Grieving For More Than One Child

UK Helpline: 0345 123 2304 | www.tcf.org.uk or we might be devastated to now be without any children at all. We might be alone and without support, or have a partner who might be grieving in a different manner to ourselves. These things are true of all child bereavements, but they are intensified if we have lost more than one child. If one child died some time back, we might have lived with an unspoken dread that something else would happen to another of our children, and now it has. Our worst nightmare has become reality, and the very foundations of our life have been completely shaken. It is hard to face the future with hope when our very worst fears have come to pass. We may vividly recall the raw agony of our grief when our first child died. Over time, we had somehow learned to live with their absence. Now we find ourselves once again in the turmoil of early grief. We might discover that the coping strategies we developed when our first child died may not help us in the same way now that we have lost a second or further children, particularly if this now means we have no remaining children. Our grief has increased on many levels. We are dealing with extreme sadness, and our grief may be further compounded by other factors. For instance, we may be grieving the loss of the relationship between our children. In fact, they may have never even met each other, and we grieve that they never will. We may never have had an opportunity to take photographs with our children together and we feel this loss acutely. If our children have died at the same time, perhaps as a result of a terrible accident, we are shocked and devastated beyond words. We might be overwhelmed by a sense that our life no longer has purpose. If our children died in the same location, and this is a place we are obliged to return to, such as the local hospital, our pain will be revisited and revived on countless occasions.