Finding Meaning in Loss

It is said that the hardest thing is for a parent to lose a child. Not being a parent, this is not a thing I have much familiarity with though, in my first novel, two of the characters face that loss. Literature, of course, is filled with stories about that pain and the coming to terms with it. Gloucester, with its rich heritage of both literature and loss, harbors a lot of these stories.

Most people know about The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, the story of the sinking of the Andrea Gale in the Halloween storm of 1991. Most of us around here didn’t know it was the “perfect storm” until the book came out. Around here is was the no-name storm or the Halloweeen storm. I was living in Marblehead then — on the ocean — and was having lunch at the Boulevard Oceanview a couple days later when someone came in and announced that the Andrea Gale was missing. I remember the silence that followed that announcement.

So Junger wrote his book and, at its center was Ethel Shatford who lost her son Bobby aboard that boat. The book captured the attention of a lot of people for it to become the best seller that it did and, up until the time of her death, people came to Gloucester and stopped at The Crow’s Nest to tell her how sorry they were. Her grief for her lost son struck a chord in hearts across the country — around the world — and people showed they cared.

Recently Stan Stone of On the Cove Blog told me about the book Gone Boy by Gregory Gibson. Stan said he read the book in a weekend and could not put it down. Gibson is a local antiquarian bookdealer who lives in the part of Gloucester called Lanesville, where Stan also lives. His son Galen was shot and killed by a fellow college student at Simon’s Rock College in the Berkshires in 1993 — two years after Bobby Shatford was lost at sea. I bought the book yesterday and, like Stan, I can scarcely put it down. It is remarkable.

The ability of a writer to travel inward to the core of his being and draw it up onto the page is a rare and astonishing gift. It is what makes the difference between a good writer and a great writer. Gregory Gibson is a great writer in this book. He writes from feelings that most of us will never experience, thank God. But in his willingness to take this inward journey and draw out what he finds there he gives his readers the opportunity to share in his loss. It is hard for me to explain what I feel as I read — anger, outrage, pain all mixed with compassion and understanding. As he begins his journey back to the college where his son died to find out how such a thing can happen I find myself feeling both anger at how the college administration could be so careless and, at the same time, the naive faith so many of us have that people are essentially good and it is wrong to project our fears onto them before they are proven to be bad or wrong or foolish or evil.

Leslie Wind called Gregory Gibson after we talked about this and he has agreed to be our next guest at the Hovey House Writer’s Group. I want to finish his book before meeting him — that won’t be a problem, I’ll probably finish it this weekend. In a way there is a part of me that is a bit timid about meeting the person who has written such a raw and powerful book. It seems almost as though his presence will be too much to bear.

But what I have learned through his book and through life is that there is no tragedy that cannot be redeemed by art. Art can’t take away the pain and art can’t make the loss less terrible. But art can elevate the loss. It makes meaning of something as seemingly random and meaningless as a storm that sinks a boat or the path of a bullet fired by a crazed killer. It offers great pain to the world and lets us share in feelings that we, God willing, will never experience alone.

Thanks for reading.