There’s another aspect of losing a child that has only recently become known to me.  I was previously aware that marriages are at risk in the aftermath of such a tragedy.  It is said that grief tears us apart with the reckless abandon of a tornado. Sometimes there’s enough remaining to rebuild and sometimes the only thing you can do is to move on and start over.  My husband and I count ourselves fortunate to have survived the storm and to have come through it even stronger.  We’ve grieved together.  We’ve grown together.  The shared love and loss of our son binds us in unspoken unity.  But I was unaware that the relationships I had with my surviving children were subject to lesser, yet more destructive winds.

After Mason’s death, Steve and I became acutely aware of how precious time is and how short life can be.  Our priorities changed, sometimes in small and subtle ways and sometimes profoundly.  Knowing that both time and energy are finite resources, we were determined to spend ours with intention.  It was time to rethink, to reboot, to go inside.  Many months later, when our lives began to come back into focus, it was clear what still resonated in our hearts and what didn’t.  We were different people, indeed different parents with different children.  We had all been rewired.  But parents aren’t supposed to change, even after the life-altering loss of a child.  We assumed our kids, being adults with families of their own, would understand better than anyone that we had suffered the worst loss imaginable for a parent and that for the time being, our focus was on surviving the loss and adjusting to the new, unwelcomed paradigm.  In time, maybe they’ll be able to understand that it was not our intention to change.  But it was inevitable and should not have been judged from a distance but embraced from the perspective of a lifetime of being loved and cared for.

Our kids became very close after Mason’s death, bonded to each other in a way they had never been before. They were each other’s support system, sharing the loss of their brother as only siblings could.  Steve and I, likewise,  grieved together as only parents could.  Family and friends were unfailingly patient, loving and supportive, knowing we were doing our best to find our way. But our hearts had been broken and at least for now we had neither the desire nor the ability to participate in our lives as fully as before. Things that had previously been of interest became submerged in our grief. Mason was always in our thoughts and our tears flowed often and freely.  Steve and I mourned with intention knowing our grief had to be felt in order to be dealt with.  Our kids who had both been dealing with substantial issues prior to Mason’s death, found themselves at the beginning of the grieving process already overwhelmed, their emotional resources exhausted. Things that would have been considered extremely difficult under ordinary circumstances, became extraordinarily challenging. And we all had such a long way to go.

Not everyone is able to grieve in a heathy manner. It’s hard and exhausting work, full of unrelenting sadness, pain and tears.  It’s so much easier to be mad than it is to be sad. Grief counseling and therapy can help you process your grief in such a manner that no unnecessary hurt is felt and no additional harm is created. On the other hand, ignoring your grief can make you toxic and destructive to yourself and those who share your loss.

Losing Mason was the hardest thing any of us have ever been through and our kids cannot conceive of a loss greater than that of a sibling.  My fervent prayer is that they never have to learn otherwise.  In my experience, the love you have for your siblings, though deep and abiding, does not compare to the love you have for your children.  The love is different, the loss is different. And that is something only parents who have spent a lifetime loving and nurturing their children would understand.  Grief is so entwined with love, that a child watching a parent grieve over a sibling could easily feel slighted by the depth of feelings involved in that process.  You can almost hear them say,  I’m still here, isn’t that enough?

“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”- Robert Frost