MartyT

Dear Emma I'm so sorry to learn of your dear father’s death barely five months ago. As you say, his death has left an emptiness inside you that cannot be filled. Even if you didn't see him very often, still you knew he was there for you, loving you, caring about you and worrying about you. My own dear father played a similar role in my life; he died in 1977, and I still miss him terribly! I'm sure you've learned by now that "getting over" the death of someone you loved so much is impossible. We never "get over" such losses; instead, over time, we find ways to get through our grief and live in a world without the physical presence of our loved one in it. I can also tell you that the very special bond you have with your father will remain with you always. He will always be your dad, and he will be with you just as long as you strive to keep his memory alive in your heart and in your mind. As you work your way through this grief journey, keep in mind that it is the pain of losing your dad that you will one day manage to "let go" of -- but you need never "let go" of your relationship with him. As someone once said, death may end a life, but it does not end a relationship. So often we torture ourselves thinking we need to "let go" of our loved ones who have died and say goodbye to them forever more -- but when you loved your dad that much, why in the world would you want to let go of him? Focus instead on letting go of your pain. Think of what your dad would want for you as you live the rest of your life. Surely he would want you to miss him very much, as you do -- but do you really believe he would want to see you suffering and miserable forever more? Perhaps instead he would want you to go on to live a good life as a way of honoring his memory. Remember too that, although you cannot be where your father is now, in a very real sense your father is very much here with you, wherever you are, because his spirit and his memory live on in you, and because you are so very much a part of him. In many ways, you are more inseparable now than you were before, because you are not limited by space and time and distance. You ask how long you should be feeling this way, and I can only tell you that grief has no specific time frame. It’s a little like asking “how high is up?” You may feel trapped in what you describe as “cuckoo land” at times, but that is because grief can indeed make us look and feel a little “crazy” sometimes. Grief can affect every aspect of our being: physical, emotional, social and spiritual. Take comfort in knowing that grief is not a pathological condition; rather it is a normal response to losing a loved one – and we grieve in proportion to the relationship we had with the person who has died. In that sense, grief is the price we pay for loving. You also say you're not getting much support or understanding from your colleagues at work, who don't seem to appreciate the very special relationship you had with your dad, or how difficult it must be for you now to cope with your loss of him. Unfortunately, Emma, that too is not uncommon. People tend to be finished with our grief a lot sooner than we are done with our own need to talk about it. But there are many sources of help for grieving people out there -- you just need to take the time to find it. You might begin by reading a little about what normal grief looks like, so you'll have a better understanding of what you're going through and what to expect in the weeks and months ahead -- it also may reassure you that what you're experiencing is quite normal under the circumstances. My own Grief Healing Web site contains a number of articles I've written on various aspects of grief (see my Articles and Books page), beautiful pieces written by others (see Quotes and Poems/Comfort for Grieving Hearts well as links to other sources of information on the Human Loss Links page. If you haven't already been there, you can get to my site by visiting http://www.griefhealing.com. Participating in an on-line discussion group such as this one is another positive step, because it enables you to give your grief a voice. Here you can share your story of loss and find emotional support and even inspiration from others whose experiences may be similar to your own. And it's available to you at no cost, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Grief is very hard work, Emma, but you don’t have to do it all alone. It is our hope that here you’ll find some of the comfort and support you need and deserve. Wishing you peace and healing,

Dear Ally, Like everyone else reading your tragic story, I am terribly shocked and saddened to read of the death of your precious son Daniel and the horrifying circumstances of the accident that killed him. That your son “paid for his first real mistake with his life” is beyond understanding, and I cannot begin to imagine how devastating this loss must be for you. I am struck by your statement that no one will tell you how your son actually died, that important details are missing, and that all your questions are being met with a “wall of silence.” I want to assure you that your need to know the details of what happened to your son is NOT “macabre”– it is a normal and legitimate response to the unanticipated and violent manner in which your son was killed. The suddenness of Daniel’s death, the way you were notified about the accident, the fact that you had no opportunity to get to your son to spend loving time with him before he died, or to see and touch and hold his body – all these factors are complicating the grief you are experiencing now. Getting to one’s child as soon as possible after a fatal accident is extremely important to parents – even though they may encounter considerable resistance from law enforcement officials and others in allowing them to do so. Read the words of another mother who found herself in a similar position: Permission was finally granted for me to see Timothy on the condition that I “didn’t do anything silly.” As they watched, I presumed that meant I was not to touch him or disturb anyone. But Timothy was my child; he had not ceased to be my child. (He had not suddenly become a corpse, a body or the deceased.) I desperately needed to hold him, to look at him, to see his wounds. I needed to comfort and cuddle him, to examine and inspect him, to try to understand and most of all to hold him. Yet, I had been told “not to do anything silly.” If I did, I feared my watchers would run in, constrain me and lead me away. So I betrayed my own instincts and my son by standing there and "not doing anything silly." Our society has lost touch with our most basic instincts – the instincts we share with other mammals. We marvel at a mother cat washing her kittens. We admire the protection an elephant gives her sick calf. We are tearful and sympathize when an animal refuses to leave its dead offspring, nuzzling him and willing him to live again. That is exactly what a mother’s human instinct tells her to do. If a mother is not able to examine, hold and nuzzle her dead child, she is being denied motherhood in its extreme (Awooner-Renner, S., “I Desperately Needed to See My Son,” British Medical Journal, 32, 356.) Family members who aren’t given time with their loved one’s body at the scene of an accident or aren’t told the truth about the body tend to imagine images far more grotesque than reality, and they commonly fill in the blanks between the bits and pieces they pick up from the media, the coroner’s office, the police investigators and others. Given only get minimal facts, their fantasies are often far worse than the reality of what actually happened. When the time feels right to you and if you still feel a need to do so, I want to encourage you to find out exactly what happened to your son. There is nothing wrong with your wanting to seek out whoever was the final link to your dead son (the first officer on the scene, the paramedic who put him in the ambulance or the coroner who examined his body and determined the cause of death) and asking for details, including seeing whatever photographs were taken at the scene. (The organization Parents of Murdered Children has developed a very effective protocol for viewing such photographs; see http://www.pomc.com/.) Much of the work of grieving involves remembering – but when remembering produces only traumatic images such as yours, Ally, the value of remembering is lost. Specialists who work with trauma survivors tell us that effective grief work cannot begin until the trauma is dealt with first. If you’re still experiencing anxiety, sleeplessness, intrusive images and nightmares, I want to encourage you to seek the help of a trauma specialist – a therapist who understands that trauma work must be done before you can begin the grief work that lies before you, as you come to terms with this horrible death of your son. Go to the TRAUMATIC LOSS page on my GriefHealing Web site for a list of suggested resources. In the meantime, please know that we are holding you are in our hearts and in our prayers. Wishing you peace and healing,

Son by My Side Early each morning, long before the roosters wake, my son instinctively rolls out of bed and slumbers down the hallway with his pillows in tow. His daily migration always leads to the foot of our bed and is followed by our rude awakening as he wedges between me and my wife. Our bed does not comfortably fit the three of us. I'm forced to sleep on my left side and my wife on her right. My wife goes through similar pains as she wrestles back to sleep. This arrangement leave us tired and sore each morning. If I find myself resting next to a bed with tubes and wires invading my son as monitors watch his motionless sleep, I will desperately pray for him and his pillow to come home and shatter the morning's peace at the foot of our bed. If I find myself resting next to a slab marked by a stone that speaks of my son, I will heartfully beg to reset the clock to when my side of the bed was not my own. It's now 3:00 a.m. and I find myself fighting for rest. My arm is sore and sleep is beyond reach ~ But I silently lie in the morning calm as tears fill my eyes and I consider how truly blessed is my life with my son by my side. -- Copyright © 2003 by Mike Kleiman Mail to: mikekleiman@cs.com Used with permission of the author

Dear Cin, Thank you for suggesting that we add a forum for Sibling Loss. That forum now appears within the "Specific Bereavement" category and is available to you and others who wish to begin posting messages there. Wishing you peace and healing, Marty T

Dear George, We all are so very sorry to learn of your daughter's suicide last year. I can only imagine how horrible this must be for you, and even though there is nothing I can do to take away your pain, I hope that I can offer you a few words of encouragement. Suicide is one of the most difficult and painful ways to lose someone we love, because we are left with so many unanswerable questions and so many mixed feelings: How could our loved one do such a horrible thing to us? Where do we put all the anger, remorse, guilt and pain that we feel? What more could we have done to help? How can we ever get past the shame and embarrassment we feel when others find out what happened, and seem all too quick to judge us for not foreseeing this and for not doing enough to prevent it? Please know that guilt and anger are the two most common reactions in grief, and most especially so when the death is by suicide. And anger at God is very normal, too. Losing someone we love is so very difficult to accept and to understand, and it is a process that takes place over a lifetime. This news is just too big to take in all at once and way too big for us to digest. We must let it in a little bit at a time over a very long period as eventually our minds come to accept what our hearts cannot. I understand that you're feeling very guilty for something you may have said or done -- or failed to say or do -- that you think may have prevented your daughter's taking her own life. I hope you realize that when someone is determined to commit this act, there is very little if anything someone else can do to prevent it. We simply do not have any control over the choices and actions of another human being, no matter how much we may wish it to be otherwise. To believe that you could have prevented this simply by saying or doing something differently is to give yourself a tremendous degree of power over another person. If you truly had that much power over your daughter, you could have "made" her do anything you ever wanted her to do, and you and I both know that was not the case. For reasons known only to her, your daughter acted on an impulse and, as someone once said, her suicide became for her a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Unfortunately, you are the one who is left behind to deal with the pain and hurt and guilt that have resulted from her action. You say you've tried a number of things and you don't know where to go from here. I sincerely hope that you are not trying to manage this grief all by yourself -- especially when you are coping not only with the loss of your daughter but also with a death by suicide. There is plenty of help out there, just waiting for you to find it. I will offer you some suggestions, and my prayer for you is that you will resolve to get busy and get moving on finding the help you know you need. First, as a survivor of suicide, you need to educate yourself about the subject. Read what others have written about it (see, for example, Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide, by C. Lukas and H. Seiden, Bantam Books, 1990; you can go to Amazon.com to order it or ask for it at your local library). Visit some Web sites devoted to this subject (begin with SUICIDE: READ THIS FIRST, then see SAVE, Sena Foundation, SOLOS - Survivors of Loved Ones' Suicides, and SOS. Information on these sites will assure you that you are not alone in this tragedy. It will offer you some ways to manage your grief, and it will help you to recognize that if others can survive this most devastating of losses, then you can do it, too. My own sister-in-law died by suicide nearly 30 years ago, and it still makes me sick to think about it. Since I am a therapist and "should've known how to help," I went through all the guilt you can imagine. But in the end, I had to come to terms with the reality that even though I did do all I could have done, it still wasn't enough to save my sister-in-law from herself. Eventually I learned that the person I most needed to forgive for that was me. For whatever reason, your daughter obviously believed that life in this world was just too much for her, and at the moment she took her own life, she saw suicide as her only option, as the only way to end the emotional pain she felt at the time. Remember that your daughter's entire life was much more than those few final moments when she chose to hang herself, George. I promise that the day will come when the good memories you have of your daughter will outweigh the bad. The way you come to peace about all of this is one day at a time, and if that's too much, you work at it one hour or even one minute at a time. But if you still find that you're unable to get to that point of peace all by yourself, I urge you to find someone to talk to about it -- someone who knows something about suicide as well as about the grief that comes with having to bury your own child. That can be the best gift you could ever give yourself and your beloved daughter. Pick up the phone and ask your primary care physician to refer you to someone who specializes in loss and grief; call your local library, mortuary or hospice organization and ask what bereavement support services are available in your community. See if there is a local chapter of The Compassionate Friends where you live (Compassionate Friends. If you don't have the energy to do this research, ask a friend or relative to do it for you. I hope this information proves helpful to you, George -- and to anyone else out there reading this who may be struggling to cope with this most terrible kind of loss. Please know that you are in our thoughts and prayers. Take good care of yourself. You took the initiative to join this discussion group and to post messages here. You can do the rest. You are worth it. Wishing you peace and healing, Marty Tousley, Bereavement Counselor Grief Healing