Friday's Faith - Child-Loss Grief is For the Long Haul

Friday's Faith

Child-Loss Grief is For the Long Haul

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

(T)here is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way, is always "present," it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.

~Marcel Proust

(Referring to Proust's quote,)

This is a delicate point. Some people feel that to bring up an "old" grief is to reawaken a wound that has perhaps ceased to hurt—or at least to hurt as much.

Perhaps it depends on the severity of the loss.

Where the loss seems lifelong and inappropriate—as in the death of a child—the grief is never "over."

It will be at a different stage, but it is still there, and as parents, we may indeed be grateful that "after all this time" someone is mindful of a grief that, for us, never goes away.

I know that my husband and I were grateful on the several occasions when, a long time after our daughter's death, we encountered friends who had heard of our loss but had not seen us, and they took the occasion to express their sympathy.

I expect that most of us would rather people risk offering too much than adopt some false constraint and leave us wondering whether they know or care.

Yes, I may cry when you speak of it, but I'm still glad for your support.

~Martha Whitmore Hickman, Healing After Loss

Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief ~Martha Whitmore Hickman