A scroller, please bear with it.
PH, I am writing this for you, because I too have lost a child. I am not offering it as advice – we all experience grief in different ways - I am simply offering it as my own experience. If there are things in it that can help you, please take them, if not just them pass.
My son was almost three when he died. He had a heart condition which we were not led to believe was dangerous – or maybe we just didn’t ‘hear’ properly things his doctors said. He suffered continually from chest and nasal infections and eventually died in my arms from heart failure brought on pneumonia, on a flying doctor plane as we were being flown from Kalgoorlie to Princess Margaret Hospital in Perth.
For the first few days I was in shock. It takes a while before you really feel the absence of someone – the ‘foreverness’ of death. When the shock subsided grief set in. there is no adequate way to describe it, words like devastated, heartbroken, gutted, can’t begin to explain that depth of that mental pain. I would creep out of bed in the middle of the night and sit on the sofa hugging a pillow and crying till I was exhausted – and it didn’t help – when I was too worn out to cry any more the pain was still there as hard and debilitating as ever.
And then there were the panic attacks : the sudden outbursts of frenzied terror when it felt as if he was somehow still in the process of slipping away from me and that there should be some incantation, some magic ritual I could find that would let me grab his hand and drag him back again.
I thought my life was over. I had a husband and five other children to look after, so I had to keep going through the motions, but I truly believed I would never, ever be happy again. And whenever I had a ‘good’ day. When something made me smile or I enjoyed a coffee with friends, I would afterwards be overcome with guilt. How could I laugh or enjoy anything when my little boy was dead? It felt like a terrible betrayal. Pain was the only thing I had left of him, and if I let go of it I would lose him forever.
This went on for months, but one day – not literally overnight, but quite suddenly – I had an epiphany. I realized that I could make a choice. Alan was dead and he was going to go on being dead for the rest of my life, nothing I did or didn’t do would ever bring him back. But my own life still stretched ahead of me – 50 years of it, perhaps, I was only 36 at the time. How was I going to spend it? If I clung onto my pain it wouldn’t help Alan – he would still be just as dead. It wouldn’t help me – I would spend my whole life being miserable with nothing to show for it. . So I chose happiness.
It was a deliberate decision, it took an enormous amount of work and commitment, and I had to remind myself constantly why I had taken it. For months – or even years - I still found myself bursting into tears at unexpected moments when something would suddenly bring back a memory of him – and there were still nights when I sobbed into that pillow. But there were also times when I caught myself asking, is this real grief or is it just self-pity? Gradually I learned to recognize the difference, and over the years these outburst came less and less frequently.
Today I can honestly say I have no grief. Of course, it changed me – it changed my whole family – but it did not blight our lives. Alan came into our family unexpectedly – he was a foster child whom we adopted. He brought a joy into our lives that we could never have imagined and his legacy to us has been one of love, happy memories and the wisdom of self- knowledge – the knowledge that we have faced the unimaginable and come out of it stronger, kinder and better people than we would otherwise have been.
