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No Choice but to Begin Anew
My Life Closed Twice: Surviving a Double Loss
By Sandra Klamkin Schocket
BWD Publishing, 2003. 208 pages.
Reviewed by John Tintera
My Life Closed Twice entered my life at the urging of a friend. Actually, it was from a friend’s parents that I first learned the story of Sandra Klamkin Schocket, a woman in her fifties and a neighbor of theirs, who several years prior had lost her husband and eldest son within twenty-four hours of each other. After experiencing heart attack symptoms, Schocket’s husband, Jay, was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with a coronary blockage. Angioplasty was scheduled and their two sons and daughter-in-law drove from Virginia and Washington, DC to New Jersey to be with their father. The surgery, a common procedure performed successfully thousands of times a day, has only a 1-4% mortality rate. Jay was one of the unlucky ones. The following morning, Schocket’s son Barry died suddenly of cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscles that had been completely undetected. Before she had time to comprehend the impact of her husband’s death, Schocket was suddenly a grieving parent as well. My Life Closed Twice is Schocket’s memoir of her singular experience of grief.
In a country where about two million people die each year and whose citizens are daily barraged with images of suffering and death from across the globe, it’s rare for average, non-famous citizens to take or even have the time to assemble a book about the experience of grief. (It’s even less common, if not impossible for such a person to find a publisher to take on such a project). The abiding reason for this is the pressure our culture puts on the bereaved to “move on” as quickly as possible. One of the most important lessons Schocket has for us is that the heart and psyche have their own timetable for grieving. Although she doesn’t come right out and say it, she makes clear that the overriding motivation to write this book came from her desire to tell the people she knows, especially those who saw her go quickly back to work and who saw few outward signs of grief, that not an hour, much less a day, goes by when she doesn’t feel grief’s knife pressed up against her chest and throat. Her message that there is no moving on, that, when someone close to you dies, (to paraphrase Yeats) “life changes, changes utterly” is not lost on those who do not know her.
Schocket’s story is especially poignant in that she lost her husband and oldest son in one fell swoop. Very few of us have to endure more than one heartrending experience at a time. Stories like these (one is reminded of the mother who lost four sons in World War II) have the power to make the commonness of death exceptional once again. They help to slow us down long enough to contemplate our own inevitable end and that of those we love -- something I think that single deaths experienced from afar have less power to do.
As Schocket takes us hour by hour through the first days of her grief -- making funeral arrangements, buying one, then two cemetery plots, sleepwalking through sitting Shivashe describes actions and emotions that all of us have gone through and will go through again and again before we die. Yet there’s something incredibly comforting in making that journey in the comfort of one’s armchair. There are plenty of books on grieving, but I know of no other author that narrates in the first person the shock, the ordinary compulsions like needing to have the living room dusted before the guests arrive from the cemetery, and the terrible loneliness, as vividly and plainly as Schocket does. When someone close to us dies, our own lives are thrown into a hellish chaos. But when someone else’s spouse, child, or close relative dies, the most we can do is empathize. My Life Closed Twice enables the reader to safely enter “the grief zone” for a little while.
As the days following her tragedy turned into weeks and months, Schocket describes for us the various strategies she employed to rebuild her life. She tells of how valuable the time she spent working in New York and living on her own before she got married became to her as a new widow. She finds herself hearkening back to the independent person she once was and drawing on inner resources that had atrophied during her marriage. Also vital were the people she met on-line in various grieving forums and chat rooms. In the “multiple loss” forums, she learned that multiple loss can mean different things to different people. For one woman it meant grieving a parent who had departed many years ago alongside the recent loss of a sibling. As part of her grieving, Schocket took the time to interview many people about their experience of loss. The compassion she experienced in reaching out helped to assuage her own pain. At the same time, it gave her a community of people in similar circumstances who could instantly recognize themselves in her, an understanding her friends and family often could not provide.
Another strength of Schocket’s book is her willingness to share with readers what must obviously have been some of the most wrenching inner debates one can face in a situation like hers. The most vivid example of this comes in her admission -- to herself and to the reader -- that she misses her son more than her husband. In some ways, it is the most painful fact that she faces in her grieving, and it is not an easy one for the reader to overhear, even in this context. The fact that she misses one more than the other gnaws at her, but eventually she comes to accept it as one more blow inflicted by her fate.
On the positive side, Schocket writes lovingly of the many friends and acquaintances who have come to her aid throughout her ordeal. One standout in the book is an old college friend of Schocket’s named Carol who, during the years of her marriage had remained on the sidelines of her life, but came to center stage in the days and months following Jay’s and Barry’s deaths. As an attorney specializing in estate planning, Carol was invaluable in getting Schocket up to speed with all the financial decisions a widow must make. For example, on the day after Jay’s death, when Carol came out to Schocket’s house to pay her condolences, she gave her the prior day’s stock report so that she would have handy the final value of Jay’s stocks. This friend was helpful in countless similar ways, making herself available to Schocket seemingly at any hour of the day or night.
“Whether we lose a parent, a child, sibling, spouse, dear relative, or close friend,” Schocket writes, “each successive death reduces by one the resources available to us.” One happy irony to Schocket’s story is that if she had not suffered her terrible tragedy, we would not have available to us this excellent resource. My Life Closed Twice is inspirational, yet grounded in every day experience; honest, yet compassionate. It speaks to us from the depths of grief, but does not leave us there. In her epilogue, Schocket tells of how she eventually sold her house in New Jersey and moved to the Midwest to be close to her surviving son and his new wife. It was not an easy decision: “I thought there would not be a bucket big enough to hold the tears when the time came to leave my house for the last time.” Yet she concludes with a glimmer of hope: “The following morning, before the sun came up, I pressed the ‘trip’ button on my dashboard. Four zeros appeared. A blank slate. They symbolized the life I was about to begin. I headed for Route 80 and drove west.”
John Tintera is a marketing manager with Holtzbrinck Publishers. He spent one year studying for the Catholic priesthood.
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