WHEN LIFE THREW US CURVEBALLS, DAD AND I HAD BASEBALL

After the loss of my mother and my brother in the same year, watching Little League brought my dad and me closer-and helped us heal.

- TERESA STRASSER

A few years ago, my dad and I became obsessed with my son's Little League team, the Purple Pinstripes. We lived and died by every pitch, exalted by a base hit just inside the line, devastated by a strikeout. We were just as invested in these fourth graders playing for snack bar tickets as we would have been in elite athletes with million-dollar contracts.

We cheered into the dry desert air until our throats were raw. We dissected every play of every inning of every game. We became one with each other and one with our team. That's how a single season of Little League baseball became our very unorthodox grief group of two, a group that met exactly 16 times at Ingleside Middle School in Phoenix.

This grief group had no moderator and no rules other than those dictated by the Little League of America-and the human heart.

"Morgan would've gotten that ground ball," my dad said with a grimace during our team's first game, wiping his twitchy eyes with a bandanna. "He never missed a grounder at first. You have to play the bounce. Don't let the bounce play you." Morgan was my older brother, a fastball-loving lefty who had been a baseball prodigy until he stopped playing at 13.

During that spring season, I watched my older son play and mourned Morgan, who had died of spinal cancer at 47, three years earlier. In the bleachers and along the sidelines, I also mourned my mom, who had died four months to the day after her son. The losses had come one on top of the other, sending me freefalling into a formless, lightless grief-o-sphere in which I couldn't seem to right myself.

To deal with this so-called cumulative grief, I tried books and meditation and synagogue and dharma talks and even traditional grief support groups, but I always dropped out.