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Life After Losing a Child
Losing an Only Child:
I had this one woman tell me “When you are a grieving mother, you become a better surfer.” I said “What do you mean?” She said “You learn how to ride the waves of grief better.” In the beginning, those waves just knock you on your ass and there is no riding it. I thought that was a really good analogy. There are still days when the wave hits and I’m knocked about and there’s nothing I can do about it. But there are more days when, not that I embrace it, but I do because the grief that I feel over my son has just become a part of who I am. I can either fight it and say I need to get over it, or I can embrace it and say ok this is now a part of who I am. What it boils down to is that you can choose to drown in the wave of grief, or become a better surfer. -Mother I Don't Have That Fear of Death Anymore I sometimes remind myself of the saying “Only the good die young.” He was too good for this world and was taken to a higher place, a better life, before others because he was just too good for this world. He wasn’t afraid. As a result of his not being afraid, I don’t seem to have that fear of death that I had before. I’m not afraid, because he’s there. -Mother Losing a child is so complex in the way that you feel. You either deal with it or you don’t. It never gets easier, but it becomes more bearable. You find a way to move through it. -Mother Stop Second Guessing Every Decision I stopped beating myself up about the decisions I made. I realized that a lot of parents second guess every decision they made. The best thing that you can do is not to do this because you would never have made a decision to put your child in harm, even when that is the only decision you can make. -Mother My husband will say to me “Pain is inevitable. You lose a child, you are in pain, and it’s a pain that you don’t expect.” You can choose to be miserable. I live every day of my life with the pain of losing him, but I don’t choose to sit and cry all day long. That is the conscious decision I make. -Mother One thing that kind of stood with us was “It’s ok.” It’s ok to be pissed, it’s ok to be mad, it’s even ok to laugh. -Father Her birthday and her death day are always difficult. I still cry at the drop of a hat for no reason. Does time heal? No. The pain is just an ache now but I don’t think it will ever “heal.” Seeing little girls that are about the age that Carrie would have been. The father-daughter dance at weddings is tough. -Mother The guilt that everybody has as a parent, the “if-onlys” and the blaming of yourself, start to slowly wear off. I think after six months, that’s when I was ready to say “This is life now and I suppose we better get on with it.” -Mother The big thing for me is to choose to live. I literally look at myself in the mirror every morning and say “I’m choosing to live today.” I want to honor my daughter by not forgetting, by continuing to live and by being there for our son who still needs a mommy and daddy. By choosing to live, you make a decision to continue on and honor them in each and every goal that you achieve know that you’ve reached that goal with the barriers that were in front of you, with all the heartache in your heart. -Mother It made me want to be a better person It made me appreciate things, not take things for granted that you may not have tomorrow. I don’t think I ever really did, but it really made me believe in that, and know that that was true. It made me more aware of it, and not to hold onto bitterness. It’s made me quicker to let go of anger, or even driving down the street and getting ready to yell at somebody, road rage, it just makes it stop. Also, because I believe that there is a God and I believe that Andy is in Heaven and that I will see him again, it has made me more aware of how I live, and that I have to live a certain way to get to that place to see him again. So no, I’m not a religious person, and I’m not a holier than thou person. I’m not trying to be something I’m not, but it just made me want to be a better person. -Mother I had a huge amount of fear approaching the one year anniversary of her death because I didn’t want to be on the other side of the year. I wanted to be inside a year. I wanted to be inside of what I perceived. I wanted to be close to her death. I didn’t want to be separated from her. -Mother The passage of time is a meaningless construct in terms of how close you are to your child. With the passage of time your child becomes less of a tangible thing and more of an idea. That’s a little upsetting sometimes. I got very upset at the five year mark when I realized that I was having trouble remembering the specifics of Cameron. She was becoming more of an idea that I wish I was living or feeling than my child. That was very upsetting but I also recognize that that’s the nature of death and grief. Time moves on and the way you hold onto memory and grief changes. I think it’s very healthy and helpful to carve out moments where you sit with pictures and very deliberately make yourself go there, feel it, sit with it, cry, get angry, whatever it is, and then step away. If you always hold it at arms length always then your love for your child and the sadness that you have for yourself begins to eat away at you. It will find some way to bite you in the tush. You have to very consciously make appointments to sit with your grief so that you can feel it and move on in a comforting and comfortable way. -Mother I am going through a process now trying to figure out what I want to do and what I want to focus on more. I’m fortunate that I have music to fill some of that time, but it’s definitely a challenge. -Mother Grief is Continuously Changing We live in an age and a culture that understands bereavement. We don’t live a society that does. My husband and I don’t understand bereavement, but there are people who have really helped us. There are books that are well-written. The whole grieving process is not a “shut the door and move on” thing which is what our parents’ generation did. I am full of hope that we’ve changed for the better. There’s a huge sense of loss and I have questioned many times if life was worth continuing to live. Ask us the question six months from now and a year from now because grief is continuously changing. -Mother It’s a complicated process. You think about your relationships with others and it’s complicated because it depends on how that particular person relates to you after you’ve lost your child. People don’t know what to say. People don’t know how to come along side you and when you’re in the midst of deep grief. Relationships go through interesting changes. We all grieve terribly differently so the friction and the tension during the grieving process can be enormous. I think all relationships change after such a loss. -Mother I think Paulina has given me the gift of knowing death in a way, and knowing that as hard as it is to let your child go, it’s their journey. She’s taught me that just because she isn’t here in person doesn’t mean that she’s not still with me every day in my heart. I talk to her everyday. When I go out and I see a beautiful sunrise and a butterfly fluttering in the wind, I just say “Hi Paulina.” It’s getting to that time of year that poppies are around and growing, and it’s beautiful. And like the flowers, Paulina was hearty, and defied the odds, and grew up in rugged conditions where you’re not supposed to thrive. They’re so strong, even though they look so fragile. -Mother I think that the first year is the hardest because every day is a new day without them, and you’ll never have a January 1st, and January 2nd, and January 3rd, first again. Every day is a fresh day of pain that you’re dealing with. I think that it comes in waves. I recently wrote to a friend who lost a daughter on Mother’s Day, it was about a month after her daughter’s passing, and I said, and I truly mean this, I’ve come to a place where 90% of the time when I think about James, I’m extremely happy. Out of the sadness that I feel, I can also feel happiness I feel because the memories of him are happy memories. I’m not in “sad grief” anymore. I still have times of sadness and loss, but then most of the time it’s a happiness I feel when I think of him. He’s with me every moment of every day. He is a constant part of who I am. I wouldn’t say that I consciously think of him every moment of every day. I don’t have to because he is part of who I am. -Mother Such a big part of your life got ripped out. You’re always going to miss that. It changes. You learn to live with it. As much as you hate it, maybe you’ll learn to accept it. But it never goes away. -Mother You know, I feel Andy’s presence around me. I feel him in my house. I feel him across my bed. I honestly do, because that’s what he did when he didn’t feel good. He would be tough in front of his friends, but when they were gone, he would go lay across my bed and stare in my face. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Nothing.’ You know, because he was too afraid I was going to take him to the hospital. Sometimes I walk past his room and I swear I hear noise from his room. I swear I hear noise going up and down the stairs in the middle of the night, the sound of him munching on something. -Mother I don’t have this thought very often but it’s one of the hardest and least helpful thoughts. I wonder “What would they look like now? What would they be like now?” It’s a really natural thought but it’s completely useless. It hurts. -Mother Losing an Only Child I think that the hardest thing for me moving forward, and I think it’s difficult for my husband as well, is defining ourselves as parents. People view you in a different way as to whether or not you have parented vs. haven’t. It’s hard when you meet strangers and they say “How many kids do you have?” and you don’t necessarily want to go into the whole “Well, I had a child but he passed away…” with a complete stranger. Navigating that has been a really difficult challenge for us because you don’t want to not honor your child’s memory, but each of us has come to a place where you talk about it and by saying that you don’t have any children doesn’t necessarily dishonor his memory in those moments in time when it’s not, but it doesn’t feel right to go into full disclosure. -Mother I really avoid situations where I will be asked that question “How many children do you have?” because I just really have a hard time with answering it. I think I’ve gotten better over time, but it’s still a very difficult course to travel. -Mother I don’t know where I’ve heard this but usually parents talk about not wanting to be alive but they hardly ever follow through. Any therapist who works with grieving parents knows that that’s a normal feeling. If you can find some purpose… People who have other children have a lot of purpose in their other children, but for families like myself, who have an only child, it’s particularly challenging because we felt like we’ve lost our role of being a parent, we lost our connection to the culture of parenthood, of community connection. All of a sudden, we are not parents anymore, active parents. For me, it was like my life was just completely taken from me and I was wandering around aimlessly wondering “Who am I? What am I going to do with my life?” My identity was just kind of stripped. -Mother The Decision Not to Have More Children On the negative side, it created a situation in which my husband and I are choosing not to have children biologically, but making a decision about adoption a lot harder because he was our only child so we’ve been grappling with that. -Mother |
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Copyright © 2008, Children's
Hospital Boston Department of Psychiatry. All Rights Reserved. The information on this website should not be taken as medical advice, which can only be given to you by your personal health care professional. Updated: May 22, 2008 |
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