TO HELP FROM heartbreak
A priest who lost a child passes on the lessons of grief in ‘The Night Lake’
In 2014, Liz Tichenor was a recently ordained Episcopal priest living in a cabin at a church camp on the shores of Lake Tahoe with her husband, Jesse, a camp counselor, and their newborn son, Fritz.
On Jan. 24, Fritz, who was 40 days old, became severely distressed and wouldn’t stop crying. The doctor at the urgent care center examined the baby but couldn’t find anything wrong.
Hours later, as his parents lay in bed with the infant, Fritz stopped breathing. Jesse, who taught cardiopulmonary resuscitation, performed CPR while Liz called 911. Paramedics rushed Fritz to a hospital emergency room, where efforts to revive him failed.
“It was now official. I became the mother of a dead son,” Liz Tichenor writes in the opening of “The Night Lake: A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief” (Counterpoint, $26).
What follows is a mother’s agonizing attempt to navigate unimaginable loss — “Nothing would be guaranteed anymore,” she writes. Compounding her overwhelming grief, Liz Tichenor’s mother had recently committed suicide.
Liz Tichenor, 36, is the rector of the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection in the Bay Area community of Pleasant Hill. She and her husband are raising two children. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
Your memoir is especially frank. Most people never consider the step-by-step process that follows such a tragedy.
A
I felt terribly unprepared for all the things that happened next because nobody really thinks this could happen to them. But also because I hadn’t heard the stories about what it’s really like to engage the tactical side of grieving. I thought, “Why aren’t we talking about this? Why does it have to be a secret we each go through and learn on our own when we could be doing that work together?”
Q
What was the reaction of your parishioners and community when you began sharing what had happened?
A
I could have chosen to be really private about both deaths, but they felt like public deaths. My mom’s death was on the front page of a newspaper. Similarly, the last anybody had seen of me, I was hugely pregnant just before I went on leave, then people saw the birth announcement and all the new-baby photos on social media. Then, all of a sudden, he was gone. It felt like it would have been incredibly false of me to not share at least some of that.
Q
Did talking about it turn out to help others?
A
Yes, to make a path for those who never had space to talk about their own losses. To have someone who is 80 years old who lost a child 60 years ago, say “I hold that loss in a different way now; thank you” felt like a gift and real encouragement to keep going.
Q
You write that, for the most part, receiving sympathy cards “poured acid into my broken heart.”
A
I want to believe that most people take the time to send cards from a place of care, but it’s more a symptom of our culture in the way we are so stridently death-denying. It plays out today being all about the feelings of the person observing the grief from a few steps removed. They want to say something kind, but also keep it at arm’s length and make themselves feel better in the process. In times like these, it’s not about feeling better; it’s about loving people and sitting with them.
Q
How have the deaths of your mother and your son affected your role as an Episcopal priest?
A
I have big and unresolved questions that matter to me on a cellular level. I have no patience for the pat answers — the “Everything happens for a reason” and “God has a plan for you.” When terrible things happen that have no explanation, where is God in that? Can we sit in that discomfort of not having an answer?
But I treasure that as a place to join people together by asking these questions together. It’s central to what it means to be human, even if there will never be an answer, but just an “I don’t know, but I want to try living this way.”
Q
What have you done to find some sense of comfort and control, and learn how to live with grief, if such a thing is even possible?
A
Grief can present as an incredibly isolating experience. There were times when I felt totally alone, yet so much of grief is universal, part of the human condition.
So deciding to invite other people into that, to ask for a hand, to trust people with the underbelly of it and feel so vulnerable — frankly, that wasn’t always received well.
There were times when I would put myself out there to share something that was really tender, and it would fall flat.
Yet I’m only here because of all the people who joined me and carried me — friends, family, my spiritual director, my therapist. Grief was something we had to learn and build together, and we don’t always get it right. It’s still unfolding.
Q
On the two-year anniversary of Fritz’s death, you write that you were distance-running in the hills above Berkeley when you had a vision of Mary, the mother of God. Ten months later, on that same path you had a brief conversation with her. What did these moments mean to you?
A
What those encounters and others did for me was pull me into awareness of there being so much more to the story. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to explain or understand, but I saw and felt life and guidance and truth that was beyond me. Yet at the same time, it was all right there and available.
It cracked me open to more of a sense of wonder, and a willingness to entertain the possibility that life is more mysterious than we want to pin it down as being.
Those encounters gave me permission to sit with mystery and have that be an OK place to live. I don’t have to understand.
Q
What counsel would you give to others in grief?
A
You can’t do soul-bearing with every person, but I would encourage people to do the vulnerable work of seeking community, whether that’s a friend or a support group. Find a place where you can bring your story, your honest questions and your wrestling and have them beheld.