Good Grief

There are stages to the grief cycle; what they should tell you is that you will repeat these stages over and over and over again. There’s no miracle cure, there’s no being “strong”, theres no getting over it…

Evan recently began working with a person who lost a child, an teen/adult child. This person had just met everyone and basically as soon as he introduced himself began telling everyone about losing his child. Evan said to me that he had originally thought that this man had just lost his child, but the man went on to say that it had been two years.

Evans boss referred the man to Evan, stating that Evan understands, because he too has lost a child. The man began to ask Evan how he does it, any advice, how do we get through every day…

Evan said, “I have learned two things.”

1. First, you have to stop thinking that everyone around you cares as much as you do, because they don’t. It’s YOUR child! They will heal much faster than you. (A few months after Annika died we were still devastated and clearly heart broken. We weren’t able to move forward, but everyone else around us could, they were moving forward…and we were not. It was really painful, really lonely. But now we are able to step back and understand why their grief differs so much from ours, after all, she was our baby…)

2. Second of all- The world is going to keep moving on and pushing forward. You can choose to pick yourself up and move with it, or you can choose to sit behind and watch it move on, without you.

 

As he told me this my eyes began to get teary because, he’s right. You have to understand these two things before you can move forward with your grief process. I have started to wonder if the grief process for losing a child is ever truly complete. To me it feels like a process in which you move through, only to have the scab removed from your wound, time and time again.

 

 “For the amputee, the raw bleeding stump heals and the physical pain does not
go away. But he lives with the pain in his heart knowing his limb will not grow
back. He has to learn to live without it. He rebuilds his life around his loss.
We bereaved parents must do the same.”–unknown