Make-believe and grief

This poem and Padraig O’Tuama’s reflection on it made me remember the make-believe game that helped my family after my brother Dan’s funeral. Dan died of ALS when he was 52, in 2006. In the poem, the boys are pretending to be bears digging a grave as they grieved one of their mothers—and the other’s aunt—, who was dying in the hospital. Padraig talked about the escapism their make-believing gave them, and the profound relationship between play and reality.

Play and reality are partners in this poem, and not partners that are in tension — partners that are in profound relationship with each other.

After Dan’s funeral, our family gathered at my parent’s house. It was the “usual suspects” who came to Kok’s Coffee after church every other Sunday—aunts, uncles, cousins, and more. We sat in a big circle in the family room, with extra kitchen chairs placed between the couch and chairs. Grown-ups got chairs and kids sat on the floor.

My mother had told me previous to this day that before a different funeral—my Uncle Hip’s—the family was sitting in a circle like this and one of my aunts said, “Everyone looks so sad.” My mother said, “We are.” That was true this day, too. No one was crying at the moment but we were quiet and subdued, having a hard time figuring out what to say to each other.

Dan’s two grandchildren, Kendall and Tyrel, started a make-believe game in the hallway. They had a little tablet of paper, a marker, and a ball. One of them would come into the living room, tell one of the adults it was their turn and accompany them to the hallway. The adult’s task was to kick the ball from one end of the hallway to the other. Then one of the kids would write down their grade on a page of the tablet and give it to the adult. As the kids went around the room, whenever a grown-up came back into the hallway, we would all ask, “What’d you get?” Kendall and Ty were not easy graders! If I remember right, I got an F. No matter the grade, it garnered laughs and teasing. A great escape, just like in the poem.

“Make Believe”
by Jacob Shores-Argüello.

“As children, my cousin and I once
dug into the side of our mountain,

a terrible brown work.
That morning we’d made the cold walk

to the hospital and watched
his mother for a long time.

She was unchained from her machines,
shrinking into ordinary.

It was our first death,
and we looked at our small hands.

But no, my cousin insisted,
these are not our hands,

they are bear hands.
And we walked to our mountain,

shaped our cave:
one meter, two meters, three.

We bears were making a home.
We roared, and shook off our human bones,

until angels howled like dogs
in the valley below.”

Padraig said:

There’s the play at becoming a bear, and that’s important, but underneath all of that there’s the real strength of the reality of being together. And how many of us, in whatever grief we’ve gone through in our life, would’ve liked somebody who could’ve entered into the reality of our grief, as well as the fantasy of responding to that grief, with us?

How blessed are we that we had, and still have, both—others who “entered into the reality of our grief, as well as the fantasy of responding to that grief”?