremost is a husband who has been there for me every moment, rock-solid, willing to be my wailing wall, who never expects or exacts any payment for it whatsoever, who understands how suddenly our lives changed course, and how long it takes to redirect the heart. Another solace is this putting of words one after the other, each of them a tiny mosaic tile of reconstituted self. When the words go into print and out to others, I have the response of strangers to sustain me: a Vietnam vet who explained, out of his own experience, that young soldiers suffer internal conflict because they believe their cause is just but are given means to achieve it that are not; a young woman whose family had been torn apart by political dissension but was cautioned by Tim's story to try to heal the rift; mothers who had lost sons and others who feared losing them.

Two friends (both English) thought I exposed too much. They offer a useful caution: Though I set little store by concealment, Tim himself was reticent; his tragedy is part of my story, but he is not material. One chilling e-mail from a jihadist said, "Congratulations - that is great news!" Even this grim message strengthened me; it contrasts so meagerly with the force of empathy.

About acceptance. That it is halting, piecemeal, and to be continued. Little by little I come to understand what happened to my son. I know that Tim saw one of his men crippled by an exploding mine. I know they were shot at in the Green Zone compound regularly. I know that he wanted to see his life as a heroic adventure. I know that he came to feel the war in Iraq was based on greed and lies. I know that he thought his plane was fired on as it lifted out of Baghdad, and that back in Namibia, heart-rendingly, he told a friend he was "ashamed to be an American."

What I struggle to understand is why, in the first place, young men love battle and old men send them into it. Why is it that, generation after generation - from Troy to Tikrit - we mourn the pointless waste of a generation in that war, discover the mismanagement of generals and lies of bureaucrats, and then for this war trot out again the same phatic phrases: ultimate sacrifice, love of country, finest hour? The research comes out, is rehashed and debated and rehearsed: The suicide rate among troops in Iraq is almost a third higher than the Army's historical average; one out of six Iraq veterans suffers from post-traumatic stress, etc., etc. Generation to generation, war to war, what we change is mainly the name of the affliction: shell shock, combat neurosis, battle fatigue, PTSD.

Why did my son seek glory in this particular theater? To test myself, he used to say. I try to imagine some parallel in my own experience and remember feeling as a child in Arizona that the real was not enough: the dusty back road to the drugstore, spiky grass, Sunday school, Swiss steak and Heinz French dressing. My aspirations ran to Technicolor, later to literature. Was this something like what Tim felt, the need for heightened senses against the dull, droll present, the mere and dreary mundane?

For the first few months after Tim's death, I felt that I lived two parallel lives, one that carried forward with the momentum of the years, with its routines, pleasures, petty annoyances - and running along beside it the enormous fact, which could at any time overwhelm and flood me. Now these streams are integrated and Tim is never wholly absent from my mind. The life I'm living is recognizably my life again, but his loss has been subsumed into my identity: It is also who I am.

My two most powerful memories of the funeral in Windhoek are not of pain, but of comedy and tenderness. In the one, we make our slow way on foot to the grave, passing through a crowd of 100 Herrera Africans waiting for their own funeral cortege. They stand in brilliant satin gowns and matching headdresses shaped to mimic longhorn cattle, staring in amazement at Tim's brother Alex, who, in full McKenzie kilt regalia, is dirge-marching behind the coffin. How Tim would have loved that sight!

In the other, 3-year-old Thyra stands at the head of the grave, sun on her platinum hair and silver shoes, in the velvet dress I made for her last Christmas, sprinkling sand from a little spade onto roses as they were tossed into the grave. She had been told that we were "planting the roses for Daddy." Later, she told me that "the ceremony was very long and very hot, but very beautiful."

From Tim's gear in the attic I salvaged a road sign stolen as a teenage prank. Now when I look up from my desk I see pictures of Peter with toddler Anne walking among the dunes, of Alex post-punk in a blue shirt in front of a red-and-white striped canopy, and of Tim as he sat at the kitchen table on the last day I saw him alive: smiling, bearded, blue-eyed, beautiful. Beside them, clipped and laminated from the New York Times, a photo of an Iraqi father prostrate over the coffin of his son. Above these is the pilfered sign: "CAUTION: THE WEARING OF HARD HATS IS REQUIRED ON THIS JOB."

Forty years is not nothing. If Tim's life was cut short, still it was not a waste. What I have learned about grief is that it is full of terrible sweetness. And that parenting is very long, and very hot, but very beautiful.

- Janet Burroway is an essayist, novelist and playwright at Florida State University. To comment on this story, please call 727 892-2924 or e-mail features@sptimes.com

[Last modified December 9, 2004, 08:15:06]