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‘Tiny Memories’ of Mother Magnified This Time of Year

Posted on May 9, 2009 - by Luellen Hoffman

By Luellen Hoffman My mind is confused about my mother being gone, even though it’s been a couple years since she died.  I feel like I can’t fathom the fact that she is not only gone, but “gone forever”.  I try to understand what that forever part means, and logically I get it and I talk to my brother Michael about it, but for some reason I just can’t put my intellectual reasoning around it yet.  This concept of “forever” is too big for me conceive. Little things remind me of her, like pansies.  She loved pansies and would always […]

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Mother Accepts Sorrow, Doesn’t Let it Rule Her

Posted on May 9, 2009 - by Diana Doyle

By Diana Doyle Five years ago, our daughter died. Savannah was only four. The grief I felt that day is still with me and still raw, but it helps me move forward and heal. After she died, it was hard to accept that nothing had changed for anyone else. The sun still rose and set and people went about their business as usual, even though my own personal corner of the world would never be the same. I had to find a way out of it, or be trapped there forever. My new baby girl and my husband both needed […]

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Gorgeous short movie about the loss of two siblings—check it out

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

So, a few months back, I gave a talk about sibling loss at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As you might imagine, there tend to be quite a few bereft siblings in the audience at these things. And they all have stories. Amazing, sad, beautiful ones that both elate me—because they’re a celebration of the bond—and make me want to cry. This particular evening was no exception. After the talk, a woman named Chrissy Rubin came up to me and told me that she had lost two siblings—Greg, 22, on July 9, 1984, and Carolyn, 43, exactly twenty years later, […]

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Carrying

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

Okay, I talk about “carrying” a lot, with regard to sibling loss. What do I mean by that? I mean the tendency we surviving siblings have to find a way to “carry” our lost siblings forward into our present-day lives. It’s a way of continuing the relationship with some one who is gone—in fact, grief-speak for this phenomenon is “continuing bonds.” How people do it varies, but why we do it is more straightforward. We try to carry our siblings forward because they are part of our identities, and our half of the relationship doesn’t end with their deaths. We […]

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What is Disenfranchised Grief?

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

When I was 14, my brother and only sibling, Ted, died. One of my more memorable experiences from that time is of standing next to his grave, watching, devastated, as they lowered his casket into the ground. A woman separated herself from the crowd, leaned down, took me by the arm, and leaned in, close enough so that I could see the lipstick on her teeth and smell her perfume. “You’ll have to be very good now,” she said, somberly. “Your parents are going through a lot.” I wrote about that scene in my book–apologies to those of you who […]

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What a Coincidence!

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

Yesterday I posted on a new study that looked at the impact of losing an infant sibling when you were very young, or even before you were born. I commented that, though understudied, the stories I’d heard from people suggested that this was a huge—huge!—life event. Then last night, my friend (and one of Open to Hope’s founders), psychologist Heidi Horsley, PsyD, who also lost a sibling, and who now specializes in grief, called my attention to a really spectacular essay by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, in The Wall Street Journal. Roth was asked to write a […]

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The Impact of Losing an Infant Sibling

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

When I was working on my book, I interviewed a couple of people who either lost siblings very early in that sibling’s life, i.e. in infancy (and were thus very young themselves) or who were born after the death of an infant sibling. I didn’t have enough people to make a huge case, but it was very clear to me that these were very significant losses. Sadly, however, because these people had been so young at the time, or were born after the death, few had ever acknowledged them as “real” mourners. Result: Disenfranchised grief. They were often confused about […]

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Surviving Children, Husband Save Mother’s Day After Son Dies

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Claire Perkins

Mother’s Day 2004 came six days after my oldest son Cameron died. We had not even had the funeral yet, as the circumstances of his death required an autopsy by the county coroner’s office and his body had not yet been released. The meaning of the day, the meaning of what it meant to be a mother, had changed for me utterly and completely. Being a mother now included the incomprehensible truth of outliving a child. It included the feeling of a heart so shattered that I doubted it could ever be whole again. It included the knowledge that no […]

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The First Mother’s Day After Maddy’s Death

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Lisa Buell

By Lisa Buell — I got a truck full of manure delivered to me the first Mother’s Day after my daughter Madison died. I had been sleeping in, hoping the day would turn to night before I had to come out of my room. The vibration of the truck shook the old single pane windows of my home and saved me from another morning of sleep without rest. I threw on my robe and made my way out the door just in time to see the load of turds falling on top of themselves in my driveway. “Sorry, I knocked […]

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Celebrating Mother’s Day When Mom’s Gone, Turn Bitter Into Sweet

Posted on May 7, 2009 - by Carol O'Dell

Mother’s Day can be bitter-sweet if your mom’s no longer here. It’s so hard to say the word, “dead,” and in many ways, our loved ones live on–in thoughts, in stories, in how they continue to impact our lives. For many, Mother’s Day can be so painful that we do all we can to avoid it. That avoidance is part of grief, and it’s necessary for a while. Grief is like a good soldier, but there comes a time when you say “Thank you, you’ve served me well,” and you let that soldier be released from duty. After my mother died from Alzheimer’s and […]

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