Sometimes death is heralded by a doctor’s call that the person’s condition is too grave to survive. The doctor says it will be only a matter of time. The family is summoned to the bedside for their goodbyes, for words they need to speak to their loved one and each other. It is a sacred time.
From the opening pages of Liz Tichenor’s memoir, The Night Lake, there is no forewarning, no preparation for death’s arrival. Ms. Tichenor’s five-week old son, Fritz, cries constantly. She takes him to a local urgent care doctor who pronounces the baby is “fine.” Only six hours later, Ms. Tichenor and her husband awake in the middle of the night to find their infant son dead. The writer, an Episcopal priest who serves as rector at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, in Pleasant Hill, California, gives voice to her grief and rage, which explode across the page in the pressured language of trauma. Her telling is written with an immediacy that claims the reader as her first-hand witness to the tragedy:
Adrenaline was coursing through my body. I felt it everywhere, surging even through my fingertips, but I managed the three numbers, dialing well. I did not fumble. I remembered our address. I spoke clearly. “My son isn’t breathing. He’s just a little baby, not even six weeks old, Yes, my husband is doing CPR. Yes, I’ll flag down the paramedics. I’ll help them find their way to our cabin.
The reader travels at warp speed beside her from the bedside of her dead son to the ER, to inquiry by the coroner, the funeral home, to bagging up his baby clothes and his final burial. The telling is sharp and raw as Tichenor grasps for an emotional and spiritual foothold that will sustain her along the way. It is an inconsolable loss and yet Tichenor will not let herself be consumed. She is already more than familiar with tragedy. She is still recovering from her own mother’s death by suicide less than two years before. The author’s rock-hard will to survive is juxtaposed against an intense fragility that is familiar to anyone who has worked with victims of trauma and complicated grief.
Throughout the memoir, Tichenor finds herself surrounded by a much-needed cloud of witnesses, but she inwardly knows the journey is hers alone to take. There are friends and acquaintances that filter in and out, sometimes struggling in their own helplessness for the right words to say. There is Jesse, Tichenor’s husband, who quietly and intuitively knows how to both get out of the way and when to gently support her. There is little Alice, Tichenor’s daughter, who is but a toddler when brother Fritz dies and an always-present reminder that despite the loss of Fritz, Tichenor is still a much needed and much-loved mother.
Author Liz Tichenor has put down roots in the Bay Area but is originally from New Hampshire and the Midwest. An Episcopal priest, she serves as rector at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, Pleasant Hill, California. Tichenor and her husband, Jesse, are raising two young children and continuing to explore the adventure of living, parenting, and leading in the community.
Photo by Nathan Phillips
What distinguishes The Night Lake from other recent books about the loss of a child is Tichenor’s faith and vocation as an Episcopal priest, which is woven at various intersections throughout the memoir. Such a frame is both a comfort and a challenge. She seeks the comfort of her home parish and all it represents but finds herself divided between her role as a priest who brings comfort to the grieving and as one in need of pastoral comfort and care. She wrestles with whether or not it is theologically appropriate to baptize her dead son and resolves to do it as a sign of claiming the baby as God’s own rather than as an entrance into Christian life and community. She envisions the landscape around the lake where Fritz’s ashes are buried as the biblical valley of dry bones in which God tells the prophet Ezekiel to command the desiccated bones that God will breathe them to life once again (Ezekiel 37:1-5.) For Tichenor, claiming such a promise is the work of grief:
On the edge of Lake Tahoe, on a pristine winter day, blue sky, blue lake, I had landed with Ezekiel that age-old prophet who touched down in a valley, expansive, filled with only dry bones as far as the eyes could see…I seemed to hear the words the prophet had heard, echoing, “Mortal, can these bones live?” God came to him, crashing in, or was it tempting, cajoling? All I could hear now was the cruelty of the question and how I hated it.
The memoir is a courageous and thoughtful companion to all those who have suffered a traumatic loss. Her telling exposes both the deep sadness and trauma of deep loss but also reveals the overwhelming rage that often is buried and denied under grief. In doing so, she gives those who have suffered a traumatic loss permission to rant and raise their fist to God in both anger as well as hope.—Bonnie McDougall Olson
Bonnie McDougall Olson
Bonnie McDougall Olson, MDiv, MFA, MS is an ordained United Church of Christ minister who has served both in the local church setting as well as the clinical setting. She received her clinical training in pastoral education and supervision at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and holds an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. For the last ten years, Rev. Olson served as the Protestant chaplain to inpatients at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, where she instituted and led writing groups for clients, published an in-house journal of their writing and trained various staff in narrative group work. Ms. Olson has also presented her work to the Department of Veteran's Affairs and the American Association of Critical Care Nurses. Her narrative work with the severely mentally ill was featured in the New York Times by Sam Freedman and in Vision, an online publication for the National Catholic Chaplain's Association.