An Unexpected Death Brings Our Family Together

Matt at the Swiss Farms

One winter night in 2005, I received a phone call – one of those dreaded calls we all know could happen at any moment, try as we might to forget it. But I will never forget the warbling pitch of my mom’s voice as my answering machine clicked to life and announced:

“Matt’s dead”.

My brother Jon’s oldest son, only nineteen, had died in an accident. I immediately flew back to Michigan from my home in California, driving north through the snow to our family house at Seven Ponds. We spent four long days cloistered in the cabin as March winds shook the tall soft pines, and through the windows, lovely snow piled like thick white blankets around us. The house made us feel safe, sheltering our family from the world outside.

That weekend seemed to move in slow motion. Death touched us each differently and, depending on our personal relationship with Matt, we each traveled through grief at our own pace. Most unexpected was that our emotional walls dissipated and we spent those days communicating and reaching out to each other in ways we had not experienced before. What came out of Matt’s death was a bringing together… a special closeness between us still living. Life, or you could say Death, unexpectedly offered us a moment in time filled with tenderness that bonded us further as a family.

When this occurred, I was already in the research stages of starting a business on death and dying. I suddenly found myself in the throws of an end-of-life process. At our Seven Ponds home, my youngest brother David revealed to me what I now find most significant about how we process death in this country: Having received the news of Matt’s accident, David called my brother Jon on his way to the hospital. When Jon arrived, the doctor gravely informed him that his son was gone, asking if he wanted to see Matt. Jon turned to David with pained confusion and confessed, “I don’t want to go see him. I know it’s terrible, but I don’t.” David was so focused on supporting his brother, he had to ignor his own need to see his nephew. We do not talk about death in this country because we are taught to be controlled and reticent about our displays of emotion.

I knew then that SevenPonds had to happen. There needed to be a way to connect, communicate and obtain information about end-of-life resources. Death and dying is an extremely personal experience that’s completely out of our control, and we need to understand that no matter what you feel, it’s all OK.

This image of Matt is up the hill from Seven Ponds lakes. It captures the moment I will always remember most of Matt… On a sunny June day many years before, Matt arrived at the house at Seven Ponds lakes, burst through the door and yelled “schools out!” while jumping up and down, thrilled and animated. He was so full of life.