You wake up in the morning and for the first few hazy seconds, you

think maybe it was all a bad dream. As soon as you get out of bed, a

tidal wave of grief knocks you down, bringing you to your knees, and

you immediately start to cry. You can’t stop crying. This is the beginning

of the end of your life as you knew it—grieving your child who

is no longer alive. Whether it was a long goodbye, a short goodbye, or

no goodbye, you want the pain to stop but you don’t think it ever will.

 

How could it? How will you go on? Why should you go on?

Everything has turned to shit. Things will never be the same. You will

never be the same. Your child has died and a part of you has, too. Your

world has gone from color to black and white, though it’s mostly just

pitch black. The light—your darling son, your beautiful daughter—is

gone forever and you’re left alone, stumbling in the dark.

 

You drag yourself into the shower and try to wash the anguish

away. You scrub and scrub until it hurts and then you scrub some more

until you burst out crying again. The shower is one of the few refuges

where you can let go, where you can turn your insides out. The shower

cleanses your body but can’t purify your soul.

 

You get dressed, unaware that you’re wearing two different colored

shoes, and look in the mirror to see if you’re still in one piece. It surprises

you that you are. But there’s something different about your eyes.

They’re dull and lifeless, like one of those zombies on The Walking Dead.

You wonder if people can see the sorrow in your eyes, or the hole in

your heart, or the bottomless pit in your stomach, and then you wonder

if they can see you at all.

 

You eat a light breakfast because the barely rational part of you

knows that you need to keep up your strength, but everything tastes

awful. Really, everything has no taste at all. You have no appetite for

anything—least of all, for your life.

 

The phone rings and you jump out of your skin before realizing

that there’s no longer a reason to ever do that again. You still have the

coroner’s voicemail to prove it. This time, it’s just a little PTSD calling

to say hello.

 

You hop in the car and begin to cry again because this is your other

fortress of solitude. You think this is where you do your best crying—

the deep, guttural, ugly kind that barely sounds human. This is the start

of your mourning commute.

 

Your first stop is your therapist’s office. Today she wants you to

recall the moment you got the horrible phone call because that’s part of

the EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy,

which supposedly will help you to rewire your trauma and relieve your

emotional distress. As your eyes begin to track her hand as she moves it

in and out of your field of vision while you’re tapping your fingers on

your legs, you think, Am I the biggest idiot for doing this ridiculous thing?

Or am I just that desperate to make the sadness subside? When she finally says

your time is up, you curse God for saying the same to your child.

 

When you get to work, everyone is extra-nice yet a little skittish

about approaching you. When they do pay their condolences, it’s awkward

(“There are no words”), and you say thank you and smile politely, and

a colleague gives you a big hug. Hugs have never felt so soothing before,

and you don’t want to let go—not just because it feels good but also

because you need to feel connected. The physical contact reminds you

that you’re still a part of this world, an unjust world without your child.

 

Your cell phone buzzes again, and you feel the same sickening jolt

in your belly. When will this stop? you think, and this time it’s your best

friend checking in to see if you’re “all right.” You hate those words.

Nothing will ever be “all right.” Right now, everything is all wrong—

with no end in sight. Why can’t everyone just leave me the hell alone? you

think, and then you thank your best friend for calling.

 

You throw yourself into your work, hoping it will be a distraction,

and it goes pretty well for a while until something reminds you of your

child and reduces you to a puddle. You run to the bathroom before

anyone can see you and lock yourself behind a stall. When someone

walks in, you bite down hard on your hand, hoping to silence your sobs.

 

After a productive morning of mourning, it’s time for lunch, and

your best work friend wants to take you out, so you slip on your “all

right” mask and prepare to be peppered with the same questions that

everyone keeps asking. They’re all variations on “How are you doing?”

and you wonder for a second, Should I really tell this person how I’m feel-

ing? Does this person really want to hear that my guts have been ripped out and

how badly I’m suffering every second, minute, hour of every day? Instead, you

say, “I’m hanging in there, doing the best I can,” and they smile and

nod approvingly.

 

They actually look a little relieved because they really don’t want to

hear about your agony, and you really don’t want to inflict it upon them.

How can they possibly understand what you’re going through anyway?

You can barely comprehend it yourself. So you quietly eat your tasteless

salad and make small talk until the check arrives. Your best work friend

is happy to pick it up, and you think that one of the few fringe benefits

of having a dead kid is all the free meals you’ve been getting lately.

 

The afternoon crawls by, and you picture yourself in this metaphor,

crawling on all fours while caught in rush hour traffic on the way home.

Home. Home used to be one of your favorite words. Home is where the

people you love most in the world live. Except for one of them. Now

you have to face your husband, wife, or partner, and, in many cases,

your other children, and it’s your job to comfort them, to reassure them,

to hold on to them for dear life.

 

After dinner, when everyone has retreated to wherever they go to

lick their wounds, you crack open what has become a nightly bottle of

wine and pour yourself a hefty glass. You plunk down on the couch

and hope that maybe by the time you finish the bottle, your heartache

will ease a tiny bit. Maybe you’ll finally get a good night’s sleep. Maybe

you won’t wake up tomorrow. Maybe you’ll drown yourself in more

maybes, you think.

 

You turn on some mindless TV show, because that’s all you can

handle right now and you’re not really watching anyway; it’s just random

images and background noise that complement the mayhem of

your thoughts. And it comes as no surprise that you’re crying again,

even though you’re watching Guy Fieri eating cheeseburger fried rice

on Food Network, so you pour yourself another tall glass and head into

the bedroom.

 

Your husband or wife is already zonked out, so you decide to skim

one of the many grief books people have recommended, but everything

you read just makes you feel worse. Finally, you pop a Xanax or two,

turn off the lights, and try to go to sleep.

 

And that’s when things get really dark, because now it’s just you

and the relentless voices in your head. You’re trying to make sense of

something that doesn’t make sense, and yet you keep trying because

you think it will provide relief, connecting the dots, explaining the

unexplainable, hoping against hope that you can miraculously change

the outcome. You hope that somehow this will make the pain go away,

knowing full well that nothing can ever take it away, knowing that the

pain will last forever.

 

It’s a grotesque feedback loop in which you’re stuck inside your

own head and the walls are filled with pictures of your child, and wherever

you look, there’s your kid looking back at you, sometimes smiling,

sometimes sad, sometimes angry, sometimes completely expressionless,

but always looking you directly in the eye. And you want to hold them

and shake them and hug them and kiss them, and more than anything,

you want to hear their voice, you want to hear them laugh or curse or

say, “I love you,” but they can’t speak because it’s just pictures.

 

So you dig a little deeper, looking for memories that come with

their own soundtrack, and you think you can hear them, but really it’s

just you putting words in their mouth—I love you, Mom; I love you, Dad;

I love you; I love you; I love you—over and over until it’s just a faint whisper,

and even though you’re wide awake, it feels like a horrible dream

and you just want it to end. You keep saying it was just a bad dream, it

was just a bad dream, it was just a bad dream, the same thing you told

your child when they were having one.

 

Then you take a deep breath and dry your eyes. You didn’t even

realize that you were crying again—when will you ever stop crying?—

and now you’re just sitting in bed and looking at a photo of your daughter

or son on the nightstand, the one from a million years ago before you

got the phone call that irrevocably changed your life. You can see their

exquisite beauty and feel their divine spirit, and you say out loud Why?

Why? Why? Why? And they look right back at you—the most beautiful

child in the world—and they don’t say a word.

 

You wake up the next morning and once again, for the first few

seconds, you think maybe it was all a bad dream. This is now your life—

if you can still call it that—when your child’s life ends.