The man, seeing his son near death, changed from his rich clothes to sackcloth and from his diet of plenty to fasting, hoping his sacrifices would help the boy he so dearly loved. When later the son died despite the finest medical attention of this day, the man once again put on his finest and sat down to an abundant feast. When friends asked him how he could eat with his child newly dead, the man replied he had done all that was humanly possible while the child was alive and now that he was gone, it was time to pick up the pieces of living and go on with life.

The wise man had come to a truth that countless parents in their pain have also found ~ the living must go on with life. Unless you are suicidal, we have no alternative.

But how you continue your lives and how you come to terms with this, the ultimate tragedy, is crucial.

Whether a son or daughter died in a muddy rice paddy in Southeast Asia or in an antiseptic hospital ward, in a sudden accident or after prolonged illness, the result is the same. You, the child's mother or father, seem to have violated a natural law. You have outlived your child. Tragically, at the same time, a period when you are most confused, you have to make a fundamental determination.

From here on, will you have a life or an existence? When Lyn was faced with this decision, she opted for life. Although there were many months when she didn't really care, when she was actually frightened by the idea of living forty or fifty years after her daughter had died, she knew her decision was right.

It is painful even now, years later, for her to recall Jenny lying in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the hospital. Being there with that helpless feeling that she had had numerous times before...but she knew that Jenny was in God's hands. But from that distant time ~ with memories she can never hope to erase and, indeed, some that she would not wish to eradicate ~ she learned that life does go on and that is only as it should be. The problem that bereaved parents face is that life is going on around them while they frequently think they have become incapable of going on with life.

More important, Lyn has learned through trying ~ sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding ~ that there are certain steps a bereaved parent can and must take in order to retain any meaning to that life. Any quality.

At the onset, it will not be easy. All too often, it is a matter of fighting the natural tide of your grief as well as your very natural desire to give in to that grief. Time must be allowed for both. It is just as unnatural to walk around with a frozen grin after such a tragedy as it is never to stop weeping. It is a matter of highly personalized balance. Unfortunately, this is not the sort of balance that can be weighed or measured or even seen. There is no formula for what is enough of either. It is, instead, something that is felt. Like a blind person confronted suddently with new surroundings, your balance of laughing and crying is something you and you alone must grope toward. For some, the balance of laughing and crying could be the easing of grief for an hour a day while for others it could be allowing a fit of weeping for that period.

What is important is that there be both.

Bereaved parents come in all ages. It does not appear to make a difference whether one's child is three, thirteen, or thirty if he dies. The emotion in each of them are the same. How could it be that a parent outlives his child?

One woman in her eighties still deeply grieves over the loss of her forty-five-year-old daughter. Although she is a great-grandmother and had nearly half a century of love from her daughter, she says nothing can ever be right for her again. "Joanie called me every day. I never interferred with her life and she never interferred with mine. But she was such a big part of my world, and now she is gone." The woman frequently bemoans being left alive to cope with all that grief.

Equally sad are the young parents of babies who have suffered crib death. As in Janet's case, she kissed her apparently healthy son Brett goodnight, put him to bed, and found him the next morning, dead with no warning.

Death has no respect of wealth or color. It does not matter whether the child comes of a monied family or a poor one.

A black mother, subsisting on meager finances, who cared for and fed her child, felt the same sense of loss when her twenty-two-year-old son died from an accident. He was dead and she was alive.

A medical secretary whose only child was killed during the Vietnam conflict felt the same emotion. She had cared. She had loved. Her son was dead.

The backgrounds vary, but the emotion is universal. Children have died. What an unutterable waste!

Although Linda still feels a sense of loss ~ and frustration at the unused years that her daughter should have had ~ she has learned to survive despite a stunting heartache. Most of all, she has learned to enjoy life despite feeling a lament behind her laughter. When a child dies, it is inevitable tht there is not a clean break. Along with the funeral and horror, there is a great deal of emotional wreckage left as a residue of the tragedy.

Cruelly enough, in the vast majority of cases, not only do parents have to endure the grief of having a dead child, more often than not they also undergo severe family crises. Drunkenness, separation, divorce, alienaation, are frequently the aftermath of losing a daughter or son. In addition, a bereaved couple all too often is jolted by a further loss ~ the loss of illusion about each other.

Shortly after Janet's son Brett died, an older couple came to offer condolences. Although they were grandparents, they obviously found it difficult to utter the right words of comfort despite every best intention. Finally, after an awkward half hour the wife said, "At least you have each other for comfort." It would seem on the surface that this would be true. After all, both Janet and her husband had been in the same house, had suffered the same loss, and together had seen their precious child buried. Certainly having each other for comfort would be the logical solution. Unfortunately, as a number of parents whose child died have discovered, it is impossible to give comfort when you feel an equal grief.

Parents in all walks of life, many now divorced, agreed on the major problem. Too much was expected of the mate and too little was received. The depth of this phase of the tragedy did not become apparent in the early days after Brett died. Janet and her husband were too busy trying to put the pieces back together and too busy receiving callers to realize that they could not comfort each other.

Visualize two people pulling a cart for many miles. When one grows tired, he eases his grip, thereby letting a larger share of the burden fall on the other. The one left pulling grows resentful of the increased burden and voices anger. The first is now resentful because his exhaustion has not been treated sympathetically. When the positions reverses, the resentment reverses.

I saw an example of this seesawing of sympathy in a couple I had considered well mated. Their son, a young man about to be married, was killed. The father, a factory worker, who has held the same job for over twenty years and once took pride in a good attendance record, now immerses his grief in drinking bouts and misses days of work at a time. Instead of going to his job he takes his bottle of whiskey, goes to his bedroom and drinks and drinks and drinks. His wife feels revulsion rather than sympathy. She has threatened to leave him if he doesn't stop drinking. To no avail. She said she is powerless to help him and is furious because he is not helping her. "Each of us has his own misery. I can't help his. He can't help mine. That's not how it's supposed to be, I guess. But that is how it really is," says the wife.

Seeing things as they really are is very painful when a child dies. Ruthless fact is the last thing the parent wants. Somewhere in the back of their minds, especially at first, is the idea that this is all a dream. Their child couldn't be dead. She just could not be gone. The parent feels that they will wake up and it will only have been a dream. But gradually most of them reach the point where they must acknowledge that their son or daughter is truly gone. That is the time when a bereaved parent is faced with life's harshest reality.

Ultimately, though, facing that reality is what they need in order to go with life when a child dies. Facing it could well begin with something as simple as language. Jenny did not "pass on." Nor did she "fly to heaven" or "go to her just reward." She died. Those two words are cold, brutal and true.

During the time before some parents decided to live and not exist, they used such euphemisms in their innermost throughts. It was only when they could think "their child is dead" that they could also think "but I am alive."