Living with grief

One of a series of leaflets published by The Compassionate Friends Going forward When we first lose our child, we count the time in hours and days. Then there are weeks, months and years. As time passes, we observe their siblings and friends moving on. Children who were at school with our child grow up; if they went to university or had a job, their friends will start progressing in their careers. Perhaps most difficult of all, our child’s partner may find someone else. It is hard not to feel resentful, to imagine “what might have been”, to compare our child’s shortened life with the lives of their peers. Our child is frozen in time; there are no new photographs, no new stories to tell. There is no easy resolution to the pain of our loss, but the raw agony of the early months and years will eventually dissipate. Adjustment means the gradual integration of our child’s absence into our lives. We will always love and remember our child, and in time, the memories and photographs that so upset us in the early days will hopefully become a comfort, making us smile as well as weep. Our lives will never be the same after the death of our beloved child. It will take many months, and even years, to weave the experience into the fabric of our lives so that we find our “new normal”. We will have changed, our lives will have changed, and we may now find that we have a different perspective on what we feel is important to ourselves and our families. We will learn to live again, but the ache of loss will never be quite forgotten. We will treasure our child’s memory for as long as we have breath.