Lisa Scottoline - Look Again

Last week, I was asked to write a story about what it feels like to lose a child. We were concerned that, among all of the statistics and bar graphs attending an article about the city's escalating homicide rate, the value of a child's life would be lost. So I set out to interview women who had lost children.

I spoke with Laticia Williams, whose eight-year-old son Lateef was killed by stray bullets, a victim of violence between two gangs. I also spoke with Susan Sulaman, a Bryn Mawr mother whose two children were abducted by their father several years ago.

And now, to their examples, I can add my own.

As you may know, I lost my son this week when I learned that, unbeknownst to me, my adoption of him was illegal. My son is, in fact, a child by the name of Timothy Braverman, who was kidnapped from a Florida couple two years ago.

I hope you don't think I'm being presumptuous in inserting my own experience into this account. I know that my child is alive, unlike Laticia Williams. But forgive me if I suggest that how you lose a child doesn't alter the fact that, in the end, he is lost to you. Whether you lose him by murder, abduction, or a simple twist of fate, you end up in the same place.

Your child is gone.

What does it feel like?

To Laticia Williams, it feels like anger. A rage like a fire that consumes everything in its path. She feels angry every minute she spends without her child. Angry every night she doesn't put him to bed. Angry every morning that she doesn't pack him his favorite peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and walk him to school. In her neighborhood, all the mothers walk their kids to school, to make sure they get there alive.

Of course, that the children remain alive after they get home is not guaranteed.

Her son "Teef" was shot in his own living room, while he was watching TV, by bullets that flew in through a window to find their lethal marks in his young cheek. The funeral director who prepared Lateef's body for burial took all night to restore the child's face. His teacher said he was the class clown, a leader among his classmates, who stuffed his desk with posthumous Valentines.

To Susan Sulaman, losing a child feels like emptiness. A profound vacancy in her heart and her life. Because her children are alive with their father, or so she assumes, she looks for them everywhere she goes. At night, she drives around neighborhoods where they might live, hoping for a chance sighting. In the daytime, she scans the small faces on school buses that speed past.

Susan Sulaman is haunted by her loss.

I asked her if she felt better knowing that at least the children were in their father's hands. Her answer?

"No. I'm their mother. They need me."

I know just how she feels, and Laticia, too. I'm angry, I feel haunted, and it's still fresh. It's so new, a wound still bleeding, the flesh torn apart, the gash swollen and puffy, yet to be sewn together or grafted, years from scar tissue, bumpy and hard.

Losing Will feels like a death.

My mother died recently, and it feels a lot like that. Suddenly, someone who was at the center of your life is gone, excised as quickly as an apple is cored, a sharp spike driven down the center of your world, then a cruel flick of the wrist and the almost surgical extraction of your very heart.

And like a death, it does not end the relationship.

I am still the daughter of my mother, though she is gone. And I am still the mother of Will Gleeson, though he is gone, too.

I have learned that the love a mother has for her child is unique among human emotions. Every mother knows this instinctively, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need articulating.

And it remains true, whether the child is adopted or not. That, I didn't know before, but I've learned it now. Just as it doesn't matter how you lose your child, it doesn't matter how you find him, either. There's a certain symmetry in that, but it's no comfort now.

I didn't give birth to Will, but I am tied to him as surely as if we shared blood. I am his real mother.

It's the love, that binds.

I fell in love with Will the moment I saw him in a hospital ward, with tubes taped under his nose to hold them in place, fighting for his life. From that day forward, he was mine.

And though, as his mother, I certainly felt tired at times, I never tired of looking at him. I never tired of watching him eat. I never tired of hearing the sound of his voice or the words he made up, like the name of our cat. I never tired of seeing him play with Legos.

I did tire of stepping on them in bare feet.

It's hard to compare loves, and it may be silly to try, but I have learned something from my experience in losing W. Because I have loved before, certainly. I have loved men before, and I might even be falling in love with a man now.

Here is how a mother's love is different:

You may fall out of love with a man.

But you will never fall out of love with your child.

Even after he is gone.

Ellen sat back and read the last line again, but it began to blur, and she knew why.

"Ellen?" Marcelo asked softly, coming down the stairs.

"I finished my piece." She wiped her eyes with her hand, but Marcelo crossed to her through the darkness, his mouth a concerned shadow in the glow of the screen. He reached for her hand.

"Let's go lie down," he whispered, pulling her gently to her feet.

The next morning dawned clear, and Ellen rode in the passenger seat of Marcelo's car, looking out the window, squinting against the brightness of the sun on the new-fallen snow. Its top layer had hardened in the cold, and the crust took on a smooth sheen. The streets on the way to her house had been plowed, leaving waist-high wedges beside the parked cars.

They turned a corner, and a trio of kids in snowsuits and scarves played on the mounds. One child, a girl named Jenny Waters, was from Will's class, and Ellen looked away, pained. They left Montgomery Avenue, and she noticed how the landscape had changed with the snow. It made unrecognizable blobs of shrubs, lay like a mattress on the roofs of parked cars, and lined the length of barren tree branches, doubling their thickness. Everything familiar had changed, and she tried not to see it as a bad metaphor.

Last night after she'd finished her piece, she'd fallen back to only a restless sleep and felt raw and nervous inside. A morning shower had helped, and she'd changed her top, slipping into an old gray sweater of Marcelo's. Her hair was still wet, falling loose to her shoulders, and she didn't bother with any makeup. She took it as a measure of confidence in her new relationship, and she didn't want to see her own face in the mirror, anyway.

"I should call my father," Ellen said, mentally switching topics.

"Your phone's in your purse. I charged it for you."

"Thanks. I feel bad that I didn't call Connie, either. She's probably at a football game today. She loves Penn State."

"She called you, and I spoke to her. She's meeting us at your house. I hope that's okay with you. She thought it would be."

"It is, sure." Ellen felt her heart gladden. "How is she? Is she okay?"

"She's very upset, but I think it will do you good to see her." Marcelo swung the car onto her street, and Ellen swallowed hard as she looked at her house. News vans parked in every available space, with microwave towers that pierced the blue sky. Reporters with video cameras mobbed her sidewalk.

Ellen said, "I hate the press."

"Me, too." Marcelo's gaze shifted to her, worried. "Would you like me to go around the block, one time?"

"No, let's do it." Ellen pulled her coat closer around her.

"Looks like national, too, and TV." Marcelo craned his neck, slowing the car as they neared the house. "I'll let you read Sal's piece before we file."