Family's Amazing Resilience After Tragedy
Marina and Kevin Krim. Photo by PatrickMcMullan.com.
It was a little more two years ago when parents across the country were gripped by a chilling, too-close-to-home tale: that of the Krims, the New York City family whose children — Lulu, 6, and Leo, 20 months — were stabbed to death, allegedly by their own nanny, who had cut her own throat.
As someone who not only has a young daughter but has also lived through traumatic loss as a child, watching my own parents struggle to pick up the pieces after the death of my younger brother in a car accident decades ago, the story of the Krims — and of their oft-documented resilience — has compelled and astounded me. It continued to do so this week, when mom Marina Krim, in a rare public appearance, spoke about how she and husband Kevin have managed to soldier on. She gave much of the credit to their surviving daughter, Nessie, who was only 3 years old when she arrived home with her mother to the crime scene on that horrific day.
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"People often told us, ‘Time will heal’ — that seemed more than a little daunting," Marina told the crowd Wednesday in New York City at a benefit for the Lulu & Leo Fund, which she and Kevin formed in the wake of the murders. ”There was no obvious path for us, no manual with step-by-step directions about how to deal with a blow like this, no teacher telling us what to do.”
As she recalled, according to People magazine, “I was sitting in the hospital, Nessie clinging to my chest, and I was asking over and over to anybody who would listen, ‘What am I supposed to do tomorrow? How do I do this? What do we do?’ The hospital workers looked at me with a blank stare. A few days later, Kevin and I met some of the top psychiatrists in New York City, and they didn’t have a reassuring answer for us either.”
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They stumbled out of the fog of grief in their own way — by honoring their late children through the creation of their foundation, which brings arts and science programs to disadvantaged children; by having another baby, Felix, born in 2013; and by finding strength and inspiration in their bright and beautiful daughter.
Lulu and Leon. Photo by the Lulu and Leo Fund Facebook page.
"I remember looking at our daughter Nessie in the darkest days and I so admired her ability to just live in the present, seeing the world just as one should,” Marina said. “To me, it seemed like she had all the answers. Though she missed her siblings, she was laughing and enjoying herself and making every heartbroken person in the room smile. She wanted to draw and collect and make things." That, she said, “guided us through the darkest days” and led them to fundraising for others.
According to Fredda Wasserman, clinical director of adult programs and education for Our House Grief Support Center, based in Los Angeles, the Krims’ response is a “wonderful illustration of both grieving and of finding joy by allowing themselves to live in the moment, so they are not defined completely by one or the other.” The trauma of the loss, Wasserman tells Yahoo Parenting, makes it particularly important to find many outlets for coping, and it’s heartening that they’ve found a way to stay connected to the memories of their children in such a positive way.
“Hopefully,” she adds, “they are also doing the grief work — talking about all the emotions, and not just pushing the grief away. Because if we push it away it will eventually come back and have to be dealt with.” After the loss of a child, Wasserman notes, it’s crucial to try to be both grieving and engaging in life. “People think they have to be one or the other,” she says. “But it’s the ‘and’ that is so important.” Having had Nessie to focus on, she adds, “must help them tremendously to know that they have joy and meaning.”
That all rings true, according to someone else who would know: my mother. “You go through the motions at first,” she tells me about the period immediately following my 7-year-old brother’s death, at the hands of a drunk driver. “[At first] you begin to think you don’t want to be on the earth, to continue life without someone you treasure,” she recalls. But then, she says, “I realized, above everything else, you and your dad had escaped harm. My family was still there, if not in the way I had wanted.”
She began to read a lot about various types of loss, from suicides to the Holocaust. “I thought, if someone else can get through it, I can do it,” she tells me, adding that she allowed herself to “grieve hard” in the beginning. She also listened to the blunt words of an acquaintance who had lost her son in a boating accident years before. “There’s always going to be a black hole in your life,” she told my mom. “Your job is to walk around that hole and not fall in it.”
Having me, she says, was part of what helped her not fall in — just as Nessie has been for the Krims. “You grab on,” she tells me, “to what is left.”