Emptiness

I have been trying to put into words what it feels like to have your child die. It is definitely a heartache and so I once compared it to the feeling of breaking up with a partner (not just anyone, but someone who you truly loved and cared for and wanted to make a life with). So take that feeling and then multiply it times a million and that starts to get close. And this makes sense, because who do we love even more than our lovers, more than our parents? Our kids. I've often told my children that they will never understand how much I love them until they have their own kids. The love for a child is like no other love and therefore the pain upon losing a child is like no other pain.

We spend our entire lives trying to protect our kids from the dangers of the world. No matter how a child dies, their parent feels like they have failed at their most basic task, keeping their child safe from those dangers. Even if there wasn't a single thing I could have done differently to keep my child alive, I still have to go over every possible scenario to be sure. I have to do this to feel like I still have some control over my world, unfortunately when your child dies you mostly feel like everything is out of your control and like very little makes sense in the world.

From the moment a baby is born we start marking milestones, trying to savor every moment of their time with us, because we know that their time with us is short no matter what. When a child dies there is an overwhelming sense of loss of potential. There are so many mile markers that did not get passed and nearly every day is a reminder of these things. I try to think about the markers she did pass in her short life, she did many many things for an 11 year old. But many times the pain of the things left undone is almost too much to bear and certainly too great to push aside.

Children seem to be much bigger personalities than their size would have you believe. The hole left in a parent's life when a child dies is even larger. In our culture our lives revolve around our children. Even as a working mother, most of my free time and much of the physical space of my life is set up to accommodate and integrate my children. Work schedules are set around kid's school schedule, evenings are spent doing homework or going to extracurricular activities, houses are chosen to most easily contain our children and their friends, cars are chosen for their ability to pack in as many kids and friends and equipment as possible. When a child is gone, many of these things seem unnecessary, useless, empty; sometimes even ourselves.