I
just got an email from a business colleague en route to being a friend. She’s lost several pregnancies and has to bid
that dream of her life farewell permanently – two losses, both the present and
the future. Shattering.
I lost my only child
before she could be born. People who have experienced other losses think
they understand, but they can't. Even a fellow of the child-loss
fraternity can't, because every one of us is unique. Losing your child is
a deeper form of grief than anything else, because at the core of our souls we
want to put ourselves between our children and all danger. I would
cheerfully have died to save my daughter-to-be, and when I couldn’t, I crawled
into the grave with her, emotionally if not physically, for a very long time. When we do all that is humanly possible, and
it's just not enough, we slide into an unknown country. We feel such
desperate failure. The very definition
of “parent” has been violated and we blame ourselves. We always blame ourselves.
My friend experienced
this loss six months ago, and is finally able to email about it. She knew what she needed : some
"doing" when she needed distraction, while she grieved and cried and lit
incense and prayed, created memorials and memory books and every other healthy
thing we do when we know better than it bottle it up and “just carry on.”
This kind of loss really
is too devastating for you to say anything except I love you.
Reach out and enfold them
in love and then exert every fiber of strength in your being to just shut up –
because 99% of us want to offer advice, and all of it is hurtful, in result if
not in intention. The thing you need to
understand about your “helpful” advice is that it is, at its base, a very
powerful need of YOURS. The emotions of
child-loss and indeed any loss awaken our own fears for our loved ones because
we do understand emotionally how fragile human life is. We want the grieving person to shut up, stop
crying, talk and act “bravely,” because that’s what WE need to quiet our own
fears. We can’t just let ourselves feel pain and grief and fear and shame
and everything else, and your raw, expressed emotion makes us so all-fired frightened
we quite literally can’t stand it.
And I understand. So tell the person you
love them and then leave the room. Drop
off the rum cake or the casserole, kiss them and get the heck out of there.
You want to share your
words of wisdom because you want the bereaved to stop feeling. You want so desperately to talk about God,
about trying again or about adoption. As
for this latter, I natter on about the joys of adoption all the time. After all, I’m adopted and I’m wonderful. If someone is having trouble, and flinches
from any thought of adopting, then I know that it’s the ego trip of
reproduction and pseudo-immortality that they are desperate about, not the
glorious adventure of nurturing, but that is a truth I rarely state out loud,
unless someone gets really offensive about it. I am not technically a mother, but I’ve
nurtured children, for a decade in one case.
Love has nothing whatever to do with biology. But I never, ever, talk about adoption to
someone who has just lost a child.
Grieving is
healthy. Grieving actually gets you to a
new path faster than “getting over it” quickly.
Some personalities, and some cultures (like New Zealand) value quiet
grief to overt actions like my friend and I would take. But the process is the same. Don’t offer advice. Just offer love and then shut up until it’s
time to offer love again. Hug IF the
person values it and back off if they don’t, knowing that needs will shift over
time and even in the space of 5 minutes.
I couldn’t bear to be touched, for years. Others need hugs, hugs and more hugs.
Understand that the
overwhelming need to advise is also born of ego – I know how you should think, and you don’t, so let me tell you. When you understand that you don’t. it gives
you the strength you need to shut up.
Hey, I’m a professional mental health practitioner, and what do I, in my
brilliant wisdom, do in situations of loss?
I tell people I love them and then I shut up. If they want to talk, I listen. You know, that thing where your mouth is
closed? That one. Except for empathetic “hmms” and echoing
their feelings back (without launching into your “I can top your story,”
another ego-driven urge), companionship
without content I call it.
I so much wish I could
hug my friend, but she’s 3000 miles away.
I wish I could tell her it will be a new path but one worth living,
eventually, but it’s not time for that, and besides, I’m not God – how do I
know, really?
I tell her I love her,
I send her Reiki and prayers, and I hope that her life will be joyful again
someday. It’s all that we can really do
for each other. And all we can do is
always enough.
Grief support when you want it. www.soaringdragon.biz/webinars-events.
