Death of a Child

Seeking Comfort after a Child Dies

Monday, January 8, 2024

Pain After a Child Dies I’ll say this clearly: parents aren’t expected to live to bury their children. And when we do, the impact can be heartbreaking, devastating. Although the wounds mend, they are never fully healed—especially during holidays, birthdays, graduations, wedding ceremonies, and even when embracing someone else’s child or grandchild. In the beginning, the tears flowed outwardly, but later they would flow inwardly. Eventually, I found some comfort. Certain things did help, like the day the nurse came and stated, “I wanted you to know we didn’t let her die alone. When it was time, I stayed with her […]

Death of a Child

Happy New Year is Tough on Bereaved Parents

Monday, January 1, 2024

  When the ball at Times Square drops, champagne corks pop. Ample hugs and kisses are dispensed all around. A new year, new hope, new ventures, new possibilities. Wow, it’s all so exciting! However, for the parent who has lost a child in the previous year, the dawning of a new calendar year can be rough. In fact, most of the time, it is. The bereaved parent can feel isolated, lonely, and sorrowful while everyone else is celebrating. Daniel died at age four in February 1997 and entering 1998 was hard. My mind was filled with questions like: What am […]

Bereavement, Death of a Child

Eight New Year’s Eves Ago

Saturday, January 16, 2021

There is a collective sigh of relief as we ring in 2021, and yet there is also mounting loss and unattended grief. For those of us who have been learning to live newly after the death of our own loves, we know that healing will take time and attention. Our own son Mack died 8 years ago today, two weeks shy of his ninth birthday. It still takes my breath away. How I long to see his teddy bear eyes and laugh together on the couch. I sense his joyful presence. I picture him running, his long legs stretched out, […]

Death of a Spouse

Give Yourself a G.I.F.T. This Holiday Season

Thursday, October 31, 2019

The holidays are a time of togetherness and family traditions. It’s even been dubbed the “most wonderful time of the year.” But for many in the widowed community, it can be filled with grief, loneliness, and reminders of our loss. Once solid relationships with family and friends may have frayed throughout the year because our grief was too much for them to handle and our in-laws, one of the last few connections to our spouse, might as well be called “outlaws.” If you’re fortunate enough to have been invited – and accepted – to spend the holidays with loved ones, […]

Death of a Child

Día de Muertos: Eat, Speak, and Remember

Friday, October 28, 2016

The Oxford English dictionary defines “remember” as to “have in or be able to bring one’s mind an awareness of someone or something from the past.” I have thought a lot about remembering or memory since our son Mack died on New Year’s Eve 2012, two weeks shy of his 9th birthday. Often a memory of a moment between us will bubble up unbidden and in the early days of mourning these would pierce me as a reminder of what I had lost. As the years have unfolded, I have come to relish those moments and even invite them. Recently, […]

Open to Hope

Father’s Day: A Duel Between Happiness and Sadness

Friday, June 17, 2016

The first Father’s Day I remember was when I was 8 or 9, and my dad and I were on an “Indian Guides” camping weekend with our “Tribe.” “Indian Guides” was a father and son organization run by the YMCA, and that weekend lots of fathers and their boys went camping in cabins, roughing it, and bonding. The Sunday morning that weekend was Father’s Day, and I had, with the help of my mother, hidden a pair of socks, wrapped neatly in my bag, so I could surprise my dad with a present when he woke up. Turns out, I […]

Open to Hope

A Letter to My Living Children for Mother’s Day

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Dearest ones, Mother’s Day is quickly approaching. Each year, I’ve received beautiful hand drawn cards or beautiful crafts from you that I cherish and save. Your words of love and appreciation are an echo of the profound love and appreciation I feel for each of you. Not just on Mother’s Day, but every day. And yet, you know Mother’s Day will forever more be bittersweet for me, since your sister will never again be alongside you to wish me a happy Mother’s Day. It has been a very challenging road for all of us since the death of your only […]

Death of a Child

Another School Year Begins

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

We hosted a college graduation party at our house for our nephew last weekend. My husband’s family was here, including our 95-year-old great-grandmother, all four grandparents in various levels of physical health. This made five generations gathered to hear my brother-in-law speak of his three children, who have now all graduated from college, and we toasted their accomplishments. I sat on the porch with my beautiful daughter Izzy, 16, listening to the toasts and thinking that it won’t be too long before she is graduating high school and heading to college. But our sweet Mack, who died suddenly of sepsis […]

Open to Hope

Declaring Independence From Grief

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Here in the U.S. we celebrate the Fourth of July as Independence Day. It is the day that Congress approved a Declaration of Independence from British rule. It marks the birth of our nation as a free, self-governing entity. The Declaration asserts that everyone has the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and claims that when any form of governance “becomes obstructive to these ends,” it is our right “to alter or to abolish it.” When grief has reigned as king in our lives for too long, it may be that we, too, need to declare our […]

Death of a Parent, Open to Hope, Your Grief

Good Grief: The Holiday Edition

Monday, December 9, 2013

Grief and the holidays are a tough combo. They go together about as well as peanut butter and pickles. Awful. Mourning a loss during this season of joyful celebration is an exercise in endurance and suffering. I know of what I speak: I lost my father, husband, aunt, and step-brother all in December—three in the same December. For a couple of decades, the advent of winter left me in a pall of bleak emotionality. I would have been perfectly happy if I could have skipped directly from Halloween to Easter. I would just as soon forgotten Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s […]