Death of a Child
More Info on “The Most Beautiful Gravestone I’ve Ever Seen”
Last Friday, I posted this photo on my Confessions of a Funeral Director Facebook Page.
Since I posted it, over 2,000,000 people have viewed it.
Many have asked, “Where is this gravestone located?” “Who is the gravestone for?” And various other questions.
Here’s Matthew Stanford Robison’s “Find a Grave” page that will answer most of your questions:
| Birth: | Sep. 23, 1988 |
| Death: | Feb. 21, 1999 |
 This unique monument shows the young boy jumping upward, out of his wheelchair. Confined to the chair most of his young life, he is now free of earthly burdens. “And then it shall come to pass, that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow.” Peacefully in his sleep on Sunday, February 21, 1999, our cherished son, brother and friend, Matthew Stanford Robison was received into a state of happiness, and began his rest from troubles, care, and sorrow in the arms of his Savior and friend Jesus Christ. Matthew was a joy and inspiration to all who were privileged to know him. He was a testament to the supreme divinity of the soul and an embodiment of the completeness our spirits yearn for. The godliness of his soul inspired, influenced and blessed all who knew him. He came into this world as a miracle and left this world as a miracle. Born with severe earthly disabilities on September 23, 1988 in Salt Lake City to Johanna (Anneke) Dame Robison and Ernest Parker Robison. At birth, Matthew’s life expectancy was anticipated to be only hours long. However, fortitude, strength, and endurance, combined with the power of God allowed Matthew to live ten and one-half years enveloped in the love of his family and friends. His family was privileged to spend time with him here upon earth, to learn from his courage and marvel at his constant joy and happiness in the face of struggle. His family will be eternally changed by his presence and temporally changed by his passing. His presence inspired all those who knew him. He opened their hearts as well as their eyes. He is survived by his parents: Ernest and Anneke; sisters and brothers, Korrin, Marc, Jared, and Emily of Murray, Utah, and Elizabeth (Czech Prague Mission) Also, grandparents and other family members. A heartfelt thanks to his special care givers, especially Shauna Langford, and others at Liberty Elementary School. |
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| Burial: Salt Lake City Cemetery Salt Lake City Salt Lake County Utah, USA |
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Here is part of Matthew’s obituary:
“They’ll Be Happy”
Says my grandfather as he looks at the handsome face of a 13 year old boy lying motionless on our stretcher.
The last time the family saw him was a couple days before Easter.
Now, a day removed from Easter, they will view the body of their son one final time before he’s taken to the crematory.
Mothers dread walking into their son’s room and finding their boy making out with a girl. They don’t look forward to walking into their son’s room and finding them with cigarette in hand.
But few mothers have experienced this: walking into your son’s room to find him lying on the floor with his face distorted and discolored from livor mortis. It was a heart problem that the doctors said was under the control of proper medication.
The mother came through the funeral home door with a laugh, trailed by her husband (the father), their son and a couple friends.
They couldn’t have done this alone. “Thank God for the blessings of friends and family” I think to myself.
Those laughs are now tears as they cut some of the locks of his hair and place them neatly in our small keepsake bags. My dad walks past me and says, “Hardest thing I have to see today.” That after he embalmed a 47 year old cancer patient in the morning and then held the hand of the cancer patient’s wife while she made arrangements.
Silence.
10 minutes pass.
15.
Tears communicate instead of their words.
“He looks so good”, one of them says.
We wait, feeling the temperature of the room with that empathy sense that funeral directors develop.
We’ve done what we can to remove the livor, leaving his facial skin looking like that of a china doll. And once they begin walking away from the stretcher, the laughter begins again.
I start an internal dialogue as I attempt to understand the contrast of tears and laughter:
“It’s got to be unhealthy for them to be laughing.”
“Maybe, but how would you feel when the last time you saw your son’s face it was discolored?”
“But this is so unnatural! The whole thing … the death itself, the way they found him and now … laughter?!?”
“Imagine all the darkness they’ve seen … and now this little glimmer of light … small as it may be … they can see their son one last time the way they remember him. Something as simple as his cleared up skin may be the brightest thought they’ve had for days. Let them laugh now … there will be plenty of crying to do later.
And with that I consoled myself; reassuring myself that when a child dies, sometimes, somehow … it can be natural for parents to leave the funeral home happy.
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As with all my post, circumstances have been changed and rearranged so as to protect the privacy of this family.
An Unimaginable Decision: A Funeral Director’s Reflections on the Sandy Hook School Shooting
Today is the day that some of the obituaries for the victims of the Newtown Shooting will begin to be published. You can view some of those obits here. Grab a box of tissues before you read them.
What isn’t seen in those obituaries is that in order for them to be published, the parents and the families had to make one of the most difficult decisions of their life: to view or not to view.
As the details of the shooting were coming out over the weekend, I was particularly struck by one piece of information: the shooter had shot each of his victims multiple times (3 to 11 times). Many will interpret such information as farther evidence of Adam Lanza’s psychosis (and that would be a correct interpretation), but we funeral directors see it from a different perspective.
When there’s a tragic, sudden death, when there isn’t an opportunity to say one last “good-bye”, it’s a natural, innate response for the family to want to see their deceased one last time, just to see them face-to-face and say that final parting gesture. No matter how opposed you may be to viewing the deceased, those walls are torn down in a tragedy and “we just HAVE to see our little angel.”
As a funeral director, it’s often our job to let the family know just how bad the deceased is mangled. We then have to be honest with ourselves, “Can we reconstruct the severe trauma? Can we make this look somewhat normal?
The conversation goes something like this (and it assumes the family wants/needs to view):
Funeral director: “Your loved one experience physical trauma. I will do everything I can to make him/her viewable. But, you have to decide what you want.
One. You can have a private viewing at the funeral home and then cremate after you view. We can have a memorial service whenever you want.
Two. You can have a private viewing and then have a closed casket for the funeral service.
Three. You can have a private viewing and if you feel comfortable with the way he/she looks, you can have a public viewing as well.
What follows is the beginning of one of the toughest decisions of their life. They want to view, but do they really want to see their child with ….
Gun shot wounds are unpredictable creatures. They can be utterly destructive or they can be so small you wouldn’t even know the wound was there. My guess is that the wounds at Sandy Hook were of the former and not the latter.
And this is the nature of evil. It keeps taking and taking and taking. Not only was your son or daughter taken, but now – because of the trauma of these deaths, you have to make a decision you NEVER, EVER could even imagine. You could never imagine your child would be taken in this manner. You could never imagine that you’d have this insatiable desire to see your child. And you never thought you’d have to confront this unimaginable reality: your child may be too distorted to be viewed.
This shouldn’t be happening. This should never happen. But, over the past weekend this decision was made 27 times.
After the Sandy Hook Shootings: What Happens Next?
On Friday, December 14th, Sandy Hook Elementary experienced a tragedy that is creating a new normal for the town of Newtown, Connecticut.
The very same day as the school shootings I worked a viewing at a small Mennonite church in Gap, PA. As with most Mennonite churches, the pastor is bi-vocational. This specific pastor works as a part-time pastor and full-time salesman for an agricultural feed company. The area that he covers includes Bart Township, the same area that experienced the Amish school shootings in 2006.
We walked in to the church, set up the casket and flowers and I broke the news to the pastor about the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. His countenance fell as he immediately connected the Sandy Hook shooting to the Amish School shooting. “I’ve been the salesman there for years. All the Amish families are my friends. Just the other day one of the mothers who lost a daughter told me she’s reminded of her daughter every time she sees children coming home from school.”
This, like all tragedy, finds a life of its own. Friday, December 14th marks the first day of a new normal for Newtown, Connecticut. In many ways, this new normal is a sad birth. In this blog post, I want to look at the practical side of how the next couple days and weeks will look for Newtown.
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TRAUMA RESPONSE: Thankfully, there are professionals who are being tasked this very moment in setting up response teams. The American Red Cross, various hospice programs and the American Psychological Association all have large scale trauma response teams who are trained to counsel children and parents in psychological and bereavement support, organize support groups and guide the community back to some type of semblance. The response teams will evaluate, support, offer guidance and help as the children, parents and teachers begin this dark journey.
Children do grieve. As long as there are relationships formed, there’s grief. And while the general public is not very adept at understanding a child’s ability to grasp death, those from the APA, Red Cross and hospice programs are. All the children will experience traumatic grief (CTG), many will experience post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the hope will be that these children, like the youth from Columbine, will bond together and find deep fellowship in their grief, sorrow and pain.
Pragmatic questions like, “When do we restart school?” and “When should I go back to work?” will be guided by these wonderful angels from the response teams.
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BODY IDENTIFICATION AND FAMILY NOTIFICATION: By deduction, the families know whether or not their son or daughter, husband or wife is dead by the simple fact that they didn’t come home. But, their son or daughter, husband or wife may be so … that the bodies have yet to be identified.
Some families may be called into the hospital to visually identify their loved ones, other bodies may be too distorted and will need to be identified through other, more technical means. All the bodies will be studied, some autopsied, some given for organ donation and one – the shooters – will be looked upon with contempt by all who view him.
Once identified, the families will start the funeral arrangements.
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These police were apparently some of the first on the scene of the Newtown shootings.
FUNERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS: There’s only one funeral home in Newtown, Connecticut. And while I doubt the Honan Funeral Home will bury all the victims and the shooter, they will probably bury many of them. From what I can tell by the obituary section on their website, the Honan Funeral Home is not a very large funeral home. In fact, they’ve only advertised 12 obituaries in the past year. They will need help as they could very well have twice their yearly volume in one week. And thankfully, per this article, other surrounding funeral directors are offering their help to Honan.
Any funeral home and funeral director who works with these families will need their own type of support over the months to come. Most of us don’t enter this business because we’re cold hearted; rather, we enter it because we’re generally big hearted. These tragedies hurt us as well. Embalming the body of an elementary school student that has been autopsied and shot is enough to permanently disturb anyone, including a seasoned funeral director.
Questions of “how will this family pay for this funeral?” are likely taken off the table, either by the funeral director’s generosity or by nonprofits like Bury a Child (run by my friend Nancy Burban, who lives in a neighboring town) who are already donating caskets and raising funds for funeral expenses of the children (UPDATE: Per Nancy, all the funds have been raised to cover the funeral expenses of the victims).
Police and other first responders will carry a burden that no man or woman should ever carry. They have seen images no one should ever see.
Pastors, too, will experience many sleepless nights as they prepare words for an unspeakable event.
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THE NEAR FUTURE: The funerals will be large, sad and no doubt full of horrible theology explaining how we can’t question God, how God will turn this into good, etc. Yet, despite the horrible theology, many churches will find themselves full. Churches will comfort some families. The community will become more closely knit. Memorials and monuments will be built to honor the memory of the children and the teachers. School will eventually reconvene. On December 14th, 2013 CNN will hold a special marking the one year anniversary of the shootings. And in five years the world will forget.
But the pain will linger. The grief will remain in the hearts of the parents and their families. Time will not heal these wounds. This is the new normal for Newtown, Connecticut.
They Say That Time Assuages: A Guest Post by Tess Pope
About Tess: I am a professional freelance flutist in Boston. My favorite gig in town is playing with the Boston Ballet pit orchestra! Thirty years after graduating from The Juilliard School with a BM and MM in music, I am taking classes once again and thinking about returning to school for a Ph.D; something that will blend my interests at the intersection of the brain, the mind and the spirit and that can have some impact on the welfare of children. I am the mother of four children (two sets of twins). My youngest son, Hunter, died suddenly of myocarditis (a rare virus attacked his heart). We are bereft, yet still, we continue.
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They say that time assuages
Time never did assuage
An actual suffering strengthens
As sinew do, with age
Time is a test of trouble
But not it’s remedy
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no malady. — Emily Dickinson
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Tess with Hunter’s hands on her head.
At night, when everyone else is sleeping, and I am lying awake, unable to sleep, and unable to think and unable to remember, I go through my catalogue of memorized poems and “work” on them. I parse out their meter, rhyme scheme, meaning – and use thinking about them to keep myself from thinking. If I search through my memories, or allow the longing for Hunter to speak itself in my mind, then I am done for. There will be no sleep, only this stretching out of time, and a kick in my gut of what I can only describe as ‘horror’. It is a feeling so physical, and so utter and the pain that follows is also so physical and utter that I feel I have to STOP. My head and body ache, like a full body migraine – one part wanting the memories and images of my boy, and the other part in such sharp pain that everything closes down. And so I abandon the attempt again.
Time is always on my mind. What does it mean to be ‘in time’? Does time exist? Or is it a construct for finite minds? “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” What does it mean to be ‘outside time’? And is that where Hunter is? I spend all my time reading about quantum mechanics and it’s implications from the viewpoint of various physicists. I read about Godel and the idea of a “World Without Time”, about mysticism and mathematics – “The Loom of God”. And what it really comes down to is this “I want my boy back.” And I agree with Emily, time never did assuage. I can’t bear to hear people talk about time and it’s healing properties. Time cannot heal. Only ‘outside time’ can heal. Because the only healing to be had is in connection. “Only connect.” And he is not here. He is outside time.
When people speak of healing I think they mean that the pain will become bearable. But the word ‘healing’ is so deceptive. It is not like a cut where the skin will knit back together, or a rash that some salve can heal. This is loss, – it is an amputation. The site of the wound may heal, but the limb will always be missing.
Also, what would it mean to “heal” from the loss of one’s own child? His cells are still in my body, from before his birth. They were so hard won, these children. Twenty years earlier and I never would have had them. I used to say “They will never wonder if they were wanted. I have the medical records to prove it.” And the misery and sickness of the pregnancies. And the worry, wondering if Molly would even be born alive, with a tumor on her lung. And at every roadblock, we had the best possible outcome. They were all born healthy, and Hunter was even born feet first. He loved how that distinguished him from his siblings. I would tell him the story how after Molly was born, he turned in the womb so that he was breach, but the doctor simply said “No problem! He’s the 2nd twin”, reaching his hand to pull Hunter out by his feet. It was the only birth that brought absolutely no pain, and still all the joy.
More than twenty years ago I went to visit Madeleine L’Engle at St. John the Divine, where she was a librarian, in New York. I lived close by and having read all her books, I took a very deep breath and wrote to her to ask for a visit. It was the most casual thing for her. She was as kind as you would think from her books. But I was still nervous and overly self-conscious and, knowing that her husband had recently died, I said something stupid about death – as if it were a kind of philosophical problem that didn’t really exist. She smiled at me sweetly, (like an indulgent grandmother I suppose) and said “Oh, no. Death is terrible. Death is horrible.” And I understood. Right then, I understood that God hates death. But mostly I remember her calmly smiling at me as she said it. The smile was, in a way, an invitation to wrestle with the hard stuff, – not pass over it with platitudes, or philosophy, or sloppy thinking, – or wishful thinking for that matter. Just like Emily in this poem. Time never did assuage. And I will always want my boy back.
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Visit Tess’ blog to read more of her story.
