The Great Unknown

An unlikely friendship helped my son grapple with divorce, death and ...

- Jowita Bydlowska

THE APARTMENT MY SON, Hugo, and I moved into after my divorce was nice, but the feeling we had was of holding on to a raft in angry waters. We were now about a 30-minute drive from Hugo's dad's new Toronto home. During the first week eight-year-old Hugo stayed with me there, he responded to the change in his life by trashing his room before finally letting tears come and allowing me to hug him.

At that time, he also developed a new fear-the fear of death. "I can't sleep. I am thinking about death," he would say when I would catch him with his eyes wide open, in the darkness of his bedroom, his little body tightly surrounded by a cordon of stuffed toys.

Hugo had always considered himself an atheist, ever since his dad had told him at age four that God, like Santa, wasn't real-and that when we die, we turn to dust. For Hugo, it had been just something to say to make adults laugh and confuse his innocent buddies in kindergarten.

But now that he was growing up, he was grasping the concept of time, that he was slowly but surely moving toward the big unknown. I think his fear of death also came about because nothing seemed certain anymore: Our little family was no longer a unit, and our lives were divided into splitcustody homes. When the nights got too hard for Hugo, we'd fall asleep holding on to each other like two monkeys, and all the unknowns stayed away for one more night.

That same year, I'd started going to a new addictions group that met twice a week. The group was a safe place where no hard topic was off the table. The best conversations would often happen after our meetings were over; my favourite person to talk to was Denis, an 80-year-old contrarian and cancer survivor who was considered by everyone else in the group to be a grump.