Mummy is in heaven

Karin Wehrli Gisi goes to the doctor with a swelling in her shoulder. The diagnosis: melanoma, black skin cancer, with metastases throughout the body. After that, everything happens very quickly. A trial of mistletoe therapy triggers a high fever and the then 38-year-old woman is immediately referred to hospital. «Erich, are you looking after the children?» «Of course,» replies her husband and can only watch as his wife withdraws into herself, calmed down. To die.

Erich Gisi, 46, from Wolhusen LU is left alone with four children after the death of his wife in summer 2008. His youngest, Elia, is just 2 years old, Noah 4, Simone 8 and Jonas 10. In Switzerland, around 1000 fathers and 400 mothers of underage children and adolescents die every year, leaving behind more than 2000 half-orphans. As a mother or father, how do you carry your children through a valley when you can barely walk yourself because of the pain?

This loss is like being burnt in, but it gets easier over the years.

Erich Gisi

«After her death, I put on a cloak so that nothing could get through to me,» says Erich Gisi, explaining his strategy to bring normality to his day, which was anything but normal. His employer gives him a month off, and he can work another month later.

He also experiences great solidarity in his neighbourhood. A neighbour helps him around the house and with the children. This means he doesn't have to pay for childcare and can return to work on a 50 per cent and later 70 per cent basis. The children need him.

While Jonas withdraws, Simone cries a lot, wants to talk about her mother, and at night the two little ones come to his bed, seeking the closeness of their father, who is now both father and mother.

«Sometimes I could only bear this closeness with difficulty, I was grieving too,» admits Erich Gisi and: «Grief is not a train that, once it leaves the station, doesn't come back, it catches you cold, again and again, with a remark, a photo.» In a grief seminar, he comes to terms with his feelings. It gets better.

And yet. He goes to parents' evenings alone. «Discuss this with each other at home,» the teacher asks the mums and dads. But who should Erich Gisi have discussed it with? Even when Jonas starts to rebel at school during puberty, Erich Gisi is left on his own.

For the first few years, he accepts help wherever he can get it, but over time, the compassion begins to bother him. «You're a very poor man,» he reads the pitying faces. «I'm not!» he thinks. «This loss is etched in my memory, but it gets different, easier over the years.»

It is 2 August 2010, a hotel resort in Tunisia. «Daniel just wanted to quickly take our towels to the pool and reserve some sunbeds,» Andrea Wiesmann recalls of the day that changed her life. The holiday programme includes a camel tour, followed by sunbathing by the pool.

But the father of the family doesn't come back. After a while, his wife goes to have a look, convinced that she has struck up a conversation with him.

Instead, she finds him on a couch, his eyes closed, his face white as chalk. A German tourist is kneeling next to him. She takes Andrea Wiesmann in her arms. Heart massage, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then the emergency doctor.

He writes cardiac arrest on a form, closes his medical case and says goodbye. They are surrounded by a cluster of hotel guests in swimming trunks and bikinis. «But you have to take him with you, help him.» - «Andrea, he's dead.»

Andrea Wiesmann wants to be strong as she tells this story. Five years later, at the kitchen table in her home in Dietikon ZH. Her boys Jeremy, 13, and Patrick, 10, are sitting next to her. One on the left, the other on the right. Patrick takes his mum's hand and strokes her arm. Andrea Wiesmann looks at him. «You have to come with us, it's something with dad,» she says, leading her sons through the hotel grounds. The boys are excited. «Shh, be quiet, the other guests are still asleep.»

«How absurd,» she says today, thinking back to the admonition. «I was in a trance.» Her state for the next few seconds, minutes, hours. Two days later, the family flies home. Separated. Mother and sons in one aircraft, the father in the hold of another.

We can't move, then Dad won't be able to find us.

Patrick Wiesmann

«I just worked,» Andrea Wiesmann remembers the first year without her beloved husband and father. The shock was too great. You die in old age, not at 47. Getting up, taking the children to nursery, school, cooking, sleeping - alone in a flat full of memories. At Christmas, the parents-in-law come, there's buttered plait and Citterio salami. Like every year. They go to the cemetery, then it's time for presents.

The widow holds herself up, supported by friends, her siblings and loved ones. «The sympathy was huge, almost too much,» she says. She is certain that this was also due to Daniel. The fun-loving joker, the master butcher at Coop, the club man who felt most at home in company. You don't leave your family alone with this burden.

«But in the second year, it was suddenly over. As if the grief was over for everyone else,» remembers Andrea Wiesmann. «But grief comes in waves,» she knows today, «it washes over you and drags you down.» In spring 2011, she sought the help of a psychologist; talking helps, so does crying.

And the boys? Psychologists say that children have a different understanding of dying and death depending on their age. They don't realise the finality of death until they are about 8 years old. They live in the feeling that mum or dad will come back.

The loss has changed Patrick, says his nursery school teacher. Patrick becomes clingy, only wants to sit on his mum's lap and no longer sleep alone. «Mum, we can't move to another flat, then Dad won't be able to find us.» On his first day at school, his mum sits alone next to him in the large assembly hall.

Jeremy is the big one, the sensible one. «When I lie in bed at night, I talk to dad,» he says, placing his hand on an old red book. «Guide for apprentice butchers» is written on it. His greatest treasure. He got it from his father - Jeremy's career choice is clear.

The psychologist advised her to do something good for herself. Andrea Wiesmann smiles and knows that she is doing it more for her boys. It's hard to say no when your father has died. She joins the Aurora association for widowed mothers and fathers (see box below) and meets people who share her fate. She exchanges ideas, can bring her children along to family events and is also offered holiday trips together. That does you good.

«At the beginning you think you're all alone, but here you realise that's not true,» confirms Erich Gisi. After years, he also met a partner again through the association. Sibylle Blum from the knows that the question «When can I fall in love again?» is one that drives many widowed people. It helps to meet someone who understands that the deceased partner will always be there, to whom you don't have to explain yourself because they have experienced the same thing.

And yet this is precisely what makes it harder to look ahead. Andrea Wiesmann has had a new partner for a year now. That's nice. The children accept him, but he can't replace their father. She struggled with herself for a long time. She wondered why. But it was the words of a friend that gave her strength: «Daniel would never have left if he hadn't known that you could do it on your own!»