A Day in the Life...After Your Child’s Life Ends

When your child has died, a part of you has, too.

Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Key points

• Whether it was a long goodbye, a short goodbye, or no goodbye, the pain of a child's loss is relentless.
• Hugs have never felt so soothing before, and you don’t ever want to let go.
• Home is where the people you love most in the world live. Except for one of them.

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 s--t. 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 Start of Your Mourning Commute

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.

Everything Is All Wrong—With No End in Sight

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 feeling? 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.

When Things Get Really Dark

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.

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.