A wife who loses a husband is called a widow.
A husband who loses a wife is called a widower.
A child who loses his parents is called an orphan.
There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.
(Jay Neugeboren "An Orphan’s Tale",1976).
The death of a child is every parent’s worst fear and has been rendered to be “a catastrophic stressor unlike any other” by the "Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual".
Grief is not an illness to be treated or cured.
Grief is a response to a painful reality that one’s world is forever altered, and will never be the same.
Absorbing this loss, and trying to adapt to the changes it unleashes, has its own unique course for every person, and will not be stilled or stopped by quick fixes or simple solutions.
A nightmare of Steven and myself .
He was a teenager and cheerfully explaining to me how his grades in School were so excellent.
I could barely see his face, but Steven's voice, his mannerisms, all of him were clear, talking to me, vividly, truly it appeared to be in real life.
I remember thinking, "how can he have grades in school if he is dead, how do I tell him that he is dead, how did he get to be back in school again", and my feeling completely confused about what was happening.
I struggled, agonized to see more, hear more of Steven, but what I was experiencing became slower and slower, crawling, almost frozen in time.
I tried to see if I was awake or deep within some nightmare, it all had seemed so life like, so real, but nothing moved for what seemed like a long time.
Suddenly I awoke, within a nano second, a painful burning sense of reality struck me full force.
Steven is dead, and dead means forever gone.
