Privilege and Isolation

I’m going to write something not everyone will agree with because privilege is an interesting thing.

The world knows there is a horrible genocide happening. It’s not new but it took some extreme circumstances to get the attention of most of the world.

As such, our social justice warriors in our lives with their good intentions share the images of the suffering families and children to stand up for the injustice.
The hope that the shocking images seen will inspire more to advocate and fight and donate. You are saddened, you are disgusted, and you are angry. You want those privileged enough to look away and continue on with life, to stand up and fight.

When this first “began” with the attack in Israel, I began to notice I was having flashbacks of the physical sensations and symptoms I felt on Charlie’s last day on Earth. Intense nausea but an inability to release it. The feeling of needing to faint and the sense of shock setting into my body. These feelings came up over and over again, out of the blue, catching me off guard. At the grocery store, on a walk in my house. Innocent mothers, fathers and siblings throughout Palestine and Israel were going through the same thing I had experienced. A loss for no reason. For no purpose. Too young. Without a chance to truly experience life. So suddenly.

I don’t forget what it’s like. I don’t forget how it feels to question why. Why us? Why him. What did we do to deserve this? I ask it every day. Ivars asks it every day. Riley asks it every day. I don’t forget what it’s like to wish you could trade places with your child to protect them. I don’t forget what it it’s like to feel the out of body experience as your soul tries to escape with the one that is leaving too early. That’s what it was. An out of body experience. I could feel the nausea, I felt like I could faint or did some how faint and yet I’m still physically present. I had a panic attack like no other I’ve had before. I knew when my baby was gone. Not just because of the physical signs but because I could not feel him anymore. I felt like I was watching from a distance. My soul trying to frantically find him and bring him back.

When my well intentioned social justice fighting friends share photos or videos of suffering children or grieving parents I hear my own wailing. I see my own pain. I see Riley’s pain. I see Ivars pain. I feel a pain for those parents who are feeling this too. I have grown to know a lot of loss moms. They all feel the same. We are barely existing through our own grief and our own losses and we feel a level of pain for those families that only another loss parent can experience. The way it randomly strikes sometimes, is like my soul has received a message from another parent who has felt a part of themselves die as they watched their child die. The helplessness, the anger, the fear.

An easy thing would be to say I am logging off of social media for a while. I am very tempted to. Logging off though will also isolate me as social media is where I have met many loss moms. Loss moms in Toronto, in Vaughn, Niagara, (yes mostly Ontario) but also in the US. They are not people I can get up and go see when the grief is too much.

Today I scrolled through my stories feed. I typically skip past the photos and videos as quick as I can. This morning one struck me harder than the rest. I saw a little boy and perhaps he didn’t look as much like Charlie as I think but all it took was about a second to see his face and his fear and I immediately was struck with the images of Charlie the day I took him to emergency. The images I try so hard not to play over and over in my head. The fear and the fight as they try to get his breathing supported. What it used to look like when he’d have his “breath holding spells” or possibly seizures and knowing he experienced one in emergency after they removed Ivars and I from the room. Haunted by the thought of how much fear he must have had as he watched his parents walk away while an alarming amount of strangers pinned him down and poked and prodded at him. These images are often so clear in my brain it’s like burn in on a computer or TV screen. You know when it would stay on a still screen or something for a long time and the image would permanently be there. These images just stay there. Meanwhile, the joyful ones I have to work my brain so hard to find. I have to stare at photographs for extended periods of time to make sure I remember what it looked like when he smiled too.

Knowing out there in Palestine, suffering children are also terrified, trying to understand where their parents are. I only saw this story for about a second. I swiped as quick as I could. It was too late. It cycles now on repeat in my mind as if it was my little boy. Reminding me over and over again of his own death. It’s also weird because I feel like a part of my brain has added this image of this child that I thought looked like Charlie into its repertoire of photos. Like even though I know it isn’t him the image bank identified it as him. Like on iPhones were you can have it identify faces and it sorts them all by person but sometimes it thinks someone else is that person. Except when it asks me to verify it and I say it’s not him it brings it back like “are you sure?”.

I realized today that those sharing these videos and these photos are privileged themselves beyond the fact that they don’t live in these war torn countries. They don’t watch in their heads their own child dying on repeat. They don’t live their days out trying to find ways they could have saved their child. They may grieve to a degree for others losses but they don’t feel the life sucking way it feels when you’ve watched your own child die in the arms of yourself, their sister and their father. After your heart has been shattered and every morning you wake up and you physically feel like the world is working to destroy every last bit of it. Twisting and turning the little pieces. Tossing them into the sharpened blade of a blender.

We took our last family photo with Charlie in the hospital as we held him and said goodbye. I will never share it. I haven’t been able to look at it myself until recently. The pain in the picture is so intense.

I am sorry for these families whose children’s dying moments are caught on camera and broadcasted to the world. In news reports and strangers instagrams, when instead those strangers could be focusing on the links, and resources to support humanitarian aid, or the petitions and protests for a ceasefire. For intervention. The people who are going to be motivated by the pictures are the same people who would do something about it anyways. The people who choose to ignore it are still going to ignore it. You may actually find by providing them with the tools to show support instead of bombarding them with painful photos of what should be private moments for a family might actually get a better response.

So today I make a list of friends I unfortunately will need to mute for an undetermined amount of time. It sucks because I also love their regular content and I appreciate how I can connect with them.

As we journey through our grief, we’ve left family chats because seeing the pictures of babies and toddlers reaching milestones Charlie never got to (either because of the regression or because he was not here to reach them) cause so much pain. We’ve stopped talking to people who can’t set aside their own wants and needs even during a time that was supposed to be focused on Charlie and not them. We’ve skipped houses while trick-or-treating and chosen not to go to parties where there are skeletons, graves, murder and death. We’ve stopped sharing our feelings with people because they can’t understand how some things are triggers and other things are not and in those cases often we aren’t just met with surprise but frustration as if the things we find triggering are weird and random. We’ve stopped dealing with people who THINK they know what we need even after we tell them what we need and what we don’t. Now I dwindle the list down again.

Grief is isolating.