Today I speak with my ex-husband and the father of our children. We reflect on eleven years since the death of our younger twin daughter A’Mya. In doing this we are spending time speaking about her, honoring her place in our lives, and, as I’d like to see it: spending time parenting her.
Our conversation was moving and opened my eyes to parts of Chris’ grief that I wasn’t aware of.
Chris says the following about his personal experience of grief:
It is a constant thing; it never goes away. It often pops up in little moments, sometimes catches you unexpectedly and all of a sudden, it’s like: Oh, I wasn’t thinking about these things and here it is. And I think that will happen all my life. You know, there’s going to be all sorts of key moments in Ananda Mae’s life where I’ll be wondering what would have been like two of them, what would A’Mya have been like. How would she have been? I think that’s natural.
Chris Young
I, Nathalie cannot say this often enough:
I think that is so important for people to understand that this is not something that goes away. It’s just like my mother she will always be my mother and there are key moments that I miss her more and then key moments where it is less present. But this is not going to go away because she’s dead. Part of her not being here present physically is a topic, the same way as for me, for you, for Ananda Mae, it’s a topic that her sister is not growing up with her.
Nathalie Himmelrich
About this week’s guest
Chris and Nathalie are the parents of Ananda Mae and A’Mya, twin girls who do not grow up with each other. As their parents, they do their best at raising one here on earth and the other in the beyond, wherever that is.
Topics discussed in this episode
- What we both remember from our story of loss and trauma
- Individual differences in grieving and dealing with grief
- Ongoing grief, what that looks like eleven years later
- Parenting the non-physical child
- Sibling’s grief
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Check out Nathalie’s website and books
Links
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HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
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Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.