Grieving The Loss Of A Child… Whether They Died Or Just Gone to Live Their Own Life
No matter how you slice it, a big change like this, even if it is the best of the child, is a huge trauma for the parent, especially the mother.
Most mothers are programmed to care for their young ones, but while they are doing that, they forget to be themselves, forget to rebuild a life of their own, so when the child dies, or leaves, they are left with nothing.
I have a student whose children live in other countries, you can’t just offer to drop by, bring some good home-made cooking, or babysit their child while they attend to other things.
You experience your life empty, your self butchered. It seems that the only way the damage can be repaired if you reunite with the child: wish it to come back, or move to the country where they are living.
If you have a loss, you think your loss is very different from other people’s. You think losing a child to death is different from losing a spouse or a parent. Or losing a child to illness is different from losing a child to a violent death.
Losing someone with whom you strongly identified yourself is always traumatic, experienced or not.
I number of decades my father left my mother exactly at the same time when my uncle died, my mother’s uncle really. The two “widows” got together for a day or sharing, but it ended poorly: they got into a physical fight about who suffers more, whose pain is bigger.
They were both right. Your own pain is always bigger, to you, than anyone else’s pain. Because you experience it directly, not through empathy.
What I am trying to say here is that losing a close person with whom your whole existence was intertwined, is a loss that requires recovering from.
You recover your self from the entanglement, you may even rebuild your self, but you can’t do that until you grieved. Until you completely and totally get the finality of the loss. Until you get that there is no hope. That it is true, it is real, and that’s that.
That is the first step you need to accomplish, and I have seen a lot of people taking years to accomplish that first step.
There is a lot of work to be done there. In addition to getting the finality, as a concept, you need to get it in detail, as an actuality.
My mom visited me from Hungary in 1992, and then died in 1995. I dreamed about traveling cross country with her in an RV… she would have been the perfect person to do that with. Hardy, enjoys and appreciates different sceneries, different foods, different cultural varieties: I so wanted to do that with her.
When she died, two things died with her:
1. I was never going to experience being loved by my mother… all hope was lost. I never experienced that while she was alive, and now it’s over.
2. That trip, cross country, and all the other ways I wanted to contribute to her were gone.
It took me ten years to accept the finality, and sometimes even today I catch myself a twinge of pain here and there when I think about that trip.
What ended the ten years “holding my breath” or “waiting to exhale” was a new knowledge, that the soul hangs out at least for a year before it moves on, and even more importantly, some souls are afraid to move on, and you can help them with that.
My mother was abusive with me and, I think, she felt very guilty about that. She asked me once, when she was visiting, and I assured her that I turned out, so she must have been a good mother, but it was like a band-aid for her, didn’t really convince her.
So when she died I could feel her hanging around, brooding, even trying to make herself felt.
One evening I set on my bed with a back pillow and connected with her. I told her that it was OK for her to go “home” and know that the faster she goes the more time she will have to try it again, next time love her child instead.
I could feel her caress my face and ascend. I experienced peace, and I experienced my own power: I set my mother free.
Now I can light candles on her birthday and on her death anniversary and just celebrate her life. That is getting into the second phase.
The second phase is finding yourself and your own purpose independent and liberated from caring for and caring about the departed.
It is not easy, so be prepared that, as with anything, you can’t just jump from a to z. You need to actually say the whole alphabet, or the missed steps will bite your butt later.
You can’t jump from grieving and feeling a part of you died to being passionate about life.
If you do, it’s a pretense, or the original question wasn’t accurate: you never felt a part of you died. You are lucky, but exceptional.
It takes healing, silence, time, and energy to build a passion that will carry you as an independent entity forward.
Connecting to the Creator of All That Is is a power source that never lets you down, that is intelligent and sends the light and the healing energy where you wouldn’t think to send it: to the past.
Connecting, on the second level, with the Tangerine Method, 5-10 minutes daily can shorten your recovery without feeling that you betrayed your loved one: they are there rooting for you, they want you to be happy, joyful, and alive.
Death for the spirit is not the same as the people left behind: death for the spirit is returning to their native state: not having to carry a body, care for a body, worry about a body, or a mind. Death for the spirit is joyful.
Come and learn to connect, experience the connection meditation in a small group, every Saturday 9 am and 9 pm. You can stay for an hour or for 30 minutes. I make sure to check you are connected and if you are having difficulties I can point out exactly where you need to put in a slight correction.
