For Mothers’ Day this year, my daughter invited me to go with her and her girlfriend to see the local well known psychic medium, Maureen Hancock, later in May. I had never been to a psychic medium, but my daughter had been a few times and was quite taken with Maureen.  I was skeptical of the powers that mediums profess to have, but it sounded like a fun evening.

My daughter suggested that I read Maureen’s autobiography, The Medium Next Door: Adventures of a Real Life Ghost Whisperer, and I did read most of it before the evening of the performance. Maureen is from Massachusetts and continues to live here. The references to Boston area locales were familiar and interesting. The story of her life is intriguing but often sad from birth on. She certainly has had challenges in her lifetime including a severe childhood illness and a near fatal car accident.

I was glad that I read her autobiography before going to see her in person. It gave me a reference point from which to learn about her life and her psychic abilities. The humor and down to earth manner that she portrays in her book comes out in spades at her performances. Even without the spiritual message, Maureen is a gifted entertainer. She is funny, compassionate and a natural performer.

I was not lucky enough to be singled out to be visited by a deceased relative during my evening with the spirits, but my daughter and her girlfriend were. It is difficult to explain how Maureen knew so many personal things about them. I remain skeptical of the powers that mediums profess to have, but I do want to keep an open mind.

At the end of each chapter of Maureen’s book she adds inspirational directions on how to face and accept life’s trials and tribulations. These do enhance and promote her story as well as add a dimension that is not totally otherworldly.

To learn more about mediums, I decided to read a bit more. Small Mediums at Large: the True Tale of a Family of Psychics, is the autobiography of Terry Iacuzzo, a psychic from a Sicilian-American family born on Halloween into a 1950s working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Like Maureen Hancock, Terry professes to have a genetic predisposition to the spiritual world. She also, like Maureen, had a sad and challenging childhood and uses humor to deliver her feelings and experiences. Terry’s book was entertaining but not especially convincing to me that she was authentic. It read more like a novel and seemed to be meant more to entertain than profess and convince readers of her psychic powers.

The third book, World Religions and Beliefs: Mystics and Psychics, by Joanne Mattern tells the lives of six well-known psychics from Medieval times (Hildegard of Bingen) to the twentieth century (Jeanne Dixon).  It is a very comprehensive and historical documentation of mystics and psychics through the ages that has an academic style, but is easy to read. It’s a book I would not have previously sought out, but I enjoyed reading it.

All in all, entering the world of psychics by visiting Maureen and reading the stories was an interesting and unique experience. Maureen’s story of her life was the most convincing, but, as she states in her book, “I’m not here to convince anyone that there is an afterlife, but I do hope through my own faith, experiences and interactions with the living and dead that I’ve planted seeds of hope and possibilities that there is something more out there when we leave this earth.”

As an echo to Maureen’s words,  the introduction to World Religions and Beliefs: Mystics and Psychics, states, “Whether people believe in their abilities or not, studying their lives gives society a glimpse into the unknown and provides a new way of looking at what might lie beyond ordinary sight.”

Norma Logan is the Literacy Volunteer Coordinator at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the October 17, 2019 issue of the Transcript and Bulletin.

This week on October 9, it is the thirty-eighth anniversary of my daughter’s death. I recognize that it can be an unsettling sentence to read. It is shocking for me to write, as well.

Coleen was my firstborn, a daughter born early due to a congenital heart condition that no one suspected until just weeks before her birth. At the time, my ex-husband and I lived outside San Francisco. Two days after New Year’s Day, I was rushed to the University of California-SF Medical Center to await an unknown future. It was new territory for all of us – her father, and I, and our baby. Coleen was born on January 21, 1980, five weeks earlier than her due date.

Her prognosis was never very good from that critical day, and even earlier, according to her new doctors, neonatal specialists and pediatric cardiologists. And yet, she came home to us after a few short months, fragile, yet thriving. On my 28th birthday, when she was four months, a petite and beautiful baby, we were advised that she would not survive infancy. Her terminal diagnosis was the outcome of cardiomyopathy caused by a destructive virus that had also caused illness or defects to other unborn babies in San Francisco. Her right ventricle was acutely compromised by the infection.

We leaned upon our youthful energy and our extended and compassionate family. Our innate optimism commanded us to give Coleen the best life possible for as much time that she with us – and we had with her.

When we lost her, inevitably, one early fall evening in 1981, our lives were rent. I’ve never used that word before, but it comes to me, 38 years later, as a perfect word to describe the brutality of grief that separated us from the before and the after. A storm rents a ship to pieces. A nation is rended by racial upheaval. Our lives were rent by our loss.

Yet, we had our faith, and a new child on the way. We sustained four months of empty arms until life blessed us once again with a second daughter, another beautiful baby girl, this time healthy, with a birthday just two years after our precious Coleen was born. Eighteen months later, another gorgeous daughter was born. Our aching arms and shattered hearts were bursting with that new life. Parents will tell you that practicality takes over after birth, and a quiet, but disordered, grief sneakily hides in the memories and in the shadows.

There is no word in the English language for parents who have suffered the loss of a child. The widow has lost a husband. The widower has lost a wife. The orphan has lost both of his/her parents.

Yet, there is a word for the loss of a child in Arabic (pronounced “thakla”), which translates to bereaved mother. In Sanskrit, there is a word “vilomar,” which means “against the natural order.”

I find this lack in the English language strikingly odd because, over and over, we read and hear that there is no grief like the loss of a child. Yet, we are wordless in our sadness.

Alexander and Eliza Hamilton grieved the loss of their nineteen-year-old son, Philip, when he was shot in a senseless duel in 1801. (Of course, his father sustained the same fate at the hands of Aaron Burr, only three years later.) In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s impressive musical, Hamilton, the song It’s Quiet Uptown holds an emotional grip over anyone who has lost a child. After Philip’s death, the Hamiltons moved from busy Wall Street in Lower Manhattan to a mansion they built in northern Manhattan. It’s Quiet Uptown, a hushed and aching song, describes the anguish of Hamilton and his wife as they walk quietly down the streets of uptown New York, wrought together by their breaking hearts. Passersby watched the newcomers in pity because they realized that the two are “going through the unimaginable.”

Those are the agonizing words. They are the devastatingly simple description. Going through the unimaginable describes the loss of a child.

When I read that Jayson Greene, father of two-year-old Greta Green, had written a book due out last January, I impatiently awaited it. He and his wife Stacy lost their firstborn and only child Greta when she was hit by a falling brick on May 17, 2015, in New York City. Greta was spending the day with her grandmother and sitting on a bench on the sidewalk beneath a high rise windowsill that gave way. It was a freak and impossible accident that immediately changed Jayson’s and Stacy’s lives.

When we lost Coleen in 1981, there were few books to read to help us through our early grief. My library’s shelves and bookstore shelves were bereft of books about surviving the loss of a child. C.S. Lewis wrote of his crushing loss of his wife in A Grief Observed in 1961. Robert Frost wrote of a wife’s devastating grief and a husband’s pragmatic composure after the death of their infant son in Home Burial, one of Frost’s longest and earliest poems. It and other full or partial excerpts were included in Mary Jane Moffat’s compilation of the poetry and literature of mourning. That book, In the Midst of Winter, was published in 1982, just after I was searching for solace in the written word.

Greene, author of Once More We Saw Stars (2019), writes of his struggle living through a similar time of desolation and despair after the loss of a child. Writing in his journal, Greene described his early grief this way: “I am ice skating along the surface of my shock.” Waking slowly to realization each day, he writes, “What is it? What is it that feels so awful?”

“I remember. I am in hell.”

Jayson and Stacy Greene suffered in the void between being a parent and remaining childless for longer than I did. I had an unoccupied nursery and empty arms for such a short time – only four months. And while theirs, and my life, became whole again, the unfathomable had happened and had changed us forever.

Greene published a New York Times Opinion piece 17 months later in October 2016 following the birth of their second child, a son. He wrote that “life remains precarious,” and he describes the feelings of his children’s precious and fragile lives in Children Don’t Always Live. The title of that piece is raw and jarring, but it defines reality for those who have lived the unimaginable – that of losing a child.

Greene titled his book Once More We Saw Stars as a reference to Dante’s Inferno – that dark time in the dark wood. Climbing out, Dante writes that “To get back up to the shining world from there … through a round aperture I saw appear some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears, where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”

If you know a family who has lost a child, or you have suffered loss and are looking for words to describe the pain … and reading of faith and hope and survival, read Jayson Greene’s beautiful memoir of his family’s journey through grief. Surprisingly uplifting, Greene’s book writes about “the fragility of life” and the “unconquerable power of love” that will make anyone feel less alone. Perhaps it will be just the right book at just the right time.

Charlotte Canelli is the Library Director at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood. Look for her article in the October 10, 2019 issue if the Norwood Transcript.

At this busy time in my life, I’m starting to realize the true importance of friendship even though I have never had less time to devote to it. My closest group of friends are three women who I’ve known since I was six years old. We’re fortunate enough to have weathered many storms together, even though we’ve been physically separated for over 20 years. After we left our beloved Catholic K-8 school, we all attended different high schools and colleges. I moved away from my hometown in New York to permanently settle here in suburban Boston. Another woman in our group moved to Pennsylvania. Yet thanks to modern technology and social media, we’ve kept in touch and are closer than ever as support one another on the journey of motherhood.

My best friends have taught me that I need three things to make friendships last through adulthood: laughter, forgiveness, and support. The mysterious balancing act of balancing work, motherhood, and being a wife and daughter can be overwhelming. Laughing our way through the difficult things with my friends is the only thing that keeps me from running away at times. Whenever we get together or talk on the phone, tears are guaranteed, not because we are crying but because we make each other laugh until we cry. Laughter truly is the best medicine and the world feels right again once I’ve been laughing with my friends.

My second key friendship value is forgiveness. Life is moving very quickly for me these days. In a rush of school drop-off, activities, working, weekend plans, cooking, tidying, and the occasional date night or two, I know I often neglect relationships outside of my family. I need my friends to forgive me for forgetting to call them back or not sending a thank-you note. I don’t make enough effort to drive down to my hometown to see my friends now that my parents aren’t living there anymore. I’m probably going to let you down if you have rigid social expectations, not because I’m rude or don’t care but because I am usually exhausted and often forgetful. Luckily, my best friends are right there with me in the struggle and never judge me if I have to postpone our phone chats because I’m dealing with a sick kid or a homeowner crisis.

Finally, I need my adult friends to be supportive. Our adolescent days of talking uninterrupted on the phone might be over, but I always have time to shoot my friends a quick text or Facebook message. We have a Facebook group that’s our safe space to vent about our husbands and work, worry about our kids (as well as show them off) and share whatever is going on in our lives. That support is my lifeline through everyday ups and downs and it keeps our friendship current and accessible in a busy world.

Reading picture books aloud is one of the great joys of being a children’s librarian. Some of my favorites are those that focus on friendship.  Not the overly saccharine texts that feature perfectly behaved people (or animals) but the real ones that show how mutual regard and affection can sustain two people (or animals) through life’s imperfections. Often, friendships in picture books have an “odd couple” quality that only adds to their charm.

The brilliance of George and Martha by James Marshall has set the standard for portraying friendship in picture books. These two delightful hippopotamuses are best friends who know each other through and through. George isn’t the most clever hippo and Martha often outsmarts him but he’s also joyful and supportive. He does frequently snoop through Martha’s things but she always forgives him. Martha can be a diva but she’s always a good sport. She can be ill-tempered but is quick to get over an argument. Nothing much ever happens in their stories but somehow James Marshall’s understated text and illustrations create their profound friendship. Other delightful George and Martha books include George and Martha: One Fine Day, George and Martha: Rise and Shine, and George and Martha: Back in Town.

Arnold Lobel created the classic Frog and Toad series, stories that show the everyday dramas and misadventures of America’s most famous amphibians. These two friends also have their ups and downs but are only really content when they are together. They often miss each other and wonder what the other is doing when apart. Neither of them are perfect though. Toad can be a little lazy and is self-conscious about how he looks in a bathing suit. Frog loves pulling pranks and loves horror stories even more. But each appreciates the other for who he really is and their stories teach children to value individuality over sameness in a relationship. Frog and Toad’s adventures are featured in Days with Frog and Toad, Frog and Toad Are Friends, Frog and Toad Together and Frog and Toad All Year.

Both George and Martha and Frog and Toad were written in the 1970s. No other picture book duo approached classic friendship status until Mo Willems created Elephant and Piggie. In Today I Will Fly, we are introduced to Gerald, a lovable but slightly neurotic elephant prone to meltdowns, and Piggie, a carefree, laid back pig with a playful side. My best friend, who is also a children’s librarian, declares that there are two types of people in this world: Geralds or Piggies. Willems clearly casts the pair as an odd couple with Gerald as a Type A rule follower and Piggie, who is cheerfully free and easy. It goes without saying that my friend and I are clearly Geralds. Gerald and Piggie solve all sorts of friendship problems like sharing issues, not liking your best friend’s favorite food, and what to do when the weather doesn’t cooperate with your plans. More riveting adventures can be found in all 25 volumes in the series.

These picture books reflect the complexities and wonderful realities of friendship. Our friends sustain us not only as we face the trials and tribulations of life but also through the everyday mundane details of living. The friends in these books hold up the ideal qualities of friendship while being imperfect animals. They accept and love their friends even when they aren’t their best selves. And that is the most enduring and satisfying thing about friendship in childhood and in adult life.

Kate Tigue is the Head of Youth Services at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the October 3, 2019 issue of the Transcript and Bulletin.