Doug Beckstead reads the obituaries every day now, looking for something he hopes he won't find.
But occasionally it will be there: Among the photos of people who have died at the end of a productive life there will be the picture of a child, smiling shyly into the camera.Sometimes the child will have died in an accident, in a drowning, maybe, or while playing with a gun. These are the ones Doug Beckstead will linger over.
Since his own son died on a ride at Lagoon three years ago, Beckstead has felt drawn to these stories. He will jot down the time and the location of the child's viewing. And then, even though he doesn't know the family, he will attend the viewing himself.
He will walk into the chapel or the funeral home and look around for someone who looks like they might be a relative. "My name is Doug Beckstead," he will tell them, feeling a little nervous and a little foolish. "I'd like to talk to the parents."
Sometimes he'll have to stop to catch his breath because the casket will look so much like the one his son was buried in, or the child will be dressed so much like the way his son was dressed.
He has done this 10 times now, and every time, after he has explained why he is there, the parents have come to him "like a magnet."
He wants them to know they're not alone, he explains. He wants the dads, especially, to know that it's helpful if they have someone to talk to. He always brings them a book or two about grieving that he has bought himself.
Beckstead now wants to start a support group for grieving fathers.
He knows what grieving fathers tend to do. "If you go to a support group with your wife you're too busy being strong for her." But he also knows that fathers have strata of pain that are uniquely their own. Often, he says, they will feel guilty. "They think, `I'm the protector, and I failed.' "
LuCene Hougaard, who runs grief therapy groups at Primary Children's Medical Center, has seen it, too. "Most of the time," she says, "it's just the mothers who come. When the fathers do come, the see their purpose as being supportive of their wives. They ususally don't share what they're going through."
"We forget we're human," says Beckstead. "We try to act like The Duke or Clint Eastwood, but with something like this you have to forget all that. You can't be the tough guy."
Beckstead is sitting in the tiny living room of his duplex near St. Mark's Hospital. He points to the pictures of Eastwood and John Wayne that occupy wall space along with photos of his children. John Wayne has been his hero since his own father left when he was a year old.
People may seem strong, says Beckstead. "But you never see them when they're alone in bed at night or they're in the shower and it hits them."
The thing that hits Beckstead is a gnawing loss punctuated by one haunting image. "I can be going along doing fine and then it's like I have a kind of seizure. I can see my son looking up at me, I can see the ride coming around and hitting him. I can see him lying there."
Six-year-old Ryan was killed on April 30, 1989, on a children's ride at Lagoon. According to news reports at the time, Ryan had apparently thought the ride was over, fell while trying to get off, then was struck when the ride came around the track one more time. Beckstead and his former wife, Christine, have sued the amusement park.
Because of the flashbacks, Beckstead lost his job as a bus driver. Now, at 35, he is studying to become a paralegal. Divorced soon after the accident, he has remarried and has two small children.
"People think that just because we don't have a visible handicap that nothing's wrong with us," he says of grieving parents. "But there's a big hole inside of us."
People seem uncomfortable with a man's grief in particular, or perhaps they just don't acknowledge it, says Beckstead. After Ryan's death, when people came to the house to console the family, everyone walked right by him, he says, and put their arms around his wife.
Beckstead is looking for a place to hold the grieving father's support group. He hopes dads who have lost children, whether through accident or illness, will attend. And he hopes, he says, that "people won't look on it as a male chauvinist thing."
It's just that, after so many years of trying to be strong, he says, men need to let down their guard.
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(Additional information)
Healing grief
For more information about the start up of a grieving father's support group, contact Doug Beckstead at 264-9579 or LuCene Hougaard at Primary Children's Medical Center Bereavement Services, 588-3086. Beckstead and Hougaard also have copies of the pamphlet "Healing a Father's Grief."