“Why does it hurt so much? Why is this grief so incapacitating? If only the hurt weren’t so crushing.” Sound familiar? All of us have known hurts before, but none of our previous “ouches” can compare with the hurt we now feel. Nothing can touch the pain of burying a child.
Yet, most of us have discovered that the sun still comes up. We still have to function. We did not die when our child did, even though we wished we could have. So…we are stuck with this pain, this grief, and what do we do with it? Surely we can’t live like THIS forever!
There are no magic formulas for surviving grief. There are a few commonly recognized patterns for grief, but even those are only guide-lines. What we do know is that the emptiness will never go away. It will become tolerable and livable… some day.
TIME…the longest word in our grief. We used to measure TIME by the steps of our child…the first word, first tooth, first date, first car…now we don’t have that measure anymore. All we have is TIME, and it only seems to make the hurt worse.
So what do we do? Give ourselves TIME…to hurt, to grieve, and to cry. TIME to choke, to scream. TIME to be “crazy” and TIME to remember.
Be nice to yourself! Don’t measure your progress against anyone else’s. Be your own timekeeper.
Don’t push. Eventually you will find the hours and days of grief have turned to minutes and their moments… but don’t expect them to go away. We will always hurt. You don’t get over grief…it only becomes tolerable and livable.
Change your focus a bit. Instead of dwelling on how much you lost – try thinking the good memories come over you as easily as the awful ones do. We didn’t lose our child…HE/SHE DIED. We didn’t lose the love that flowed between us…it still flows, but differently now.
Does it help to know that if we didn’t love so very much it would not hurt so badly? Grief is the price we pay for love. And as much as it hurts, I’m very, very glad I loved.
Don’t let death cast ugly shadows, but rather warm memories of loving times you shared. Even though death comes, LOVE NEVER GOES AWAY!
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Maybe the only thing worse than losing a child would be losing a grandchild and having to watch what it does to your child.
My son loved to see people happy. When I used to go shopping with my son and I was looking at something I might like to buy but hesitated – he would say “go ahead and buy it mom.” He knew it would make me happy. So now after he is gone I strive to be happy as I know it makes him happy. And I feel like I’ve done something for him.(not always though.)