A parent’s love for their children is unconditional and infinite.
That is why the pain of losing a child is unbearable and never goes away.
Most of the people believe that the most terrifying thing that could happen to us is to die. But only a parent who has lost a child knows there is something much more frightening. Mourning the death of a child is the most devastating, heartbreaking, soul-crushing pain anyone could ever experience.
The grief after seeing your precious little angel leave this world is not something you get over.
It is something you need to learn to live with. No one ever stops grieving, because losing a child is like losing the greatest, most significant part of yourself. It feels worse than losing yourself. And this vast in your heart can never be filled by anything else. The only thing that’s holding you is the hope that one day you will meet your baby in Heaven.
This crushing experience completely transforms you, and you can never be the same again.
It’s unimaginable how you’re not going to hear your child’s laugh again. It feels so wrong when you realize that you are able to wake up the next morning and see the sunrise, while your innocent baby is never going to have this opportunity again. And even if you go through every stage of grief over and over again, your child is not coming back. Your heart breaks every single day you get to live without your angel.
Probably the hardest truth you need to accept when your child is gone is that there is no such thing as healing.
The pain never fades. It never goes away. There is shock, denial, confusion, powerlessness, anger, hopelessness, but never healing. You feel alone and unable to function, knowing that your precious baby is never going to cheerfully run into your arms again.
All you desire is for you to be able to somehow change the past and do everything possible to save your child. You repeat your last conversations over and over again as if they were frozen in time. You can still clearly see their face and feel their presence around you. And what’s killing you is the thought that you could do something to protect them back then. If only you were closer, if only you were a few moments earlier, if only you were… But you weren’t, and this is crushing you.
Inevitably, you fall into a horrifying emotional rollercoaster, and you feel like there is nothing you can do about it. You reach peaks of anxiety and then depths of despair you never reached before. You spend days, weeks, even years feeling like your world is over. Moreover, you can never feel utterly happy or insanely in love again because all of your love and all of your happiness is now forever gone.
Still, you need to remain strong for the other people in your family who are also suffering from the loss.
You feel obligated to bottle up your emotions and act like you have already accepted the fact that your baby is gone. Maybe you are blessed with other children that still need your love and cares, which makes the pain a little less unbearable. And you need to be there for them and give them all of your care and attention because otherwise, the grief will take over and you will feel lost again.
Maybe your spouse is experiencing the very same hopelessness and desperation as you are. In such devastating times, you need to be there for one another, hold each other’s hands, and keeping your hearts from breaking into a million pieces. At the end of the day, your family is all you have. The people who are still next to you need your love more than anything in the world right now. And you need theirs.
Even though it seems unthinkable, you can find the strength to survive the loss of your child within you.
You can still accept happiness in your life. It will be extremely difficult, and you will feel like it’s not fair for you to be smiling while your child is never going to have the chance to smile again. But you must accept that, although they’re gone, life still goes on. The world doesn’t stop with your loss. That is why you need to reach out to the people who are there for you and let them help you get through this unimaginable pain. You may never hold your child in your arms again, but you will forever hold them in your heart.
