loss of a child

Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple

The loss of a child is without any doubt one of the most challenging experiences I have gone through in my life both personally and in my relationship.

The most important aspect I have found through my survey of more than a hundred people and through interviewing parents one-on-one are:

Understanding different ways of grieving
Accepting the differences
Allowing each other time to grieve.

The 5 steps to survive your loss as a couple

Grief and death are topics that make a lot of people uncomfortable. Since you and I have both experienced the loss of a child, we know this from personal experience. You as a couple have a common source for your experience of loss. Nonetheless, even though the source may be the same, the experience itself can be very different. When, where, and how the experience differs is the point at which you need to keep working with each other to stay connected.

The main causes for stress in the relationship post-loss are that couples:

A. Have different grieving styles and are unaware of them

B. Don’t recognize, don’t understand, or don’t accept each other’s style

C. Think / feel the other is not grieving properly

D. Expect the other to grieve like they do.

Overview

Step 1 ALLOWING
Step 2 AWARENESS
Step 3 ACKNOWLEDGING
Step 4 ADJUSTING
Step 5 ABSORBING & INTEGRATING

Step 1: Allowing

The first step is all about the initial response to the loss of your child. You are in shock, which emotionally protects you from being too overwhelmed by the loss. You are unconscious to most of what is happening to you and around you. Your life’s energy is focused on giving you the best support in dealing with this shock by experiencing numbness and disbelief. What is required at this step is to allow yourself to be taken care of by your friends and family and allowing your experience to unfold.

Step 2: Awareness

In the second step you become more aware and conscious of what has happened and try to deal with the irrevocable reality of death. You grieve but you don’t know what to do about it. You are becoming aware of the emotions like anger, sadness, guilt, and anxiety while also experiencing physical, behavioural, and cognitive symptoms as part of your suffering.

Step 3: Acknowledging

As time goes by and as you move to step three you are aware of how you process the loss and actively try to find ways to progress through it. This is most likely the time for you to pick up books and talk to other bereaved parents. You are starting to take steps towards your new life where the loss is still important but moves away from the centre of your life.

Step 4: Adjusting

In the fourth step, you begin to integrate your child’s memory into your life. Grief has become a habitual reaction to triggers. You have become familiar with it and are able to move with it. As recovery takes place, you are better able to accept the loss. You invest energy to create your New Normal life. You still feel the loss but that feeling becomes part of your more typical feelings and experiences.

Step 5: Absorbing and integrating

The fifth step guides you in (totally) integrating the loss in your life. You reflect on it. You recognize its gift in your life and are grateful for the evolution in your life since. The experience of gratitude and the understanding of the gifts from your loss prevail over the sadness. The loss has found an integrated place in your life and you focus on other areas of your life and the future ahead.

Relationships can be challenging without loss. It is my personal opinion that we enter any relationship to grow: emotionally and spiritually. Having said this, we definitely did not choose to add the loss of a child to our ‘personal growth to-do list’.

To read more about this, check out the book Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss As A Couple.

mother and child — Photo by Mathilde Langevin on Unsplash

For every mum there is a child and for every child there is a mum. This is one thing we all have in common: we all have a mother. There is this one person in your life you call ‘mum’. What happens to you when you think of your mum?

Eight months ago I became a mother and my daughter is just starting to say mum-um-um… to my delight, of course. Four months ago however I’ve also lost the person I called mum.

My mum’s death was sudden and as such unexpected. It left me wondering how orphans feel growing up without this one person to rely on, to talk to, to get support, love, encouragement and guidance from? Am I now an orphan?

It also made me contemplate the relationship I had with my mum over the years. I always felt close to her, even though we had our moments of disagreement and relationship challenges. I spent intensive times with her, especially in the last 15 years as I lived overseas and only saw her once a year but then for a few weeks or on holiday trips together. Growing up I always felt supported and never doubted her love for me. Still, like every mother – daughter relationship, we had our ups and downs, differentiating myself and my life from hers and practicing allowing her to be different to what I expected her to be.

Mothers, like sons or daughters, change. For me it wasn’t very easy to see her change, becoming older and partly more stubborn in her own ways. Even though I believed she had every right to make her own choices, I was annoyed at certain ones and downright angry at others. I had however learnt to keep my frustration and anger to myself, probably as I had learnt it from my parents. So outwardly I might have seemed accepting but naturally inwardly I had my human thoughts, emotions and reactions.

Having a child of my own opened my eyes to motherhood in a whole new way. I’m amazed at the intensity of what it takes to mother a child and it’s only been 8 months. In comparison to my mum, I have a very actively supportive husband who is taking his role as a father seriously, where my father, representing his time, was far less involved.

Mother’s Day has been created to remember those amazing things mothers do and show them our gratitude. (No, I haven’t forgotten Father’s Day but that’s another time of the year.)

The role of a mother (or a father) never stops, not even with death. As mentioned above, it is 4 months ago that I’ve lost my mum, but 8 months ago I also had the younger of my twin girls die. So not only do I have a child, I also have lost one and so have experienced the whole spectrum of having a child, losing a child and losing a mum in a short timeframe. I still very much feel this child of mine with me, as well as my mum. I will always remain mother to two girls, if people ask or not. I am a mother by honouring her soul who has passed on.

My mum and my younger daughter are still with me, even though not on a physical level. Neither mothering nor being a child never stops. Now I might not have ‘real’ conversations with them, but I still have them inside of me. I think of them, am angry and sad for their leaving me and my other child and I miss them.

If your mother is still alive, what are you waiting for?

If your mother has passed, what are you waiting for?

Have you found peace in the relationship with her?

Surviving Child Loss As a Couple

Being Mum – Being Child

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Nathalie Himmelrich