I’m in that peculiar space where I’ve disassociated (?) my day-to-day life from Z’s passing. I sometimes forget I am a bereaved parent as though the entire concept is unfamiliar to my life.
Not that I’ve forgotten Z, or that I’ve forgotten that she’s gone – it’s just I’ve boxed that part of my life away from the other parts of my life. I can’t have all that pain leaking all over everything. I wouldn’t be able to function if I didn’t.
It’s insulation with an impressive R factor.
I know lots of bereaved parents now. I mean not lots, but more than people should know. They kind of start appearing in your life when you lose a child. It’s not something that is part of idle conversation, so these intimate details don’t get shared until it becomes pertinent.
Most of the time when I talk with someone about their child’s passing my immediate internal reaction is almost always “Oh my goodness… that’s horrible. I can’t even imagine what they are going through. Ugh. This is awful.”
For all of us that have lost children, we have lost them in completely unique ways. Naturally, the circumstances of death are just as unique and individual as our children.
I ache for the parents of the lost children as though I haven’t lost my own child. My pain is all neatly boxed up in my heart and in my life; My empathy for their loss isn’t. It’s just all out there, running amok in space and time and if I catch part of it, my emotions get smeared all over the place.
Analogies are weird, so I’m not even going to try taking one for a spin here. It’s way too tricky.
Of late, there have been a lot of children’s funerals noted on the news – my heart breaks for their families individually and my thoughts always lob back into the place where I can’t imagine what the parents are going through.
Except I can. I buried my own child not that long ago.
0 stars. Would not recommend.
Aloe & Moss 