Bereaved Parents

For all the bereaved parents out there, I am sending virtual hugs your way.  In the last 11 years of being a bereaved parent, life has been a long ongoing search to find out how the fuck I am supposed to live, and I mean live not just exist, in a world after my beautiful child has died. 

For a start I had to learn to feel all of the feelings, not all at once but bit by bit.   It was and is physically impossible to sit in the pain for too long, if I did I would be dead.   I had to allow the anger, the guilt, the shame, the pain, and everything in between, to be felt.   I found some safe ways to express which included a lot of shower crying, car crying, open park screaming, counselling, group therapy, talking with friends, walking, walking and more walking, and of course Art Therapy.  It took special people to be able to sit with me in my grief, those friends are absolute legends, and forever in my heart.

My Art making put the feelings on the page so I could see what they looked like outside of myself.  Lots of black, red, grey, sharp shapes, angry movements, cutting things up, ripping paper up, words, stories, self portraits of my pain, and many many others.  The paper was a safe container for me to get it out, without hurting anyone.  My feelings could be felt and seen, acknowledged and validated by me.  All the crazy I was feeling was represented in my art and it made me feel a little better afterwards.  As the years went on my art became less and less dark as things started to shift a little.

I had to have time to process, to go over all the possible scenarios and all the details with a fine tooth comb to find out how it all could have actually happened.  The search lead to no answers, no answers to the why? Why him? Why us? Why me?  I read countless books by other bereaved parents trying to figure out how they navigated this death without dying themselves.  Underlining passages, I grasped onto other parents words trying to make some sense of this senseless death. And trying to work out WHAT NOW?  Fortunately for me I had many practical jobs to do like, change nappies, cook, clean, get kids to school etc.  In hindsight if not for this, I may never have got out of bed.  But that luxury I was not afforded, and thank god for that!

11 years of processing this trauma and I no longer carry the pain every day.  I did for many years. One day I was asked “why do you carry the heavy burden of pain every day?”  I was fuming that the question was even asked of me.  I had formed the belief that it was now my job, perhaps as punishment, to carry that burden of pain and grief for the rest of my life.  But that question made me challenge my belief.   Could there be another way?   Could I put it down?  What if I could just carry the love of my son with me instead, which was light, joyful, amazing.   I was so grateful to have spent the time I did with him, I was actually so lucky.  So that’s what I choose to do from that moment on.  I still have some crappy days but mostly I hold onto his love not the pain, grief or details of how he died.

I came to a place of acceptance of what is.  Now just to be clear, acceptance of what is, does not mean that I am ok at all with any part of my child dying but more that I had to surrender to the fact that I can not do anything about what happened.  If anyone had of mentioned the word acceptance in the earlier years of bereavement,  I would have cracked it and got really really angry and probably stormed out, muttering “what the f… would they know?”  But when it was the right time for me, acceptance, that there were no answers to the why, seemed to be another turning point.

So now, present moment, I carry his love with me, he is a part of me.  I interact with him, playing games together with number plates.  I will see his name on a number plate on the car in front of me and then later he will send a number plate with my nickname on it.  It makes me smile and makes me think of him and this will happen daily if not many times a day.  Some will think this is silly, but regardless of whether he sending them is true or not, if it helps me to bring his essence into this present moment.  He is, in a way, with me in the here and now.

I believe that you can find joy after the death of a child and I am proof.  I hope this for you all.

For bereavement support please know The Compassionate Friends are always there, also The Australian Centre of Grief and Bereavement, Amber Community for Road Bereavement and of course Creative Spirit Arts Therapy.