I have always liked fences and what they promise
I have always liked picket fences.
All fences really, and stone walls.
They are finite, and exact. They clearly delineate one side of something from the other. They surround things, like farmhouses on a prairie, and swimming pools in parks. They keep the danger out, if you are within the fence, or keep it in if you are outside the fence.
This interpretation of mine, that a fence is a protective measure, makes sense when I think of my chaotic and traumatic childhood. I did not always know what safety felt like, only the fear of not having it. But I knew what safety looked like.
A clean, freshly painted white picket fence.
One of the reasons I bought my house in the summer of 2000 was the installation of a picket fence. I was out on a run and when I passed by on my way home a fence had been installed, and the house just popped. When a for sale sign went up, I put in an offer and have called that corner lot with a new picket fence home for 25 years.
Grief changes what safety even means
While fences separate things and people and spaces, they also bring folks together. In Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall, two neighbors meet to repair the stone wall that separates their properties. They disagree on the need for it, that there is no need, really, for this physical separation, and yet the repairing of that wall each spring is a task that brings them together.
Perhaps fences are not so simple.
I have used the picket fence as a metaphor for much of my journey since Molly died. I am in year ten now, and while life has become more manageable, I still have tall picket fence days in life after child loss.
There is no absolute in the aftermath of losing a child, only a constant recalibration of grief, fear, and understanding. Nothing is as it seems and nothing will ever be as it was supposed to be. The only absolute for me in those early days was that Molly was never coming back, and even that took a bit to set in.
The early shock and the plexiglass years
My first picket fence was made of plexiglass, and I looked out through it at my life. Molly was out there somewhere on the other side. I did not construct this fence for safety; it constructed itself for me.
Other than my family, the only people looking out with me were others who had lost children. It took me a bit to notice all of you. I say “all of you” because even though I do not know all of you, you exist, forever, on my side of the glass. We may grieve differently. Our children are different. Our circumstances varied. But we all share it — the exhaustion, the desire to understand, the constant emotional weight.
Like the dust settling after an earthquake, or the water receding after a flood, there comes a time when we slowly start to put it together. I do not always know what “it” is, but the plexiglass becomes a screen, and then perhaps a fence, where the air flows back and forth and we can observe what is happening on the other side.
Living with grief when there is no choice
It is the duplicity of the fence — the connection and separation it can simultaneously bring — that resonates with me.
In one way, the fence is a distinct separation.
My yard, your yard.
But fences can separate emotions and realities as well.
Dead Molly / Alive Molly.
Happy Barb / Sad Barb.
The downside of fences is they force us to choose. Pick a side, they say. My grandmother would often admonish me when I wanted something I could not have with, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Be happy with what you have.”
The fences that arrive with the loss of a child leave no room for choice. Choice is impossible.
And so, we — the moms and dads, the grammies and grampies, parents who no longer recognize the shape of our own lives — learn to straddle the fence. To navigate it. To incorporate it into our daily routines. We live with one foot planted on one side of the fence and one on the other.
In the early days, all I could do was stand still.
Time behaves differently after losing a child
Time is funny after losing a child, not funny haha, but funny quirky.
When I first began participating in online grief groups, I could not wrap my head around the people who were where I am now, ten years in. It all hurt too much. I couldn’t acknowledge the reality of all those years without Molly, that time would keep moving while she did not.
There were days I sat in a chair in my yard all day. Perfectly still. Because perhaps if I stayed perfectly still, it would all go away.
I would look at my picket fence, the one that still, at that time, enclosed my yard from the street — the fence that Molly spent her last day mending with Kenny — and think to myself, This is it?
This is my picket fence life?
Those Americana paintings of pristine houses with clean picket fences, flowers and green grass, a front porch where a smiling family sits in their Sunday best do not include child loss.
Except, perhaps they do.
Lisa and Mari. Brandy and Jack. ER and Vinnie. Cathy and her Molly. Marilyn and Ryan. Jon and Nat. Nancy and Blake. These are parents and their children who sat with me in my fenced-in reality. They weren’t me, but they were me. They were living their picket fence life too.
There it is again, that duplicity.
Ten years in, I still straddle the fence
The fence for me now is that picket fence I straddle.
I am, at year ten, about as close to the “old Barb” as I will ever be. So many people have said, I can’t wait until the old Barb comes back. While I inhabit the same body, I cannot and will never be the old Barb. She existed in a world with Molly.
Back to the fence.
In everything I do — say, feel, plan, execute, fail at, experience — I am straddling a picket fence in life after child loss.
This is where the pickets themselves become important. Long flat boards, perhaps rounded a bit on one side, narrowing into a sharp point at the top.
When grief and joy exist at the same time
The height of the fence matters now.
The lower the fence, the better the day. Or hour. Or millisecond. A low fence allows both feet to stand on one side.
I do not remember the first time I had a truly low picket fence day, but I do remember the first time I woke up and didn’t think of Molly right away. I putzed around and eventually sat on the porch with my coffee. I felt relaxed and couldn’t pinpoint why.
What am I forgetting? I wondered.
Then it hit me. Molly.
That fence went from six inches to six feet in a millisecond.
It doesn’t surround me anymore. I have become proficient at straddling it, carrying both sides into my daily life. When I am coaching, or wrapped up in a movie, or playing with Jack, my fence is low. I am okay.
When I am overtired, emotionally challenged, irritated, or stretched thin, the fence may rise. I have no control over its height, only my ability to navigate it. It isn’t always Molly that raises it. It is what losing Molly has done to me.
One foot is planted in joy, gratitude, hope, and acceptance — to a depth I did not know before her death. The other is planted in sadness, fear, pain, and darkness — also to a depth I did not know before her death. This is what it means that grief and joy coexist.
Everything I do now, I do from both sides of the fence.
High fence days, pain, and emotional weight
High picket fence days are the worst — the days when sadness, pain, and emotion all land at once.
Picture it now: straddling that fence as it keeps rising, or finding it suddenly six feet tall, one foot dangling on each side, the full weight of your body and your grief pressing down onto a clean, white, sharp, pointy wooden picket.
For me, it is as painful as it sounds — physical, emotional, and deeply familiar.
To those who have not lived this, it may seem like a bleak way to live. Living life atop a pointy fence.
I am in a place now where I can appreciate that fence and all that it explains, delineates, and represents for me.
Healing does not mean leaving grief behind
When sections of the fence chip and deteriorate, I mend them. With each repair, I grow stronger. My attachment to the fence itself loosens. I begin to reflect on what it represents rather than clinging to it for safety.
As the fence gets repaired and replaced, I slowly outgrow the need for its physical presence. I begin to take on the qualities of the fence itself — steadiness, boundary, connection.
I become the fence.
Memory, names, and why we keep saying them
I now see many of the people I have met since Molly died as sections of my fence. I am surrounded by people, not pickets.
I can stand with you in grief and let shared understanding cloak us. I can stand beside you and scream when rage shows up. I can move around you and laugh loudly, raucously, childishly, when happiness breaks through. None of this cancels the rest.
I run a summer camp for kids called Barb’s Track Camp. We do “The Molly Mile” on Thursday mornings as a way to remember someone missing in our lives — a ritual of memory, healing, and permission to say names out loud.
I talk about Molly. I tell the kids it’s okay to miss someone. I ask them to wear a color that represents their person, and if they can’t think of one, to choose pink. Molly’s color. Before walking, skipping, or jogging the mile, we say hi to them. I count to three and we scream it to the sky.
The stories shared along the way are always heartfelt. Whether they are missing relatives, friends, or pets, the common thread is the same: the children want to talk about them. They want to say their names. Memory is not something they want to skip over — it’s something they want to hold.
Concord High School includes a memory chair at graduation, placed at the front of the stage with a single white rose. Gracie gave the Memory Chair speech the year she graduated. The theme was simple and profound: the chair gave her permission to invite Molly to her graduation — and permission to be happy.
So here we are, across cultures and time zones, across beliefs and traditions, gathered together by candlelight and memory. A shared acknowledgment that our children existed and still matter.
There is nothing I can say to fix this reality. But I can include you in it.
We are not outside on a track, so we will use our indoor voices. I am going to count to three, and if you are so inclined, I invite you to say hi to the child or children you are here to commemorate.
That way, they are here too.
1… 2… 3…
Molly and Gordy.
This is what life after child loss looks like for me — not moving on, but learning how to live with everything that remains.
