This is a question many bereaved people want to know. It is also one of the hardest to answer. Personally, I believe there are a lot of factors that affect how we deal with life and this in turn will affect the way we react to any given situation, especially grief.
How our parents dealt with the loss of their parents or close friends? Will be our first example of these traumas life throws up. We further learn as we go through life the pain of losing pets. Then, there is our own innate natures which do not always want to conform with how others examples have shown us what to do in like occasions. Then when it comes to the experience suffered by child bereavement, this becomes an impossible question to resolve.
Every other death we encounter in our lives, whether sudden, through long-term illness or disease, will be accepted, eventually. It will take some folks longer than others to work through the pain and missing, but it simply becomes part of their lifetime’s experience.
However, when it comes to the death of ones own child whether from: sudden, through long-term illness or disease; it can be for most parents impossible to find complete closure. Indeed many of us, including me, do not think it is possible to find any kind of closure, as while we are alive, and our child is not with us – how can there ever be closure. Children are not meant to die before their mums and dads.
This is why self-help organizations like The Compassionate Friends (TCF), CRUSE and SANDS and many others are invaluable to grieving parents.
You make some good points, Betty. I think knowing instinctively that this pain will always be with me is what makes it all the more important for me to turn something out from it that is good in a lasting way. I don’t want to miss the lessons, the growth, or the mercies. This is life changing stuff. My son would want it to be for the better.
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Yes, I reached the same conclusion, ‘since, it’s impossible to have my daughter here with me, I might as well do something positive’. I didn’t want her to be forgotten as she died so young, at just 3 yrs and 3 months, then I would do something to make sure other people remembered her and that others got to know her. So I wrote a book about my journey which was eventually published called ‘One step at a time, Mourning a Child’. With the aim that her life and death would count for something. I have learned from other bereaved parents that my book helped them with their journey.
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I just put your book on my to-read list over at Amazon.
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Thank you, I hope it helps. If it does please pass on the link to others you know who might benefit from reading it, too.
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