When we first become a mother, our life changes. We experience powerful feelings of protection, and want always to be able to say, “I'm here. You're safe”.
When our children are young, they become our highest priority, and we accept new and wide responsibilities. We give up sleep, energy, privacy, and time, putting our child's needs ahead of our own as we adapt to their time frame. We become nurse, teacher, handyman and referee along with many other things too. Becoming a mother changes us and, through all the changes, we find strengths and skills in ourselves, of which we were perhaps unaware. We develop patience, empathy and accord with another human being who, at least initially, is totally vulnerable.
Being a mother can expand our sense of who we are or what we might become. There can be new issues, new questions in our lives, presented by our role as a parent. In one way we might be stronger and more confident, but we could also feel that we ourselves have become more vulnerable.
When our child dies, we lose a part of ourselves, not only because they are our children, but also because of the way they have become entwined with our own identity. We may experience an over-whelming sense of failure; we thought that we could protect them and keep them safe, and we have been shown in the harshest way possible that we were wrong. Whatever age our child is when they die, we still feel the unfairness of their death. The natural order of things is that parents die before their children; anything else is against nature, an accident, a catastrophe.
Our physical loss
When we have given birth to our child, the physical sense of losing a part of ourselves, if that child dies, is searing. We carried our child in our womb and our body was their source of nourishment. Their birthday was literally that: the day we gave them birth. On that day, we went through the pains of labour; now we have the pains of grief. Many of us, at least in the early days of our bereavement, feel the loss of our child as an intensely physical pain. As time goes by, some of us see the anniversary of the day they were born to be a very lonely and difficult time, because our memories of it are unique to us. We may find ourselves reliving those hours each year. And that is something even the closest members of our family may not be able to share, or even comprehend.
Around the country there are numerous mothers who have not given birth to their child or children, but have adopted or fostered them. These children are loved and cherished as any birth child, and such mothers often say that their child grew in their heart, the longing and waiting being just as real as had the child grown in their womb. The death of this child might well bring back to us how we had to deal with the earlier distress of infertility before he or she came to us.
Caring and losing
As mothers, our care for our young children has been intensely physical as well as emotional: we have fed them, bathed them, changed and dressed them, cuddled them and held them in our arms. Even when our children are older, the memories of physical care are part of the bond between us. Whether we have been through a long, all consuming battle with an illness, or suffer from the trauma that a sudden death brings, the circumstances in which they died will affect how we feel. We may be struggling to understand the despair that led our child to suicide. Have we become a ‘childless parent' or even a single, childless parent? Each death brings its own particular burdens.
When our son or daughter dies, we may want to go on caring for them as long as possible. Mothers who are able to hold their dead child, wash and dress him or her, and perhaps place their little son or daughter in the coffin themselves, are able to bring this physical care to some sort of closure. When a post-mortem is involved, we are prevented from doing this for a while, sometimes even forbidden to touch them, and that can hurt. It is hard to be deprived of these opportunities, for whatever reason, although some of us may find the task too daunting. Some mothers find the giving up of their child's body an agony, and the hurt continues for a long time. If our child was an adult, we may not have the choice to continue with the physical caring; they may not have lived near us, they may have married or had a partner, so that we are no longer ‘next of kin'. Although we may not see it at the time, the necessary procedures that follow on the death of our son or daughter in preparing for their funeral could be looked on as our continuation of caring.
Sadly, a few families have no body to see, touch or bury. The conventional rituals of mourning are missed and strong desires can go unfulfilled.
Our surviving children
If we have surviving children, they continue to need our care, and in fact, if they are very young, their ongoing requirements can present us with the need for structure in our daily routine and that could be helpful to everyone in the household. Older children may need our care and support now more than ever, for they are probably confused and hurt. Their lives too have been changed. Many children look back at the time immediately after the death of their brother or sister and say they felt as if they had lost their mother and father too, as though their whole family had disintegrated. We may know this is happening, yet be unable to prevent it. We can be so disabled by our grief that we find it difficult to be a mother to our other children. Sometimes we struggle to protect our children from the full extent of our grief, because it seems a burden too big for them to shoulder. But this can leave them feeling even more alone; if we do not share our tears with them, they feel shut out. It is better to weep together than be separated by closed doors. Our children's grief compounds our sense of guilt and our failure as a protector relates not just to our child's death but also to the fact that our other children are wounded as a consequence of that death. In reality, we can probably help them less with this than with any other pain they have experienced in their lives so far.
As mothers, our feelings of failure and guilt over the death of our child may give us an urge to overprotect our surviving children. We may even find it difficult to allow them to lead a normal life, to let them out of our sight. This is true especially if the death of our child was due to murder, or some terrible accident: we fear the same thing may happen again. It may not be logical, but our protective mothering instinct is in overdrive and cannot easily be controlled. If a brother or sister died as a result of an illness, their siblings may have carried their own secret fears that they too are going to get sick. As mothers we need to try to understand their thoughts and allay their fears, but in our own distress we may not find these things easy.
Others in the family
We may be trying to support other members of our family at this time. Our own parents have lost a grandchild and will be grieving; as they see their daughter suffering, there is what can seem like a double burden. We might feel that they need protecting from seeing the depths of our grief; but in fact most of us are helped by sharing rather than by pretending. Like our own children, we may feel we have lost our own mother, that she is unavailable to us because of her grief. We want to shout, “Who is mothering me ?” We are fortunate indeed if there are people within our family able to answer our cry for help.
Coping alone
For a single parent there are other burdens. Not only do we have to be mother and father to our surviving children, but also we have no one to be with us in our worst times. As well as feeling desperately alone, we may find that this loss reminds us of other, earlier losses, perhaps even the loss of our child's father, and we may feel doubly bereaved. In this situation, we urgently need the support of other adults, whether family, friends or professionals, so that we in turn will be able to help both ourselves and our surviving children. If we are now childless, the isolation is almost unbearable, and we may question our continuing identity as a mother.
Difficulties in grieving together
We may be shocked to find that we experience difficulties in our marriage or partnership. Even when we have been close, the pain of grief can drive a wedge between us. We think we should be able to share our loss, to support each other, but often it is not like that. We may grieve in different ways, one needing words while the other needs silence, or perhaps action. We may find our partner's tears unbearably painful and may hurt so much that we are unable to hold their pain as well as our own. As mothers, we are used to being the person who ‘makes things better', the one who sorts things out. Fathers may feel they failed in their perceived role as provider and protector. We may each try to sort out the other's problems, rather than cling together and let ourselves grieve. If our relationship was difficult before, it may get worse rather than better, at least in the short term. It may improve in the long term through our shared suffering, and growing understanding of each other's grief
Children born after the death of their brother or sister
Some of us may give birth to further children after our child has died. We may be surprised by how our feelings are interwoven, how the past death is also part of the new birth. Some mothers experience vivid flashbacks during pregnancy or labour. Although we are looking forward to the birth of our new baby, we may find ourselves suffering extremes of anxiety and fear, our confidence is gone and we are full of doubt and worry. This can make the early weeks and months fraught and may make bonding with the new baby very difficult. We know that we will be kept busy when our new baby arrives, and the tiredness from this will add to the weariness that the earlier bereavement has brought, but in some way the need for a new routine can help us and give a new structure to our days.
Sometimes friends and well wishers can be extraordinarily insensitive in thinking, and even saying, that the new baby will somehow wipe out the earlier loss, that everything will be ‘all right' when we have a replacement. It is hard to have to explain that the new baby can never replace the child who has died. We welcome the new child as a blessing and a joy – but we welcome them for themselves, not as a substitute.
The way forward
We need to survive. We need to be there for our children, our partner, our family, for our friends and indeed for ourselves. If we are in the horrific position of being the only survivor, then perhaps we need to survive in order to bear witness to the fact that our child did live, that he or she was special, precious, loved. Mothers do survive and there are some things that can help, with perhaps the most important one being that we recognise that the loss of our child is not something we are expected to bear alone; we need to let other people help us. Sometimes we are so locked into our motherhood role that we find this very difficult. We fear that if we let ourselves go, weep with a friend, or even acknowledge to our children how much we hurt, then somehow we will lose the ability to cope at all.
But in truth it is not like that. At least in the early days of our bereavement, if we give ourselves space, let other people cook the meals, take our children to school, listen to us as we talk about our dead child, then we will gradually grow stronger and better able to carry on. Our children will benefit from the company of others, whether that is playing a game with friends or talking with someone they trust about what has happened. Our partner needs space and time also; he may choose to spend time alone, perhaps pursuing leisure activities, or he may enjoy going to the pub, or he may spend long hours at work hoping to escape from the grief at home. It is hard to recognise each individual's needs at this time, especially when these are very different. One of us may need professional advice while the other does not. Usually it helps to seek support from several sources.
Many mothers and their families turn to The Compassionate Friends (TCF); we derive consolation and comfort in sharing our loss with other bereaved parents, telling our child's story, and finding we are not alone in our pain. We may be helped by the support offered in the Contact system or local groups, through the wide range of leaflets, the website, the quarterly journal Compassion, the Postal Library and by telephone, email or letters. There are groups within TCF for particular circumstances – Shadow of Suicide (SoS), and Families Bereaved by Homicide (FBbH), for example – and contacts for siblings through Support In Bereavement for Brothers and Sisters (SIBBS), or for others such as grandparents, or for childless parents.
We each have to find our own way through our grief. Just as each child is special and different, so is each mother, and our pain when our child dies is unique to us, but we do not have to walk the path alone.
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