As Barbara Rosoff points out in her book, The Worst Loss, there is no more powerful a bond in our human relationships than that between a parent and a child.
Most parents say that the best things they ever did in their life was to have and raise their children. Children carry the hopes and dreams for the future which the parent envisions in his/her mind. When the child dies, the future dies with them.
Children provide parents with 24 hour responsibility for 18 years. This responsibility is so all consuming that the parent's identity is formed and developed around being this child's mother or father. When the child dies the parent's job is terminated and the identity of being someone's mom and dad is over as well.
The major part of the parental responsibility is to nurture and protect and when this is no longer possible and tremendous helplessness and desolation occurs.
A parent has multiple losses: they loose the person, the relationship in real time, the job, the identity, the social role, the connections, the daily routine and interactions, the plans for the future.
Devastation does not quite capture the loss. Catastrophe is more appropriate. Life as the parent knew it, is over. A new life will have to begin, a life the parent didn't want, didn't ask for, a life which is abhorent in many ways without the one we so dearly loved.
The best response to this loss is validation. It is terrible! It is incomprehensible! It is the worst thing that could happen!
Saying things to make the mourner feel better sounds like a discount, a disqualification of the grief, a lack of understanding of what has happened and the devastating result.
"I can't imagine. It must be terrible!" is a much better acknowledgement than, "I know how you feel. It will be all right."
Stay with the grief, acknowledge it, validate it, commiserate with it. Misery really does love company and is comforted by it, but it is difficult for those who would succor to sit with the grief without trying to minimize it, or ease it in some way.
It is in standing/sitting in solidarity with the bereaved that comfort is given not in attempting to deny it or taking it away.
Harriet Sarnoff Schiff who wrote the book, The Bereaved Parent, tells the story about how when her 10 year old son Roby died on the operating room table a nurse offered her a tranquilizer, and Harriet looked at this well meaning nurse in horror wondering how anyone could think that a pill would take this catastrophe away.
A parent and a child create a new world together and when the child dies that world ends too. It seems to the parent that this event is, in fact, and in a social and psychological way it is, the end of the world.
This is article #5 in a series on Grieving parents.
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