Bereaved Parents: Reflections on Laura’s Would be 38th Birthday

Written on July 13, 2024

Reflections from a Bereaved Parent: On my Daughter’s would be 38th Birthday 

Written on July 13,2024

Today our daughter Laura would have turned 38 years old. Happy Birthday Laura! I began the day by kissing a photo of Laura and blowing a kiss into the air while saying Happy Birthday Laura.

For 23 years, Laura, our only child, has been missing from earthly life, though her spirit is still very much alive. Since her death I have fostered a new kind of relationship with Laura, of parenting an angel. I believe Laura is still out there, in Heaven, here with me, here with others, or wherever she wants to be at any given moment. I imagine Laura doing spiritual work, having a second life mission in the afterlife. I wonder what she will be doing on her birthday. I wonder if Laura will visit me and her father, her family members or friends. Though I don’t want to pressure her, I hope she visits me today, in some way, in some form, somehow. I know our love is eternal, but the need to feel it in some tangible way never goes away.

Today I am open to writing what pops into my mind. I am willing to reveal my personal thoughts and feelings to be read by whoever finds this essay. I hope this piece of writing finds its way to those who suffer from the death of a child, and to the people who hope to support them. 

A week ago on July 5, I turned 67, one week before Laura’s birthday. I tell myself I have nothing to lose by sharing my intimate thoughts. This truth bearing may be the gift of aging. Perhaps it is the gift of having had the courage to continue to live a life with meaning for so many years after the  loss of my beloved daughter. I am what I call,  a long hauler bereaved parent. I have much to share from the many years of introspection and of navigating life without Laura, life without my role as a mother.

I was the proud parent of Laura, who lived 14 years, 10 months and 17 days. From the moment Laura died, on April 26, 2001, I became a childless mother. I was left behind in the parenting world. What remained was a deep knowledge and wisdom about parenting, and immeasurable skills that I could no longer use. My heart remained full and swollen with maternal love and nurturing energy with no place to put it. On my worst days, I felt like God fired me from my job as a mother. On my bad days, I felt like I had raised my daughter to go live with God. There were no good days.

The prospect of living without Laura was as foreign to me as living in a world without air to breathe.  I did not know how I could possibly go on living without our daughter.

The death of a child is an unfathomable loss, and the unspoken universal fear for all parents. From the moment a child is born, a parent’s protective instinct kicks in and says, keep your child safe, protect your child, keep your child alive. For a mother this protective instinct and great responsibility begins before birth, from the very moment she finds out she is pregnant. When an unborn fetus, baby, child, teen, or an adult offspring dies, this universal fear becomes the harshest reality of all, devastating beyond human comprehension; to outlive your child. All parents fear it, don’t want to think about it, and can’t comprehend it. You can only know this pain when it happens to you.

Somehow, bereaved parents make it through each day. We simply have no choice.

After the funeral, shiva, memorial, tree dedication, unveiling, and that horrendous first year of visible grief, we integrate into society as invisible. We are expected to abide by an unspoken code of silence, keep our grief swept under a rug, so as to not make other people uncomfortable.

When we resurface and want to tell our story, or bring our deceased child’s name into a conversation, we feel discomfort around us like a dead weight in the air. Bringing up one’s deceased child can put a crimp in conversations, gatherings, and celebrations. Sometimes we do find a willing ear in a compassionate soul, and we let a bit of air out of our overfilled balloon of love and pain which is ready to burst at any time. We learn to keep our horror stories packed inside of us in tidy packages, only to be let out and spoken of to a small audience; to a spouse, partner, close friend, family member, counselor, or someone we met in a parental bereavement support group. 

Once we enter life on the other side of the great divide of parents who get to keep their children and those who don’t, we join a subculture of bereaved parents. We are told, you are now in a club that no one wants to belong to. We learn that there is no word in the English language to describe us. Widow, widower, and orphan are in the dictionary, but no word for a bereaved parent; too ugly, taboo, forbidden, not to be given a name. Forbidden, rejected, shamed. Though we are not physically separated into colonies or sent off to live on an island like persons with Leprosy were, we are in a sense cast off.

We the bereaved parents live among you. We are your neighbor, a co-worker, a relative, or your friend. We stand beside you in a grocery line and sit behind you in a movie theater. We go about our lives and we try to keep our pain tucked inside. We learn what is socially expected of us. We become grief warriors. We go on with our lives and try to blend in.

To parents of living children, we represent their worst nightmare. Bringing it up is too sad, and can make them uncomfortable and trigger their own vulnerability. We represent what no parent wants to think about; that bad things can happen to good parents, loving parents, any parent. We happen to be the unlucky ones. 

Bereaved parents are in a minority within parent culture. We are separate from mainstream society, which revolves around family and parenthood. This becomes a more stark reality if you happen to lose your only child, or suffer the loss of more than one child. Some bereaved parents suffer the death of all their children. Yes, you read this correctly, the unthinkable does happen. And parents like myself, with no surviving children are a minority within a minority. 

When people state, life is short, a bereaved parent might wish to counter it with, life is too long, though they do not say it. Life can go by slowly for someone who is suffering and in emotional pain. Though time may heal some of the raw pain of the open wound of death overtime, the scar remains forever. Underneath lies the pain of scar tissue deep within the wound for the carrier of this loss. A bereaved parent becomes adept at forming new ways of adapting and integrating into the fabric of life, just as a wound transitions into a red and jagged scar that softens and blends into skin tissue, almost invisible, but still there if anyone chooses to look carefully enough, or to listen deeply, or to remember. Parents grieve for life. The wound remains, radiating pain when it chooses to; at anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, or for any reason at all, just like and old injury triggers sudden aches and pains at the change of weather conditions and barometric pressures. A bereaved parent holds their emotions together, just as sutures hold the skin to together to hide a wound, to stop the bleeding. The body lives on after a deep wound, just as the soul of a parent lives on after the debilitating death of a child, carrying a life long scar while mending it slowly.  

Grieving parents need not live hopeless aimless lives of despair forever. At the beginning days, months, and years of grief, the sorrow can be debilitating. No one should direct a griever to snap out of it. We all eventually come to a place where we reinvest in life. Maybe it is because we really have no other choice.

During those early years of my loss, I came to a place where I decided that I didn’t wanted my daughter’s soul to be weighed down by my depression and sadness. I pulled myself out of despair to attempt to live a life that Laura would be proud of. This kind of reinvention of oneself is a tremendous amount of work and exhausting. Long term parental grief is often looked upon as pathology, obsessive, or as hopeless despair. From my own experience, and of knowing others who have lost a child, bereaved parents are some of the strongest, courageous, compassionate and creative people.

Parental grief is lifelong, though it takes on different forms throughout the years and as we age. Our healing is not a linear path like a trail up to the top of a mountain where there is suddenly a clear and beautiful view of our lives, unaffected by internal pain. There is no finish line, no end game to this suffering. But there are many moments along the way of pure joy, similar to a feeling one might get at the top of a mountain. We have moments and periods in life when we feel content and at peace, but the pain will resurface; it is just around the bend. I never know what might trigger the deep sadness of missing Laura and the life I imagined we would have had if she were here with us now.

When you lose a child you lose your future. 

Parents of living children have road maps that are pre-set by simply being parents. They are thrust forward into the future along with their children’s futures. They plan and celebrate milestones as their children grow and look forward to older age; perhaps there will be grandchildren to spend time with during retirement or adult children to care for them in old age. These parents may suffer hardships and tragic events in their lives, but they are still parents. A bereaved parent with no remaining children, a parent who has miscarried and was never able to have children are tasked with forging a future without their beloved offspring.

If you are a long hauler bereaved parent like myself, you have been navigating this rough terrain of parental grief for a very long time. We are constantly needing to reinvent ourselves along the way, to pave our own roads forward, to do the hard work of creating new paths and finding new reasons to get up each morning. We live with the fact that there will be no birthdays, no first dates, no graduations or college interviews, no weddings and certainly no grandchildren. Life as we had envisioned it is over. That road stops here. It’s finite.

 What is unknown to us in the earlier years of child loss, is that this road of living with long term grief is littered with invisible landmines. There are secondary losses, sudden blows that invade our ever vulnerable personhood and can trigger full blown re-grieving periods. Sometimes a landmine of pain explodes within me and festers into a long period of sadness when I least expect it. This re-grief of my daughter may come about after the death of a loved one, like when my father or a best friend died, or after the loss of my job as a teacher after so many years. It can also come about when I am feeling socially abandoned. I have found that after Laura’s friends reached adulthood, we could become left out and left behind. I can be deeply saddened especially in the case of being left out of weddings. Fortunately, my husband and I have been included in some of Laura’s friend’s weddings and celebrations. We recently met a baby of one of Laura’s childhood friends and feel honored to still be a part of their lives. One of Laura’s best friends lives in France and still comes to visit us with her son every summer.

Note: If you are a parent with living children who have milestones, try to include your bereaved parent friends into your lives and celebrations. It means more to them to be included than any discomfort you may feel from inviting them. They will behave. They are self-trained to act with great restraint. They may decline the invitation if they find it emotionally hard for them, but chances are this will be one of those joyful moments, like the ones you feel at the top of a mountain. 

Over the decades of living with long hauler grief, social support diminishes. You can count yourself lucky if you have a few friends and/or family members who will let you tell them detailed stories and share memories of your child when they were alive, or talk about how you are feeling on your grief journey. These beautiful and empathetic souls are here to help us carry our children into the future through conversation and connection.

Some of these souls are the people who read my stories on Blue Sunflower, on Substack, stories about Laura and of how we parented and advocated for our daughter with Congenital Heart Disease (CHD).  These caring and compassionate people find the time to call, email or write comments and support my writing. Some of them are bereaved parents themselves. Some suffer their own sets of hardships and losses.  

No matter how many years have gone by, your bereaved parent friend, family member, or co-worker may still be asking themselves these questions years after the initial sting of their loss.

How did this happen?

How did we get here?

Why did God take my child away?

I still ask these questions, into the air, into the void. There are no satisfying answers to these questions.

I write today to shed some light on the darkness of grief and the tough road that bereaved parents travel down. I can only speak from my own experiences and from those I know who share this type of loss. I write to share what is often unseen and unheard. I write to give voice, to help us to be seen and to be heard. We are invisible until we decide it is time to become visible.

If you are suffering from the loss of a child or know someone who is, clink on the links below:

https://www.compassionatefriends.org/

https://alivealone.org/

Neena Verma https://substack.com/profile/81305828?r=z9fo9&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=search