Read Online Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child by Rita Volpe - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Rita Volpe
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house was cozy and filled with collected objects. My house now is modern, sparse and minimal. I need the openness and light.”
Each of us today has an intact marriage. Some of us feel our marriages have been strengthened by having endured and survived the worst that life can offer. We have made drastic changes in our patterns of living in order to remain with our spouses and remain sane. We have learned to accept what cannot be smoothed away, such as the fact that bereaved couples can disagree over something as vital as visiting their child’s grave. We know that we must accept what our partners can and cannot do, although it may differ from our own capabilities. We also realize the importance of our own needs and wants.
Audrey: “Driven by a hunger to hold on to Jess and to understand what happened, my husband and I share perhaps an even closer relationship.”
Phyllis: “Mel and I were like two frightened children holding hands. We were lost and trying to find our way out of a dark place that we inhabited. We grew to be extremely dependent on each other.”
Among the nine of us, only Maddy had divorced and remarried, long before the death of her son Neill. She and her second husband Cliff had been married since Neill was eight years old. So, while he was the devoted stepfather, he was not Neill’s blood relative. The stepfather relationship put Cliff in the position of sometimes feeling powerless, not knowing how he fit in after Neill’s death.
Maddy: “I think Cliff knew I had the greater pain and he deferred to it. In a way, we were luckier than the other couples in that Cliff was the stepparent. He
felt the grief but it was somewhat different. My former husband and I had battled over many things since we divorced in 1977. When Neill died we became friends. Instinctively, we both knew that to honor Neill and to do right by his younger brother, Phillip, we had to stop the fighting.”
However much our relationships with our husbands have been battered about by our shared tragedy, there remains the fact that it is a shared loss. Although it may have taken us awhile to look beyond our own grief, we all came to realize that our husbands are the only people on earth who held that lost child with as much loving closeness as we did and miss them as much as we do.
Barbara G.: “After many months of different grieving styles, I told Bruce that I would never leave him because only he knew and loved Howie as I did.”
People just naturally seem to acknowledge a mother’s grief more readily than a father’s grief. As a result, they often asked our husbands, “How is your wife holding up?” They would fail to ask how our husbands themselves were bearing up. The same was often true of our surviving children. Time and again they were asked, “How are your parents doing?”
Just as no one ever prepared us for losing a child, so no one ever told us how to deal with our surviving children. Only one of us, Ariella, has no other children or stepchildren. She and her husband Bob have done away with the traditions that are commonly associated with family. While those of us with surviving children have found we must carry on the celebration of holidays and birthdays and such, Ariella and Bob prefer not to be reminded of these events. They will travel over a holiday or ignore it completely if they so choose.
The rest of us spend much of our lives dealing with the issues that arise from having other children … the surviving siblings, if you will. Indeed, we cringe somewhat at using that term “surviving” children. More than one of our children has taken offense at being labeled in such a way, saying that it demeans their very existence by defining them only in relation to their dead sibling.
How we address ourselves in our relationships with our surviving children has much to do with where we are in our bereavement. In our
early grief, “bereaved parent” was our identity. We wore it as a badge; we were bereaved
Each of us today has an intact marriage. Some of us feel our marriages have been strengthened by having endured and survived the worst that life can offer. We have made drastic changes in our patterns of living in order to remain with our spouses and remain sane. We have learned to accept what cannot be smoothed away, such as the fact that bereaved couples can disagree over something as vital as visiting their child’s grave. We know that we must accept what our partners can and cannot do, although it may differ from our own capabilities. We also realize the importance of our own needs and wants.
Audrey: “Driven by a hunger to hold on to Jess and to understand what happened, my husband and I share perhaps an even closer relationship.”
Phyllis: “Mel and I were like two frightened children holding hands. We were lost and trying to find our way out of a dark place that we inhabited. We grew to be extremely dependent on each other.”
Among the nine of us, only Maddy had divorced and remarried, long before the death of her son Neill. She and her second husband Cliff had been married since Neill was eight years old. So, while he was the devoted stepfather, he was not Neill’s blood relative. The stepfather relationship put Cliff in the position of sometimes feeling powerless, not knowing how he fit in after Neill’s death.
Maddy: “I think Cliff knew I had the greater pain and he deferred to it. In a way, we were luckier than the other couples in that Cliff was the stepparent. He
felt the grief but it was somewhat different. My former husband and I had battled over many things since we divorced in 1977. When Neill died we became friends. Instinctively, we both knew that to honor Neill and to do right by his younger brother, Phillip, we had to stop the fighting.”
However much our relationships with our husbands have been battered about by our shared tragedy, there remains the fact that it is a shared loss. Although it may have taken us awhile to look beyond our own grief, we all came to realize that our husbands are the only people on earth who held that lost child with as much loving closeness as we did and miss them as much as we do.
Barbara G.: “After many months of different grieving styles, I told Bruce that I would never leave him because only he knew and loved Howie as I did.”
People just naturally seem to acknowledge a mother’s grief more readily than a father’s grief. As a result, they often asked our husbands, “How is your wife holding up?” They would fail to ask how our husbands themselves were bearing up. The same was often true of our surviving children. Time and again they were asked, “How are your parents doing?”
Just as no one ever prepared us for losing a child, so no one ever told us how to deal with our surviving children. Only one of us, Ariella, has no other children or stepchildren. She and her husband Bob have done away with the traditions that are commonly associated with family. While those of us with surviving children have found we must carry on the celebration of holidays and birthdays and such, Ariella and Bob prefer not to be reminded of these events. They will travel over a holiday or ignore it completely if they so choose.
The rest of us spend much of our lives dealing with the issues that arise from having other children … the surviving siblings, if you will. Indeed, we cringe somewhat at using that term “surviving” children. More than one of our children has taken offense at being labeled in such a way, saying that it demeans their very existence by defining them only in relation to their dead sibling.
How we address ourselves in our relationships with our surviving children has much to do with where we are in our bereavement. In our
early grief, “bereaved parent” was our identity. We wore it as a badge; we were bereaved
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