The Triumph of Grief
We are asked to hold so much after the death of our child, but one of the heaviest loads was feeling like I failed. When a child is born, we are hard-wired as parents to make sure our child survives. It is our job. And when that doesn't happen, for whatever reason, we feel like we have failed. It doesn't matter if we recognize this feeling as irrational — we still feel that way. It is one of the most brutal parts of losing a child.
Recent research on the science of the grieving brain is astounding and validating. One fact that hit home for me is this fact that we are wired to search for our child after they die. Our brain chemistry is structured to motivate and direct a parent to seek out and protect his or her offspring. When we are separated from our child through death, our brain's neurochemicals and hormones are still trying to motivate us to find our child because they are not in our presence anymore. We are biologically driven to look for and look out for them. The urgent, desperate need, the instinctive drive to get to your child doesn’t mean you are crazy. It means you are doing what you were created to do.
Death is an abstract concept and it turns out that it takes the human brain a long time to absorb and accept this information and to then re-wire its circuitry. For a long time – it could be days, weeks, or months – part of our mind is still searching for our child to care for and protect them.
The science of the grieving brain comforts me. After our son John Paul Raphael died, I was desperate to find him. He died in my arms. I watched as his body was wheeled away. Later I buried him. And STILL, my mind and body persisted in believing that there was something I could do, some place I could go, some back alley I could search, where I would find him alive and all would be well. For some reason, I felt like an old woman in a Dickens novel, shawl clutched over my head searching dark street after dark street, calling for my lost baby. There was no rational thought. There couldn’t be. My whole body, mind, and spirit were in shock. All that mattered was finding my child again.
I lived in a dual reality for weeks, especially while moving through the details of planning the funeral. Part of me watched myself from above while I ate and drank and talked to a funeral director. I wanted to scream at myself, “What are you doing????? Your baby is GONE!” The more reasonably I behaved, the more enraged I became at myself. How could I sit at a shiny wood table in a funeral salon picking out holy cards when I knew my child was somewhere in that terrible building? It felt like a betrayal of my own heart and my love for John Paul Raphael to just go along with it all. I remember feeling furious with my husband months after we buried our baby. I raged at him with tears and hot anger for screwing the wooden lid on his tiny coffin. How could he do that? Why did I let him? When did we ever agree this was ok? In my grief, I felt sure that if we had just insisted he not be buried, we could avoid having to deal with the reality that he had died.
Each of us share this truth: There is nothing we wouldn’t have done to keep our child alive. There is no mountain we wouldn’t climb to be with them again. We may share the same burden that we think we should have been able to do those things. That we failed.
In fact, the outcome was always out of our hands. We were powerless. And accepting that is almost as hard as accepting that our child is gone. It feels too painful, too terrifying to live in a world where something that terrible can happen to you and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Perhaps that is why we sometimes feel shunned or invisible after child loss. Other people are wary of coming too close lest the same terrible misfortune come their way.
Oh dear grieving mothers and fathers, we have not failed. We are not weak. We are not crazy. We are human and live in a fallen world. But we are so loved. We are seen and cared for by our suffering Lord and his sorrowful mother. The depth and breadth and width and weight of our grief is know.
And slowly, so slowly – our brains and bodies are shifting and re-wiring. In many ways, this is also terrible. We may be ambivalent about learning to live in a world where our child is no longer present to us. Frankly, we might rather not. And yet, it still happens. With every new experience and every new day without our child, we learn a tiny bit more about how to live and move and be in this new, terrible reality. In time – sometimes a very long time – our brains slowly stand down from Code Red to Emergency to an adjusted new normal which eventually, isn’t only terrible. We learn to integrate the grief enough that there is space for beauty and goodness as well.
It is an act of defiance of the evil of death to choose to live and to let goodness into your heart again. This is the opposite of failure. It is triumph.
