Levada Giesey lost her 23-year-old son in 1985, when he was murdered during a hold-up on a Pontiac street.

    It's been nine whole years, yet Giesey says her life still hasn't returned to normal -- an ominous portent, perhaps, of the struggles Bill Cosby and his family face. Cosby's only son, Ennis, was shot and killed 12 days ago in Los Angeles as he changed a flat tire.

    "Life is never normal again," says Giesey, a secretary in Buick's advertising department. "You have a new 'normal.' And that's one thing that's hard for people to understand -- because you never go back to what you were."

    James Campbell would surely agree.

    Campbell's 8-year-old son, Joe, died in a bus accident 23 years ago. Joe was getting off the school bus to run home. Crossing in front of the vehicle, he dropped a book and stooped to retrieve it. The driver, who had no idea the little boy was still there, put the bus in gear, and Joe Marc Klaas, father of Polly Klaas hugs an unidentified friend after her murderer, Richard Allen Davis, was convicted last June in California. was crushed. Two of his siblings watched him die.

    Campbell concedes his loss is very different from Cosby's. Yet, he says, in ways the two deaths are very similar.

    Both were sudden. Both were violent. And both were, in their own ways, absurdly inexplicable. And as Giesey notes, "I think there's a common bond between all parents who've lost children suddenly -- no matter what the manner of death."     The bottom line is that no loss wounds like the death of a child. It's an experience, experts say, that sears survivors like no other death, often leaving permanent, visible scars.

Just ask JonBenet Ramsey's parents, assuming their complete innocence. Or Marc Klaas, father of Polly Klaas. Or the parents of Nicole Brown Simpson. Or Ronald Goldman's father, Fred. Or Oak Park's Pamela West, whose 13-year-old daughter, Desiree West, was slain last summer.

    Part of the trauma can perhaps be attributed to the greater senselessness that attaches to a child's death.

    "My son's death was just meaningless," says Campbell from his office at the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology, where he teaches philosophy.

    "If we can anchor our grief in meaning and make it serve a greater purpose, then we can make sense of it. I don't know what Mr. Cosby is making of his tragedy," he says, pausing, "but with my son's death, I could make no sense out of it."

    Perhaps trying to restore some normality to his life, Cosby returned to work at his TV sitcom, Cosby, Monday morning. In an interview Sunday night with CBS News' Dan Rather, Cosby said, "I think it's time for me to tell the people that we have to laugh. We've got to laugh."

    In many ways, Campbell's loss may bear a stronger resemblance -- in its accidental nature, and the victim's apparent unawareness that he was in danger -- to the loss a Los Angeles mother suffered the same night Ennis Cosby was gunned down. In that case, Corie Williams, 17, was accidentally shot when a gang member took aim at a rival on a public bus, one of three homicides committed that evening in Los Angeles.

    Cosby has talked with the grieving mother, Loretta Thomas-Davis of Watts, several times.

During a family press conference last week, Helen Green, Thomas-Davis' cousin, emphasized how touched the family had been by Cosby's concern. Through his agent, Cosby has also acknowledged he found talking to somebody who'd gone through the same experience enormously balming.

    In the modern era, a child's death contradicts all reasonable human expectation -- that our children will bury us, not vice-versa.

    "You expect the older generation to die, but the death of a child is a very special grief," Campbell says, adding that the word "grief" may not be strong enough to describe the pain, which he calls "beyond description. It's every parent's nightmare," he says, "and when it happens, it's worse than you could ever have possibly imagined."

    And where you might put other deaths "behind" you, in the common parlance, Campbell -- who now helps other families who've lost children through the nationwide organization called Compassionate Friends -- insists you can't do that with the loss of a child.

    "You can put it beside you," he says, "but never behind you, never out of mind." The despair diminishes over time, he says, but the event still retains a singular immediacy. Asked when his boy died, Campbell once blurted out, "Twenty years ago -- and yesterday."

    Twenty-three years on, Campbell now says he has "four children I love very much, one of whom is dead." He keeps a picture of Joe on his desk. "The memory of him" he says, "brings me great joy." But he admits that while he's fine today, "it took me a long, long time. I hope it can take the Cosby family less."

    'Primary grieving'

    Campbell figures he spent about five years in what he calls "primary grieving," the period when he says despair fills your life and threatens to crowd out everything else.

    Absorbing a child's death can take much longer than generally assumed, says Beth Stewart, a neuro-oncology pediatric nurse who helps run Duke University Medical Center's bereavement program, Whispers of Hope, that follows families who've lost children to brain cancer.

    "If you look at the literature on grief and loss," says Stewart, "it's very clear that parents continue to experience intense pain and loss for a minimum of four or five years -- while society expects you to be pretty much over it in about six months."

    Levada Giesey goes even farther, arguing that deaths from murder can take up to 20 years to get over, in part because the agony is prolonged by the years that can be taken up in trial, subsequent appeals and parole hearings -- each of which revives the horror once again. "It's a lifetime kind of thing," she says.

    Expecting survivors who've experienced the loss of a child to "bounce back" within six months is even crueler than it sounds, says Elizabeth DeRath, a clinical psychologist in Lansing who runs the Grief Recovery & Education Center, a community program affiliated with the Gorsline-Runciman Funeral Home. "Six months or so after the death is often when the grief gets worse for awhile," she says, "not better." Part of the problem, experts agree, is that parents are supposed to protect their children in all circumstances, so the loss of a child can be complicated by guilt and a sense of failure that may not attend, for example, a parent's death.

    Indeed, notes CMU's Daniels, research shows that a child's death often changes the parents significantly. "It's not like losing a sibling," she says. "We don't see an abrupt change in those survivors like we do with the death of a child. An out-of-order death is extremely traumatic," she says, "and nothing prepares us for it."

    All the same, Daniels argues, these changes can ultimately be positive. "You really reach down and find strength that the majority of us just don't believe is there," she says, "the strength to actually get through each day, and to reach a point where we don't cry every time we see a photograph. The human mind has astonishing healing powers we're not in touch with very often."

    Donna O'Toole was instrumental in helping set up Michigan's hospice system after her 21-year-old son died of cystic fibrosis 16 years ago. "The losses in my life haven't diminished me," she says, "but rather deepened and enhanced my appreciation of life." You learn, she says, that losing a child "isn't all pain and suffering, that eventually it comes to something else."

    Reaching out

    Experts suggest that reaching out to help others who've suffered similar tragedies -- rather like Bill Cosby and Loretta Thomas-Davis -- helps many survivors achieve a more durable sense of peace.

    Betsy Stover, who lost an infant with multiple birth defects at 11 months -- and subsequently founded Ele's Place, a Lansing bereavement program for children who've lost parents or siblings -- found herself writing every mother in the obituaries who'd just lost a small child.

    "You just want to scream, 'How can the world keep going when something so terrible has happened?'" she says.

    With both Giesey and Campbell, helping others became an important part of putting their own lives back together. Giesey is now the national vice-president of Parents of Murdered Children, a bereavement organization that helps anyone who's lost a relative -- whether child or not -- to murder. For his part, Campbell has volunteered with Compassionate Friends for years to help others "walk through their grief, to give them some assurance that they will live to laugh again, that they would live to be happy again."

    It was all part of a larger understanding, he says, that reconciliation comes not from "putting the grief behind you, but learning to walk along with it as a companion.

    "Joe is still a presence in our family's life," he says. "His picture is here right on my desk. He's always lived for me, you see."

    His heart aches for the Cosbys, and like many -- perhaps most -- decent people across America, he wishes he could help.

    "I've been very, very sad for Mr. Cosby," he says. "I think every parent who's lost a child grieves with him."         Call for help

    If you've just suffered a debilitating loss, there are a number of bereavement programs that might be able to help.

    Despite the name, Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) stands ready to help anyone who's lost a close family member to murder. Call POMC at (810) 360-9692.

    The Compassionate Friends help parents who've lost children of any age. Call (810) 978-8879 or (810) 296-5056.

    Finally, Touched By Suicide can be reached in Birmingham at (810) 646-5224. Copyright 1997, The Detroit News

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