[00:06.55]In the early ’60s, when I was fourteen years old
[00:10.64]and living in a small town in southern Indiana, my father died.
[00:15.96]While my mother and I were out of town visiting relatives,
[00:19.57]an unexpected and very sudden heart attack took him.
[00:23.84]We returned home to find that he was gone.
[00:27.12]No chance to say “I love you” or even “Good-bye”. He was just gone, forever.
[00:34.01]With my older sister going away to college, our home went from a bustling,
[00:39.82]happy family of four to a house where two stunned people lived in quiet grief.
[00:45.50]I struggled terribly with the pain and loneliness of my loss,
[00:49.59]but I was also very worried about my mother.
[00:52.84]I feared that if she saw me crying for my father, her pain would be even more intense.
[00:58.41]And, as the new “man” of the house,
[01:01.62]I felt a responsibility to protect her from greater hurt.
[01:05.20]So I devised a plan that would allow me to grieve without causing more pain for my mother.
[01:11.98]In our town, people took the trash from their houses out to large barrels
[01:17.74]in the alleys behind their backyards.
[01:20.18]There, it would be burned or picked up by the trash men once a week.
[01:25.54]Every evening after dinner, I would volunteer to take out the trash.
[01:30.30]I would rush around the house with a bag,
[01:33.58]collecting scraps of paper or whatever else I could find,
[01:38.28]and then go out to the alley and put it in the trash barrel.
[01:41.74]I’d hide in the shadows of the dark bushes,
[01:44.94]and that’s where I would stay until I had cried myself out.
[01:49.07]After recovering enough to be certain that my mother couldn’t tell what I’d been doing,
[01:54.10]I would return to the house and get ready for bed.
[01:57.71] This subterfuge went on for weeks.
[02:01.43]One evening after dinner, when it was time for chores,
[02:04.17]I collected trash and went out to my usual hiding place in the bushes.
[02:09.28]I didn’t stay very long.
[02:11.06]When I returned to the house,
[02:13.77]I went to find my mother to ask if she needed me to do anything else.
[02:17.62]After searching through the entire house, I finally found her.
[02:22.44]She was in the darkened basement, behind the washer and dryer, crying by herself.
[02:27.69]She was hiding her pain, to protect me.
[02:31.52]I’m not sure which is greater:
[02:34.09]the pain you suffer openly or the pain you endure alone to protect someone you love.
[02:39.18]I do know that on that night, in the basement,
[02:43.00]we held each other and poured out the misery
[02:45.74]that had driven us both to our separate, lonely, crying places.
[02:48.58]And we never felt the need to cry alone again.
