If your child died suddenly, you probably are suffering extreme feelings of bewilderment, anxiety, self-reproach, and depression. You had no preparation and no time to gradually absorb the reality that the world was about to change dramatically. There was a sudden destruction of the world you used to know. There was no gradual transition, nor time to make changes in yourself, your expectations about your life, or your world. In sudden death you are called upon to face a massive gap between the way the world should be, with your child alive, and the way the world is. Your sense of the world and of control is assaulted. After a sudden death, the loss does not make sense. The critically important understanding of what happened is missing. The sudden shock of the death of your child without warning so stuns us that we cannot comprehend what has transpired. Consequently, if your child died suddenly, you may be unable to grasp the situation and find it difficult to understand the implications of the loss. Because you were not prepared for the death and it had no understandable context, you will try to deal with your lack of anticipation by putting the loss into a series of events. You may find yourself looking back at the time leading up to the death and searching for clues that could have indicated what was to come. This tendency to reconstruct events in your mind in order to allow for some anticipation of the death is quite common. It is an attempt to restructure what happened so that it seems you had some inkling that the death was going to occur. Problems arise when you hold yourself responsible for not perceiving cues that were actually either imperceptible or nonexistent prior to the death. Frequently bereaved parents react emotionally and respond to what they perceive as unmet responsibility. One bereaved parents I spoke to, felt inordinate guilt for many years for not recognizing that her child had been having difficulty coping with life. Grief affects us cognitively, changing the way we think and how our brains work. We may feel confused, in disbelief or have feelings of unreality, as if this cannot be really happening. When you are in the midst of intense pain from grief, it can seem as though things will never get better. You may feel better for a little while and then find yourself feeling wrapped once again in pain as raw as you remembered your very early days and weeks of grief. It can seem as though the work of grieving is never done. The time will come though, when you can begin to build a different life for yourself. You can find meaning again in your life. You will be different. Your life will be different. You will still miss your child, but you can survive .. It takes courage and patience, it is difficult and painful, but you can do it.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:04:11 +0000
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