Heather Violet MacVicar Johnson’s 2-year-old daughter died in a swimming pool drowning accident in Cayman on 24 March, 2002, an event that devastated the child’s mother and her family.
A decade later, Heather shares her story in a book that she hopes will give solace to other bereaved parents.
Titled Beyond the Sunset, 30 Days Towards Healing Your Grief after the Death of a Son or Daughter, her book intersperses sections from the Book of Job – whose 10 children died – with advice, her own experience and insights into the torture bereaved parents go through when trying to come to terms with the death of a child.
Prior to her upcoming book launch and signing at Hobbies and Books on Friday and Saturday, 4 and 5 May, Heather talks of little Fiona, who she called Fifi, and how her reaction to the child’s death destroyed two of her marriages and almost alienated her older daughter.
“You don’t recover, you learn to adapt,” she says. “It’s not a journey you want to do alone.”
“When a husband or wife loses a spouse, they become a widower or widow. When children lose their parents, they become orphans, but there’s no word for a bereaved parent who loses a child,” she says.
After struggling with grief and anger for years, one of her first respites came when she left Cayman for England for three months to visit her older daughter Brittany in college in the UK. That break from the familiar environment where everyone knew what had happened to Fifi, along with her attendance at bereavement groups, brought her to a point where she felt ready to write about what had happened and to help deliver some hope to other parents.
After leaving the UK, she moved to Jamaica, where she now lives and works as the official hiring partner for Disney Cruise Line and MSC Cruises line in Ocho Rios in Jamaica. She returns to Cayman regularly.
She sought out books that might bring her peace, but found little on book shelves that helped. Then she read the Book of Job, about a biblical character who had lost 10 of his own children. “If you believe in God, Job’s story is real. That brought me some inner peace because reading about someone who is real, and God knew about it because He allowed it to happen and Job survived. I thought ‘maybe there’s hope for me.’ That is when I decided to write a bereavement book based on the Book of Job,” she says.
Heather, a member of Compassionate Friends, an international bereavement group for grieving parents, grandparents and siblings and a bereavement counsellor, also has a 6-year-old daughter, Ciara. “There were days when I’d just fall to pieces. Ciara always reminded me, ‘Mom, you’ll see Fifi again’. At that time she was just four. I asked her where Fifi was, she said ‘Her spirit is with God. You have to be a good girl to see her again’. Such encouragement for a four year old to give!” she says.
She still has what she calls her “Miss you, Fifi” days. “I was having a “Miss you, Fifi” day and Ciara said ‘But you have me”. I thought ‘You’re absolutely right’. We look at what we don’t have anymore and what we need to heal is right in front of us,” she says.
The death of her child cost her two marriages, to her first husband – Fifi’s father to whom she’d been married for 20 years – and her second husband to whom she stayed married for only three months. She could not talk to Fifi’s father, not realising that men grieve differently than woman and wondering if, because he did not seem to grieve as openly as she, he loved their daughter less. She realises now that was not the case, but by the time she figured that out, she had already withdrawn from the marriage.
Her strong relationship with her third husband has made her recognise the absolute importance of communicating, she says.
Heather says she also for a time failed her daughter Brittany, who was 12 when her little sister died. “My daughter [Brittany] had some serious issues. Fifi died and I was so caught up in my own selfish hell, she became wayward. It was another bereaved parent, who did not have another child, who told me ‘Be careful, you could lose another child.’ I was thankful for that advice and Brittany and I were able to share how we felt.
“She missed her little sister. She’d lost her baby sister,” she says.
Heather also has a “what not to say” list that she has handed out at children’s funerals. It includes advising people never to say to a grieving parent “God needed an angel”, “You can have another child”, “It’s God’s will” or “I know how you feel” – all perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately insensitive comments she received after the death of her daughter and which she has heard others say to bereaved fathers and mothers.
“Job had friends who sat with him in silence for a whole week and just mourned with him. Bereaved parents could use some of Job’s friends,” she said.
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