Caring Advice

The most caring advice often comes from other bereaved parents who have traveled the same anguished road of despair as you; they fully understand the bottomless depths of your grief.

• You have to take care of yourself. Eat, walk. If you can’t eat a whole banana, eat half a banana. Every day is full of ice picks, but you can learn to dodge them. If the bad news on TV or the radio hurts too much, guard against it. Don’t watch it; don’t listen to it.

• Brace yourself for certain dates like Mother’s Day and your child’s birthday. Seeing large displays of Mother’s Day cards, for example, can pull your heart to the floor.

• The one thing you can’t prepare for is your child’s gravestone. Seeing your child’s name engraved in granite just pushes you into the finality of it all. (How can your child’s name be on a stone in the cemetery when it should be on a marriage certificate?)

• You have to get stronger. Your situation doesn’t get easier, so you have to get stronger.

• When your parents die, you lose a big part of your past, but when your child dies, you lose a big hunk of your future.

• You have to grieve in your own way on your own timeline.

• Some people say that after you’ve been through the first year of grief, the second year is easier. It wasn’t that way for me. The second year was just as hard as the first. If not harder.

• It never gets easy, but it gets easier. His mantra: Stay busy and keep the faith. (And Charles says if we stay busy, we are keeping the faith.)

• Write down some goals every night – things to accomplish the next day. List things you need to accomplish at work or tasks you need to tackle around the house, even if it’s something grubby and dull like cleaning out a closet. When you get up the next morning, order yourself to do something on your list. When you finish one thing, make yourself take on something else. When night comes, you can look at what you’ve done, and you’ll know you didn’t waste the day that was given to you, especially if you do something for someone else. Remember, too, that sometimes you have to take things off your list. If you note something you plan to do, and it makes you too sad to do it, don’t do it. Just mark through that task and pick another one.

Other suggestions Frannie offered...

• Make the most of your sobs. Cry while you work on something. When a super sad spell hits you, take it out on the floor in the kitchen or the prickly pinecones in your backyard.

• Remind yourself it won’t always be like it is right now. It won't always hurt this much. The pain doesn’t go away, but the crying will change. You will still cry, but more on the inside than the outside. You’ll always have your big ball of hurt, but you’ll learn how to pick it up and carry it around.

• Death brings sadness. It also leaves you with a sense of urgency, a search for meaning. Life is short for all of us. We have to make our living count for something.

• Keep children in your life. It helps to take some of the love you feel for the loved one who is absent and wrap it around another child who needs it.

• Know that many helpful people will come into your life. They will. They will come.

• Keep lifting your shade. It will be hard, very hard, but you’ll make it. Just get out of the bed every morning and lift your shade. One day you’ll see the sun and some blue sky, and you’ll decide you want to jump into life again, at least for a morning or an afternoon.

• Even though life is never the same kind of happy again, you can find "a different kind of happy.” You can find special meaning and contentment in pleasant moments and experiences that come your way.

• The death of your child is the hardest hurt life can throw at you, but you can handle it. You can discover a resilience of spirit and courage and strength you can’t imagine you have.

• One day you’ll choose to live again, and you’ll be passionate about something you know is important. And you’ll definitely know what is important and what is not. 

• We have to keep going, no matter what. Other people do. If they can, I can. If I can, you can.