~ When your parent dies you have lost your past. When your child dies you have lost your future ~

To bury a child is to see a part of yourself, your eye color, your dimple, your sense of humor, being placed in the ground. It is life’s harshest sympathetic experience and must therefore be the hardest one with which to deal. In reality, when children die, not only are we mourning them, we are also mourning that bit of our own immortality that they carried.

A poem written by Herbert Parker most graphically explains the enormity of the bereaved parent’s “loss of future”:

His little arms crept ‘round my neck
And then I heard him say
Four simple words I shan’t forget ~~
Four words that made me pray...
They turned a mirror on my soul,
On secrets no one knew.
They startled me, I hear them yet;
He said, “I’ll be like you.”

Although studies of the grieving process are by now means complete, psychiatrists in general agree there are certain normal reactions.

The first sensation a parent has at the news that his child is dead of one of numbness, a sense of not actual being the bereaved party. It is like being shot with Novocain, you can hear the dentist drilling and yet you feel nothing. It is as if the dental procedure was happening to someone else.

The numbness stays with you for days and will come in waves just as your weeping and sorrow will come in waves. For that, a grieving parent can be thankful. If you had to face the enormity for your loss for every waking minute, I am certain that it would completely envelop you and consume you and prevent you from ever again becoming whole. During this time many people like being told what to do...if someone tells them to eat...they eat...if someone tells them to sit...they sit...most normally strong-minded people, their behavior changes to atypical. Most people are too numb to think for themselves during this time. They appreciate being told what to do ~ they feel that if the numbness goes away it will make way for grieving. Some people need sleeping pills after the loss of a loved one so that they can get the needed rest that their body requires and to clear their minds ~ just beware that sleeping pills can become a habit and that you need to break yourself of the habit.

Lyn worked at St. Charles Hospital Emergency Room on the east side of town, Jenny was in Toledo Hospital on the west side of town. The night Jenny died she went from that Toledo Hospital to St. Charles Hospital...she walked in and told them that she could never come back again. At that time, she knew that she could not handle the trauma of the emergency room setting. She just prayed to God that no one in her family would require hospitalization until God felt that she was ready to handle a hospital setting again. It took her close to a year before she could even step foot into a hospital...the memories still come back. She took a deep breath the first time she had to enter a hospital again, but she succeeded. With each time that followed it got easier, yes she still has memories, however, they are getting easier to handle each time. Yes, she feels that God did carry her during this period of her life.

Far worse than lying awake all night, can be the mornings. Remembering your child is dead ~ you feel like a tidal wave hit you, engulf you and you might feel like you are drowning. You have to fight your way out of bed every day ~ and usually it is every day. This can go on for months and it can be the toughest battle for you. Nothing in life can be more emotionally draining than struggling to leave one’s bed. If it takes all that much to get up, what energy is left for the rest of the day?

Another thing that most people lose during this time is their concentration. It would be hard for someone who normally reads to read a book, watch television or even have the attention span to have a simple conversation with someone. You feel detached...like nothing was alive or part of this world. The only reality that you know is that your child is dead. That is truth. Everything else is false. Eventually the detachment leaves and in its place comes pain. Deep, slashing, gouging pain that knives through you with only brief periods of rest. Strangely though with this pain comes healing. It seems that what numbness can’t do, pain does. When you feel pain you realize that you are alive ~ that you are again living.

In todays times it seems that people try to protect the female...they are there to lend a shoulder to cry on, etc., but in reality the father needs as much encouragement as the mother. They are burying their child too. It is very unfair that people think that a man doesn’t have the same feelings as a woman ~ they loved their child, they helped raise them...and they saw their child dead. Many times it is the man who makes the funeral arrangements “because they are stronger”...hogwash. Society expects the father to be able to continue on...return to work and provide a living for his family. Most men pay dearly for keeping a stiff upper lip. They pay dearly because they are not allowed to grieve for the child that they have lost. They tend to sink deeper and deeper in sorrow. As one father told me, “I feel as if I am walking across the Arctic snowcap." "I am very tired. I know if I lie down to rest I will fall asleep. I know if I fall asleep I will freeze to death. I just don't care. I can't fight my tiredness any more." This is how the man felt inwardly as he faced the world "bravely" each day and shook hands with customers and made new contacts. He walked around wondering when it would be his turn to grieve. Finally he reached a point where he knew that he needed psychiatric help. He does not remember getting much help or guidance. But, and maybe this is what it is all about, he spent any number of sessions just crying. Only after many such sessions did he begin to feel he had left the snow-capped Arctic. To this day though, he can still recall his emotions and, when he does, he shudders at the bleakness he had discovered within himself.

Not all people are fortunate enough to come out of this period intact. Stories abound in which a parent suddenly takes on a new behavior in seeking thrills that would excite a teenager rather than an adult. As in other facets of living and dealing with problems, extreme reactions bring about their own sets of problems.

The man who became a stunt motorcyclist after his son died in an automobile mishap or the mother who left her husband and became an exotic dancer after their only child died left behind them hurt partners and families.

Other parents do not go seeking thrills. Instead, their reaction is the opposite. They become fearful and feel the need to wrap those they love even closer to them. One suburban woman, although her child died from a physical ailment, suffered terribly whenever her surviving youngsters went off to play outside. Another mother, whose son was a drowning victim, will not allow her children or even her husband near a swimming pool or lake. "I just can't handle my fear. It's not worth their few hours of pleasure when I have to undergo such terror. They don't even argue with me about it. I guess they understand," the woman explained.

All too often, however, children faced with such restrictions do not understand. They strain to break free from bonds which they find unreasonably constricting. One twelve-year-old girl confided she hates her mother from June to September because summer becomes a time of "you can't do this or that." "I don't care if my brother died when his rowboat tipped. I have a right to swim and go to the beach. He's been dead two years and I'm left with no one to play with during vacation. She won't even let me go to camp!"

As in many other steps of the bereavement process, if it appears to be impossible to allow a normal life to go on around you and with you, perhaps professional guidance should be considered. Of course, what is normal varies, but some people deal with death in a manner that guarantees no one around them will ever be free of grieving.

One mother who lives in a small suburban house turned her dead son's bedrooms into a virtual shrine. More than a year has passed since he was killed in an automobile accident, yet his school books sit on his desk as if he will return anytime to continue his education. His bed remains unmade, just as he left it. A half-empty soda bottle still sits on his dresser. "His room will remain untouched as long as I live," his mother said. "I believe this way, my way, is the right way. This is how my child should be remembered." The unfairness of this enshrinement concept is that the other children who are alive are made to feel they must tiptoe reverently about their home. When they complain about the atmosphere in which they live, they do so not from imagination but from the gloom that hangs over the very air in their home.

There are many bereaved parents who rightly or wrongly believe doctors did an inadequate job of caring for their children. For parents in this situation, hatred festers. They have often taken this most negative emotion and forced it upon their surviving children. One such case is the brother of a youngster who died of an obscure disease which doctors were unable to detect until it was too late to save the child. Not only are the parents embittered against a particular doctor, they have passed on their hatred of him to the surviving brother. Fifteen years after his ten-year-old brother died, he speaks venomously of this doctor.

Probably all too common among parents who develop reactions out of the normal range of grieving are those who begin to experience physical ailments either real or imagined. Sometimes the ailments take on the form of what caused the death of their child. Physicians and family should take a long hard look at such ailments and recommend counseling.

And, of course, some parents completely withdraw from society. Although each extreme bereaved response is tragic, it would seem this is the most hopeless because the parents have removed themselves from the prime source of easing their hurt ~ the company of their fellowman. Many of the negative patterns, unfortunately, are set during the weakest time ~ the most vulnerable time ~ for these parents. They are set during the early stages of grieving. Methods people use in coping ~ or trying to cope ~ with grief are as highly personalized as people themselves. Not every solution is right for every parent. Some things, however, can apply to most people. The easiest, and in the early stage the most necessary, method is to roll with the punches. The parent who has suffered this tremendous shock should allow the waves of grief to submerge him or her, but he should also allow the tide of momentary forgetfulness gently to sway him for the few precious moments it is present.

One of the most essential ingredients for a father in coping with his grief is to forget all about the good ole Anglo-Saxon ethic of apathy and to cry. Let the tears come. Let them flow. They help wash away sorrow.

It is during this early period, even though the pain is great, that we must begin to take the first steps out of the cocoon of mourning and back into the land of the living. Although in no way should your grief be buried, it is important to take some positive steps. Do it slowly, trying to be gentle with yourself. For a mother, such a step could be something as simple as putting on lipstick or changing a hairstyle or just cooking a meal instead of eating canned or frozen food.

Many men agree with taking this conscious first step. A teacher whose married son died in Vietnam did it when he took his third-grade class on an unscheduled field trip. A fireman whose nine-year-old boy had died of pneumonia talked to some touring children at the firehouse instead of turning away from them. A businessman ate lunch at a restaurant with friends instead of brown-bagging it alone in his office. These people all remember that first small step. Many faltered. Most came home and cried or brooded. Often, they did not attempt anything else again for a short period of time. But the feeling that there was perhaps still something left to enjoy penetrated their grief.

It is important that no one neglect taking that first small step ~ and it should be a small one. That way, if you fall, it's just a tiny way down. It won't be terribly hard to climb back up again. It's something you can do.