The Grief of Losing a
Child
By Vanessa Hutton
In 2004 when my son Luther died I wasn’t a Clinical Mental Health Counselor. I was and I still am a Mother who lost her son. There’s no word that describes or identifies us as bereaved parents. We often become marginalized within society because we cannot contain the pain. It is as if society doesn’t know what to do with us. The thing people say to me most consistently in the 18 years since my son died is “I don’t know how you do it, I would die if that happened to me”. It is painful to hear. The message is that we are supposed to kill ourselves. Death by suicide in the first three years is common for bereaved parents. The research shows that the traumatic impact of the losing a child rewires your brain. This neurological rewiring literally changes your neurophysiological experience of life. Losing a child causes people to have ongoing PTSD responses rooted in this shift in the nervous system. The research on the grief experience for bereaved parents is really disturbing. Essentially people who lose a child are at risk for an earlier death due to physical health problems. Bereaved parents die earlier than non bereaved parents. Often they die from cardiovascular disease. Which essentially means we die earlier than expected and usually from a broken heart. It makes sense. I once read that losing a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person but there was no list of the other things. Tornado? Natural Disaster? What is worse? I still don’t know. What I do know is we feel desperately alone in our grief and many of us have intrusive thoughts about killing ourselves. And feel ashamed for thinking that way despite it being the normal response. My experience as a Bereaved Parent has been crushing. The aftermath of the loss has been a mine field. Mostly because we are so changed. It has been my experience that the people around us don’t recognize us so easily anymore. For many of us the world becomes very unfriendly. 47
