— How would I tell our young children?

by Rachel Zimmerman

It was 10 years ago — July 1, 2014 — that everything changed.

A grim-faced state trooper pulled up to my house. I saw him from the living room window as he stepped out of the cruiser. He slammed the car door shut and took his time letting himself in through the wooden gate. He turned down the stone path. His slow, plodding footsteps gave him away. I flung open the front door and rushed down the steps toward him.

Part of me knew before I asked.

I remember the opposing compulsions tugging me in two at that moment: I want to know, I don’t want to know, like a child in a field, picking petals off a daisy. He loves me, he loves me not. I hesitated, just for a second, to speak. But the cop had a mission to complete. He was steady, stone-faced, with militaristic precision to his steps.

All morning, I’d been desperate for news of Seth, my husband, an MIT professor and father of our daughters, then 8 and 11. Here, finally, was the messenger. So often, the truth is nuanced, multifaceted, subjective, shaded gray. But this fact striding toward my doorstep was that rare, eminent type of truth: particular and inescapable.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

The cop’s response began with a gesture of his head. I saw it start to move, slowly, up and then down. As it did, mine began to shift too, rotating to the right, to the left and back, almost like we were locked in a dance, except that his motions finally stopped, while mine grew steadily faster, overwhelming my entire body, shaking off every moment that came before.

The cop nodded, “Yes.”

I fell to my knees, weeping, howling the only thoughts I could summon into words: “The girls, the girls, Oh God, the girls,” like an old vinyl record stuck in a scratched groove. The trooper took my arm. The world collapsed into a sickening, hyper-real haze. I floated above my body briefly, saw myself below like a Sicilian widow in a Coppola movie.

But I could not dissociate from the pain for my young daughters. Kneeling there, I felt I’d failed my key job as a mother, to protect them. As I tried to stand back up, my limbs, once solid, had now turned rubbery, unreliable. I leaned against the policeman as he led me back indoors, handing me over to a cousin who had arrived during my frantic morning search.

As we entered my living room, the state trooper cleared his throat uncomfortably. He asked if my daughters’ names were Sophia and Julia. I nodded. He looked straight at me: “There’s a note.” It was left on the dashboard of Seth’s car, abandoned on the Tobin Bridge from which he jumped.

I thought I’d vomit. “I don’t want it in here,” I said. “I can’t read it.” My cousin walked with the cop back to his car where she took the single sheet of paper.

She quickly folded it away, promising to keep it safe. Then she returned, placed her arms around my shoulders and begged me to breathe. In that instant all of the previous roles I’d embodied — wife, journalist, daughter — dissolved. The clarity of my new vocation as a ferocious watchdog mother infused my entire nervous system. I felt myself lapse into a kind of madness. My reality seemed impossible to inhabit. How do I tell my children, “Daddy died.” And, worse, how he died. They would never recover.

I sat on the couch, the last place I’d seen Seth that morning. My body was numb except for the dry matte of my tongue, thick and sour, like a bad piece of meat. Staring at the unfinished puzzle left on the floor, the one he’d worked on with the girls only hours earlier, I felt that language itself had betrayed me. Soothing words like “Marriage,” “Promise,” “Father” struck me now as poisonous, no longer bestowing the luxurious comforts that had tethered our lives. I had no backup to cling to, no map.<

Yet I was fully aware of a deadline looming. The state trooper had delivered the news of Seth’s death shortly before noon. Within about an hour, I’d snapped into a mental state that was laser-focused on solving a single problem: How to tell the girls.

Now in my small office upstairs, I glanced at the old digital clock atop my wooden desk. It read 1:10 p.m. Day camp pickup was at three. How did a mother tell young children about their father’s death, I wondered. I desperately needed a script.

As a journalist, there was one thing I understood well: how to track down an expert for guidance. I dialed a trusted work colleague and explained that I required fast help finding the right words for Sophia and Julia. “I’m on it,” she said.

***

Ten minutes later, my colleague phoned back. I should stand by, she said. Then the phone rang again. Accustomed to speaking with strangers, I immediately blurted out my dilemma as soon as Dr. Paula Rauch, a psychiatrist from Massachusetts General Hospital, spoke her name.

“My husband is dead. My kids don’t know. What do I say?”

As I sat clutching my phone, Rauch calmly walked me through the language I might use to explain the unimaginable to my children.

I should speak plainly, she said.

I could tell them their daddy had an illness in his brain. We couldn’t see it, but just like cancer, it took over his body and made him die.

There was nothing any of us could have done. It was nobody’s fault.

Don’t lie, she advised, but don’t offer too many details.

I nodded throughout, saying little, taking notes.

Let them know they are safe and you’re not leaving, she said. Acknowledge their pain. Reassure them you will muddle through, things will get better.

Hanging up, I exhaled for what felt like the first time all day. I always appreciated a solid plan. This prescription, in the form of her words, offered me a lifeline.

When the time came, I drove the quarter mile from my house to the children’s camp and parked in the nearby lot. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in the car. I knew it was best to speak to the kids on my own, but I was also becoming aware of a dynamic I’d largely avoided in parenting thus far: requiring help.

Before this moment, I had considered myself one of those older, therefore wiser, super-moms who could effortlessly go it alone. Now, I knew I wouldn’t be able to drive the girls home by myself after telling them. So, there in the car with me was my mother, who’d broken the speed limit all the way from Cape Cod to Cambridge that morning when I called her with the news. I’d also asked Maria, the children’s longtime babysitter, to join me for support.

They waited in the car as I stepped outside. I fixed my eyes on the girls as I walked hesitantly toward them. I felt the contrast between the burdensome weight of my knowledge and their easy, lighthearted ignorance. I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo of Julia, cross-legged on the ground, sitting in a circle of friends, giggling and clapping hands with the other children awaiting pickup. I wanted a record of what I believed would be her final carefree moment.

In a robotic stupor, my body adopted the persona I’d rehearsed over the past hours. I waved. They approached me. I led them to a wobbly chrome table outside Anna’s Taqueria, their favorite burrito place. I pulled both girls in close and told them I had very bad news.

“Girls, a terrible, terrible thing happened,” I said, holding their small hands. I paused. “Daddy died.” I couldn’t bear the silence that I expected would follow, so I began chattering to fill the space. “It was kind of an accident, but worse,” I said, grasping for phrasing that might offer some slight relief. “I don’t know all the details, there’s still a lot we don’t understand. But it’s true. And I am so, so sorry and I know it feels impossible now, but we will stay together and take care of each other and go on.”

The disbelief on their faces was so stark that I felt I had to repeat myself. “He’s dead.”

Sophia, who looks like Seth — with her tight, dark curls and deep set eyes — cried, “No!” and “How?”

Julia stood up on her chair: “I’m not even double digits yet,” she wailed.

***

When sundown finally arrived, someone, mercifully, brought me an Ativan. I tossed four extra pillows onto my bed. “We’re sleeping together,” I told the girls. It’s something we never repeated, despite my offers, because it triggered flashbacks of that day. While I held them, I replayed the nightmare morning in my head: the unanswered calls to Seth’s phone, the rising dread, the cop arriving, the note. Each memory, I believed, eroded any hope for an untroubled future.

With my children’s hot breath against my neck, and the time nearing 3 a.m., I tried to blot out these thoughts. Soon, we would have to endure another day. There would be decisions for me to make. I tried to yield toward a woozy, drugged half-sleep, still checking, with each passing hour, that their small chests continued to rise and fall.

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