How long will I grieve my child?
One cool spring desert day, way back in my adolescence, I sat with my grandmother. The best word I can use to describe her is stoic. She rarely showed emotion. Nanny had a tough exterior and kept people at arm’s length. She grew up on a farm in Texas and moved to California as a young woman during the Dust Bowl. She and her family worked the fields. For many years, they lived in a tent and picked fruit, vegetables, and cotton up and down the Central Valley. It was a hard life. They were often hungry and not sure where their next meal would come from.
But on that day as I sat with her, I noticed a portrait of a little boy - maybe two or three years old. It was hung a little too high and surrounded by the blank starkness of an otherwise empty wall. Many decades had passed since she buried her sweet baby boy. When I asked about him, her body collapsed. A wave of grief overtook her. She had no words. Not knowing what to say, I sat in silence as she sobbed. The pain of the loss seemed to inhabit every cell of her body. When her voice returned - shaking and unsteady - she shared the story of his passing. She talked about holding and rocking him in her arms as he took his last breath.
Now, as a grieving mother myself, I share an unfortunate and heartbreaking kinship with my grandmother. I am a member of a club that no one wants to be part of. The lesson I learned that day is that waves of grief – the kind that overwhelm you and seem to take over your entire body – can happen decades after a devastating loss.
A wave of grief can hit at the mention of your child’s name. It can hit at the grocery store when you see your son’s favorite food. It can hit during random everyday moments, without any warning. My family remembers one such moment. While we were talking down a dirt road toward a small farmhouse on a sweltering Texas summer evening, a tsunami-sized wave of grief hit me. My legs could no longer support me. And my family helplessly watched as I stumbled and screamed at the top of my lungs, begging for death to reunite me with my son.
I’ve learned that these waves of grief are a normal and natural response to loss. When someone you love dearly dies, you may experience these waves in varying degrees of intensity for the rest of your life. Your relationship with the waves, however, will most likely change. In the beginning, it feels like you won’t survive. You might even hope that you don’t survive as the yearning to be with your child seems to rise up from the core of your being. As time passes, the painful pangs of grief may become more familiar. You learn ways to exist with the kind of heartbreak that most parents never want to imagine.
If you join a child-loss support group, you will most likely hear parents say that time has not healed their wounds. Sometimes 10, 20, even 30 years after the loss. Something deep inside their being continues to cry out for one more hug, one more conversation… just a few more precious moments with their child.
When grief expert David Kessler is asked how long grief will last, he often responds with another question, “How long will you love them?”, indicating that there is no time limit. You will move through your grief in your own time and at your own pace.
I know that I will love my son for the rest of my life. But I do not have the advantage of looking back 10, 20, or 30 years to know how my grief will change over time. Instead, my grandmother, mother-in-law, and many other brave souls, are my guides – gently illuminating the dark and uncertain path ahead with their shared wisdom and lived experiences of child loss.
