One of a series of leaflets published by The Compassionate Friends To be bereaved of a child is overwhelming. Our existence is rocked to its core. How can this be true? The death of a child can be even more traumatising if it was sudden. This may have happened as a result of a sudden health emergency or an unexpected deterioration of a health condition, a drug overdose, self-inflicted harm, violence, an accident, or the cause might initially be unknown. Our minds are filled with questions that often have no answers. The news hits hard. Whether our child was one year old, seventeen or seventy, we did not expect to outlive them. There was no chance to prepare, and there was no opportunity to say goodbye or to have final conversations. The thought of our child suffering is another layer of pain. Those dreadful moments when we learn of, or witness, the death of our child are etched in our memory forever. Our world comes to a complete stop in that instant and we feel out of time, out of place. The enormity of what has happened sends us into a state of shock. The immediate turmoil “I went over and over what happened, again and again, piecing together the order of events , trying to make sense of it all - what I was doing at that moment, what I did next, what happened to her, what people said, and what was done to try to save her. None of this would change the outcome, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about it.” It is a complete shock to learn that our child has died, and we may not even believe it at first. Some of us react to this traumatic news with great emotion, crying or shouting. Others feel strangely calm and detached, which can lead other people to mistakenly assume that we are coping well. Grief following the sudden death of our child
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTM0NTEz