I found this facebook post today on a friend's page, and I thought it stated things so well, so I'm sharing it here...
"The
gap between those who have lost children and those who have not is profoundly
difficult to bridge. No one, whose children are well and intact can be expected
to understand what parents who have lost children have absorbed and what they
bear.
Our
children come to us through every blade of grass, every crack in the sidewalk,
every bowl of breakfast cereal. We seek contact with their atoms, their
hairbrush, their toothbrush, their clothing. We reach for what was integrally
woven into the fabric of our lives, now torn and shredded. A black hole has
been blown through our souls and, indeed, it often does not allow the light to
escape.
It is
a difficult place. For us to enter there is to be cut deeply, and torn anew,
each time we go there, by the jagged edges of our loss. Yet we return, again
and again, for that is where our children now reside. This will be so for years
to come and it will change us profoundly. At some point in the distant future,
the edges of that hole will have tempered and softened but the empty space will
remain - a life sentence. Our friends will change through this. There is no
avoiding it. We grieve for our children, in part, through talking about them
and our feelings for having lost them.
Some
go there with us, others cannot and through their denial and a further measure,
however unwittingly, to an already heavy burden. Assuming that we may be
feeling "better" six months later is simply "to not get
it."
The
excruciating and isolating reality that bereaved parents feel is hermetically
sealed from the nature of any other human experience. Thus it is a trap - those
whose compassion and insight we most need are those for whom we abhor the
experience that would allow them that sensitivity and capacity.
And
yet, somehow there are those, each in their own fashion, who have found a way
to reach us and stay, to our comfort. They have understood, again each in their
own way, that our children remain our children through our memory of them.
Their memory is sustained through speaking about them and our feelings about
their death. Deny this and you deny their life. Deny their life and you no
longer have a place in ours. We recognize that we have moved to an emotional
place where it is often very difficult to reach us.
Our
attempts to be normal are painful and the day to day carries a silent,
screaming anguish that companies us, sometimes from moment to moment. Were we
to give it its own voice we fear we would become truly unreachable, and so we
remain "strong" for a host of reasons even as the strength saps our
energy and drains our will. Were we to act out our true feelings we would be
impossible to be with. We resent having to act normal, yet we dare not do
otherwise. People who understand this dynamic are our gold standard. Working
our way through this over the years will change us as does every experience -
and extreme experience changes one extremely.
We
know we will have recovered when, as we have read, it is no longer so painful
to be normal. We do not know who we will be at that point or who will still be
with us. We have read that the gap is so difficult that, often, bereaved
parents must attempt to reach out to friends and relatives or risk losing them.
This is our attempt.
For
those untarnished by such events, who wish to know in some way what they,
thankfully, do not know, read this. It may provide a window that is helpful for
both sides of the gap.”
~
Author Unknown
For
those who understand, and for those who don't. I will never stop missing my
child. Thank you, Andy, for those you've brought into my life as a result of
your absence. They are wonderful indeed. And for those that left me, I'm glad you can't understand, for I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
