What Parents Wished You Knew About the Grief of Losing a Child

I was added to a “Loss of a child” support group right after Jeb’s funeral. I don’t post a lot there because that’s not how I process this, but it regularly appears in my newsfeed because it’s a local group to where we used to live and I think there’s some algorithm that helps that along.

I logged into social media a few months ago to respond to an event and saw an image that stopped me and intrigued me. It was just a box with the words: WHAT DO YOU WISH PEOPLE KNEW ABOUT LOSING A CHILD?

I read every reply and started marinating on the things people said. Of course, they were all spot-on in how I feel, how Gregg has expressed to me he feels, but I wanted to really process it and take time to think on what I read to make sure that time didn’t change things. Over the next few months, I joined a couple more groups like that one – not local, much larger, and a few weeks ago, I posed the same question. In the larger groups, the answers didn’t change.

You are forever changed.

This is the overwhelming answer I received – overwhelming. I am a completely different person that I was at 8:00 PM April 29, 2023. I have entirely different goals, motivations, and desires. My drive and ambition in any part of my life OTHER THAN my relationships with my husband and children and our families is completely altered. I look at things like marketing trends and ideas and think, “I don’t care.”

I remember in the months after Jeb’s death, I was scrolling through some social media platform and kept seeing all these cutsie short videos designed to market books and thought, “How much time did it take to make that, curate it, edit it? To what end?” Thinking that way annoyed me, but so did the videos, and I haven’t really been back mainly because the people behind them are actually my friends and they’re just trying to market to this generation. THEY haven’t changed. I have.

Fundamentally, at my core, I am a different person and I know the old me will not return in the same way.

You don’t sleep.

OH MY GOODNESS. YOU NEVER SLEEP. I might doze off and then start awake about four hours later. I put off going to bed because it takes forever to fall asleep and it’s just exhausting to try. It’s been fifteen months and I have had maybe four solid nights of sleep. As I write this, I’ve been up since 2:13AM. I’ve handled some website things, handled some marketing things, and still had an hour before I have to leave to drive to work so I’m writing this article. I am in a fog of exhaustion and grief that I can’t see through.

I understand the science. I cope all day with the grief, and I’m very good at it. I am a pragmatic person and I don’t really buckle under emotion. I’ve never been that way. I’ve never been one to have an out-loud expression of my emotions or react to situations outside of handling whatever’s going on. I have always been the one to have a level-head even in the midst of chaos or fear. I remember lying in my hospital bed on my 10th day of my stay with my pregnancy with Scott. I was 30-weeks pregnant, crashing and Scott was crashing and my nurse came in to prep me for emergency surgery and she was just crying as she tried to talk to me. I finally put my hand over hers and said, “You’re clearly upset. Can I pray for you?”
I was fine. And that’s just how I am. I react in other ways. I pray. I speak Bible verses. I clean – diligently. In order for me to be in control of the situation, I need my environment in order. Living in the construction zone of our house destroyed by renters made that hard and added to that accumulating stress in the back of my mind.

And I write. I create characters that are so real that my readers will pray for them while they’re in the midst of some crisis or deadly scenario before the reader remembers they’re reading a fictional book. (True story.) The emotions that I’m not even certain I fully possess are there – they’re just simmering in my creative psyche, waiting or the perfect time to be manifested on the page.

It is exactly how God made me and I don’t mind it.

I have shed very few tears over Jeb’s death. Not none – but few. Privately, with Gregg, I’ve had a couple of nights here and there where tears fall as we speak about him. I have comforted so many people that find themselves in my arms, crying on my shoulder as I speak condolences to them. I had a friend at Jeb’s funeral ask me to quit comforting everyone because it wasn’t my job then. Only — perhaps it was. Perhaps that’s the one reason God made me the way that I am – so that when nearly 300 people gathered in shock to mourn the horrific death of this brilliant boy, they could find comfort from one of the two people in the room who loved him most.

In the midst of grief, around 3-5AM, your brain has been through a couple of REM cycles and there’s a sudden release of cortisol. Cortisol is the stress hormone (which affects blood flow) and while my brain is at rest and normal control and composure are also asleep, grief overtakes me because none of my coping skills are present to stop it. It increases my blood flow and heart rate and I am suddenly awake. And unable to go back to sleep.

The grief from losing one child causes the fear of losing another child.

YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES. The “It can never happen to my family” is completely gone. It absolutely can happen to your family. The hard part for me is twofold: My daughter is a grown and married adult. We have a fabulous relationship but we do not speak every day. Sometimes, it takes a day or two to get a text back from her. I don’t mind this. Sometimes it takes a day or two for her to get a text back from me. We do meet about once a week as a family for dinner. I am completely comfortable and content with who we are as a family group.

We were talking one day and she mentioned that a friend speaks to her mother every day. I paused and asked very carefully, “Do you want me to call you every day?”

She very emphatically said, “Oh God, no.”

But I want to know she’s okay and I’m so very happy every time I hear from her – either phone call, text, or visit. Because in that moment in time, she is completely fine and I know it all the way.

We also have Scott at home. Scott walks about 10 miles per day. He started doing it in March of 2020 as a way of coping through the shut down. Jeb was struck by the driver of a truck while he was walking home from the store. Every time I hear sirens and Scott is not in this house, I worry and wait. Sometimes, I find a reason to call him. I’ve gotten better about it in the last few months, but it’s hard not to call him. A friend told me every time she sees Scott walking, she feels like it’s a testament to my faith. I don’t know. I think I just want my 18-year-old son to have something that is his without constraints.

It never ends. You cannot turn off the grief.

It.Is.Always.There.

Under the surface of every experience in my life, the grief shimmers. I don’t ever forget – don’t ever not think about it. I posted this picture because it so very clearly exhibits what it feels like.

You can read it at this link, but here is part of it:

We still live. We laugh. We experience. We enjoy. We plan. We teach. We minister. We love and are loved. And the entire time, there’s this giant abyss in the center of everything.
The idea that it will ‘get better’ doesn’t compute. We learn to function around the chasm and with it. Sometimes, it gets totally in the way.
I could take this statute and cover the hole with a shirt. Maybe add a sparkly necklace and fix my hair. You might forget. Someone who never met me might never know. But it doesn’t fill the abyss. You just don’t see it anymore. But I still feel it.
God help me, I feel it all the time.

My great-grandmother lost three children in her lifetime. One to war, one to drugs (aka also to war), and one to alcoholism. I remember she had a table next to her telephone table that had their pictures on it. I always thought it was sad that those pictures would never change. Even when I was a little girl I thought that. I wish I could talk with her about it – how she processed their deaths and how she worked through the loss.

If you haven’t experienced it, you can’t understand

I think the death of a child cuts deeper than other loss. It doesn’t take away from other kinds of grief people experience, but I do think it’s different. It is not the natural order of things, and yet it still happens. My friend DiAnn Mills whose son was killed by a hit and run just months before Jeb was killed says that we are part of a group no one wants to be a member of.

There is actually nothing you can say.

I can’t tell you how often we’ve heard, “I don’t know what to say.”
That is truly, truly okay. There is nothing you can say. No words will make it better. There is no sentence that can become a healing balm. It’s okay. We don’t need platitudes. Be freed from the need to give them.

But your presence really does help. The support from all the different corners of our community has been overwhelming. We see you and hear you. You have no idea what you mean to us – what your presence does for our souls.

We will talk about him.

Jeb was a fundamental part of our existence. We speak of him all the time because we talk and tell stories all the time. He had a hand in so many things that no matter where we are, we are reminded of him. A Rubik’s cube, an anime T-shirt, a card trick, an art desk, a date night play – we are overwhelmed with visible reminders and, like I said, it never goes away. It’s okay and even encouraged to talk about him with us. We like that. I can tell when people are uncomfortable with it. I guess they don’t know what the level of appropriate conversation is. Or maybe they’re worried we’ll break down in the midst of the conversation. Honestly, that would be okay, too.

We could not get through this without God.

ALL THE WAY TRUE. I know there are countless people alive in the world today who have suffered the tragic loss of a child who do not have a relationship with Jehovah God. The idea of that is incomprehensible to me. I could not function, I think, if I did not have the relationship with Him that I have. I need to be able to lean into Him, to find truth and power in His Word, to pray and know He hears me. I have a meme that says, “Her secret is simple: on her best days she prays, and on her worst days she prays.” There’s a platitude that God will not give you more than you can handle. Actually, that’s not really in the Bible. What is in the Bible is that God will not leave us nor forsake us. He will not leave me alone in my grief. I know He will hear every word I say and every utterance of my soul. Because of that promise, I will make it through. Despite all of the truths I’ve listed above, we will make it to the other side.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever. Psalm 73:26