Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9507030078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KRYS STEFANSKY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Mail arrives for Shelly Wagner. It piles up on a tiny table in the hall. It collects in her dining room. It covers each glass-topped inch of the writing desk in her living room.
Strangers write her long, pain-filled letters to say thank you. Finally, someone knows exactly how they feel.
Shelly Wagner knows. Her 5-year-old son, Andrew, drowned in the river behind her house 11 years ago.
Time stood still. Days, nights, she went to bed. Prayed for sleep.
``In my dreams, sometimes I could make it not happen, or give the night a happy ending,'' she said. Eyes closed, she'd play back that beautiful summer evening in July 1984, how she pushed Andrew in his tire swing in the back yard of their North Shore Point home in Norfolk, how she went into the house for just 10 minutes, how he did not answer when she came back out.
For three years, she sought comfort in books, counseling and support groups. Nothing helped.
``When I read everything after Andrew died, I didn't read anything by a mother herself,'' Wagner said.
The healing began several years later when she wrote her own poems about her son and his death. In them, she strips bare her soul, her guilt and her fight to deal with every detail of missing Andrew, like what to do with his shoes.
Her book was published in January 1994 by Texas Tech University Press after winning its First Book award. Sixteen months later, ``The Andrew Poems'' is in its fourth printing. Nearly 4,000 books have sold. People buy them in twos and threes and say they're for family and friends who need them.
The 47 poems have made Wagner a focal point for bereaved people across the nation. Now, the strangers who read them bring their grief to her door.
``I feel a little bit like a chalice that gets filled,'' she said, the sun streaming through the windows behind her and bathing the room, full of rose chintz and needlepoint pillows. Outside at the edge of the lawn, the Lafayette River, the river where Andrew died, flows slowly past.
Wagner is amazed by how life has changed since her book came out. Before this year ends, she will address book clubs and support groups and the first of four international conferences.
``It's been like a chain reaction. When I read, usually someone will be there that will invite me to read somewhere else.''
That is how she found herself in Boston two weeks ago, reading her poems in front of 1,200 medical professionals, her biggest audience so far. When she finished, all available copies of her book, 500, were sold.
Wagner said she couldn't refuse the invitation to address the Association for the Care of Children's Health, a conference of health professionals from across the U.S., Canada and other countries who care for injured, chronically ill or dying children, when she was told a representative from the Children's Hospital of Oklahoma would be there.
Earlier this year, as television news clips showed the bombed federal building in Oklahoma City, Wagner kept seeing faces of the parents of the 19 children who died in the day-care center. ``I watched and knew they were only beginning their descent into grief.''
In Boston, the association's executive director, Dr. William Sciarillo, gave copies of Wagner's book to the Oklahoma representative for each of the families of the 19 children who died. He said the poems contain a healing message for bereaved families and the medical caregivers who work with them.
``Shelly's reading was magical, magnificent. She just mesmerized them,'' Sciarillo said afterward.
Upon accepting the books, Michael Noel, the Oklahoma hospital's administrator, agreed Wagner's poetry was a strong healing force. He called her readings a ``ministry'' and predicted more mail.
Getting letters from others who've lost someone they love is not a burden. ``I am honored by them,'' Wagner said, pausing over each word. She answers them all. Her empathy comes from experience, ``What you wish to be is normal and anonymous and life to be the way it was before.''
Wagner is 47 now. She and her husband, John, an orthopedic surgeon, live alone. Shelly Wagner has just come home from visiting Thomas, Andrew's 22-year-old brother, who has moved to Wyoming.
Reminders of Andrew, forever 5, are everywhere. His mother's blue eyes and his impish grin, framed by a blond bowl haircut, smile out of gilt frames on desks and walls. His handprint molded in plaster is propped up beside his brother's on a hall table. His fuzzy, brown bear bedroom slippers are parked under an armoire in her bedroom.
``Grief bombards you like being in a meteor shower,'' said Wagner. The latest painful stab came just a month ago when she had to put her son's dog to sleep. Their golden retriever, Rusty, she writes in one poem, was the only witness to Andrew's death.
Wagner's poetry readings began in a bookstore here, a support group there. Sometimes an audience of three, sometimes 200 heard her. At first, she drove to appointments around Virginia, taking a family member with her for support.
Now, invitations are coming from farther away - Maryland, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Canada - and for much bigger audiences. These days, Wagner travels alone, needing the solitude to prepare herself for the readings and the pain.
``I dread them,'' she said, ``because I have to take him out of the river again.''
The graphic, simple nature of the poems is what gives them power.
``It's reality-based,'' said Susan Salisbury-Richards, national executive director of Compassionate Friends, an organization that helps bereaved parents, siblings and grandparents resolve their grief after the death of a child.
``It comes from the gut, and that's where it hits, in the gut. It's a book you can't read in one sitting. You have to take a breath and come back to it. It's that powerful.
``This book transcends. It is not just for bereaved parents. It's for everyone.''
Wagner is on the organization's docket as keynote speaker for two upcoming national conferences, one next year in Long Beach, Calif., and one in Philadelphia the year after.
When Wagner finishes a reading, in a voice carefully level and with gentle reminders to the audience that everything she's reading is absolutely true, her books are snapped up.
She imagines she knows why.
``I'm standing there with my hair combed and I'm dressed and I don't look like I did in the book. In the book I'm a wreck,'' she said. ``Also the fact that I read them and can even now interject some things about them is encouraging to those who find it hard to even mention their child that has died. It gives them courage.''
Donna Licklider keeps Wagner's book in a bedside table in her home in Batavia, Ohio. Her first son, John David, died 28 years ago, 10 days after he was born. She reads the poems near his birthday or whenever the grief bubbles back up.
``After all these years, it gave me answers to some of the feelings I had had,'' said Licklider, who this spring drove six hours to hear Wagner read. ``Now I know I have a place to go if I have no one to talk to.''
That affinity for Wagner as a fellow sufferer is common among her readers.
``It's like one of our bereaved fathers said about our organization,'' said Julie Sligh, director of Edmarc Hospice for Children, a program of care for terminally ill children in South Hampton Roads and support for their families.
``None of us wanted to belong to this club, but all of us are glad that it's here. This is how it is with Shelly. Anybody who has to experience that depth of pain is glad that somebody is already in there.''
For those in the club, Wagner has advice. Ignore convention and do what she did, like wearing Andrew's favorite polka-dot dress to his funeral.
``We don't do things that would help us initially, because we're afraid it might seem weird, but we should do it because you're never going to get to go back and open that casket and put that teddy bear in,'' she said. ``And if I tell you I threw away the shoes too soon, maybe you won't.''
Arranged to tell the story of Andrew's death and his family's life in the years after his drowning, the slim volume reads like a novel, filled with the details of a mother's heartbreak. It is also a love story.
``If I were to pick someone to read it,'' Wagner said, ``I would give it to someone intact and tell them to read it before something happens.
``There's such an innocence. I want to tell them, you don't know what you have.''
by CNB