Losing A Child

What are common emotions after losing a child?

When a child dies, you will feel all the emotions that people feel in grief - enormous sadness and anger. There's nothing that feels more unjust in the world than losing a child, and it feels very unnatural for a child to die before their parents. As parents, we have feelings of protection, as that our job to protect our child and maybe we should have been able to save them from their illness or maybe we should have been able to save them from the accident or whatever took their life. You need to just know that those feelings are common, and as much as we want to be there and protect our child from everything in the world, sometimes in life we cannot protect them from death.

Will I ever get over the death of my child?

Parents wonder if they will ever get over the death of a child. You will not get over the death of your child, you will learn to live with the loss of your child. The child will always be in your heart. You will always feel an awkwardness when someone asks you how many children you have - do you name that child? Do you have two children or three children? So you will learn to live with that loss, you will always keep that child as part of your family. But it's not something we recover from. A child is a part of our family, living or dead and they're a part of who we are. And in their memory we learn to go on and to continue life, but they will always stick with us.

What support is available to parents who have lost a child?

There's wonderful resources out there now for parents who have lost a child. There's great organizations like the M.I.S.S. Foundation, and there's also a number of other organizations that have simultaneous camps. You go to the camp with your family, and your children go in one track, where they're dealing with the loss at their age level, and you're also dealing with the loss and the grief as an adult. So those are wonderful to explore and your local hospice can tell you about them or they're easily found on the internet.