Tag: grief education

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: Hardly the Time for Being Taught

It seems to be the nature of humans to listen with an ear to respond rather than an ear to hear.

I’ve done it myself.

Jumped right in with all kinds of suggestions designed to “fix” someone else’s problem.

Or worse, heaped my own experience with something more or less (often less) similar onto an already overburdened heart.

I hate that tendency in myself and I’m working hard to try to change it.

Those who feel compelled to just say SOMETHING often bombard grievers with platitudes, comparisons to their own grief or just empty, frivolous words that require we either stand there dumbfounded or find a gracious way to exit the conversation.

It’s especially painful for a broken heart when a well-meaning someone decides THIS is the moment for a theology lesson.

“God has something planned for you in this” or “God will use this for good”. (Romans 8:28-29)

“We don’t grieve as those without hope!” ( I Thessalonians 4:13)

“All our days are numbered.” (Psalm 139:16)

I get it-death is a heavy subject and the death of a child isn’t something anyone wants to talk about, contemplate or be forced to wrestle with. So it’s often easier to simply say something-anything-do your duty and walk away.

But it is hardly helpful.

Deep grief as a result of unbearable loss is not a teaching moment.

It’s an opportunity to listen well, think carefully about if or when you need to say anything and simply offer compassionate companionship to a broken heart.

Grieving felt hardly like the time for being taught, at least initially. Early grief was my time for pulling out of my past those truths that I had already learned — out of my ‘basement — so that I could begin to assemble them together into something even more meaningful to me than before. It was the time for understanding that even though I had always believed in heaven, it now looked to my perceptions to be more real than this world. It was the time when, even though I already believed in God’s control of the world, I now felt dependent upon him being sovereign over it for all my hopes. It was the time for realizing that even though I already believed that Christ conquered death, I now longed to see death die.Lianna Davis, Made for a Different Land

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: Surviving Grief Anniversaries

I know I’m not the only one who carries a calendar in my head that threatens to explode like a ticking timebomb.  Days that mean nothing to anyone else loom large as they approach.

The date of his death.

The date of his funeral.

His birthday.

My birthday.

The day he should have graduated from law school.

On and on and on.

How can I survive these oppressive reminders of what I thought my life would look like? How can I grab hold of something, anything that will keep my heart and mind from falling down the rabbit hole of grief into a topsy-turvy land where nothing makes sense and it’s full of unfriendly creatures that threaten to gobble me whole?

Read the rest here: Surviving Grief Anniversaries

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: Courage is a Heart Word

You know what breaks my heart all over again?  

The fact that so many bereaved parents tell me they don’t feel they can share their experience on their own FaceBook or other social media pages.  

That’s just WRONG!

They have been shushed to silent suffering because when they break open the vault of emotions and let others see what’s inside, many people turn away-or worse, they condemn that wounded heart for sharing.  

SHAME on you if you are one of those people.  

Read the rest here: Courage is a Heart Word

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: Background Music

Another bereaved mom wrote that she was better able to cope now than she had been a year ago.

And thanks to Facebook memories she had proof.

Several comments down a second mom wrote something that got me thinking-when, exactly, did Dominic’s loss move from the forefront to the background?

I’m not sure I can pinpoint a day or moment when I realized that sorrow was no longer ALL I feel and Dominic’s absence no longer ALL I see.

Read the rest here: Background Music

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: I Don’t Want to Remember My Son

I don’t want to remember my son. 

I want to make memories with him.  

I want him to watch me grow old, to watch him get married and have children and to hear his voice mingled with his siblings at my table.

Read the rest here: I Don’t Want To Remember My Son

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: My Juggling Days Are Over

When I was a young mother, my brother used to love to sit back and wait to see how many things I could do at once.

I could hold a baby, iron a shirt and talk on the phone at the same time.  I could pick things up with my toes when I didn’t want to disturb the sleeping child in my lap and couldn’t reach the object with my hand.

Four children in six years, breastfeeding, homeschooling and taking care of all the household chores meant that I got pretty darn good at keeping multiple balls in the air at the same time.

juggling huff post

Those days are over.

Like so many things at this point in my life I don’t know how much of what I experience and feel is a function of getting older (definitely middle aged here!) and how much is attributable to grief following the death of Dominic.

But this I do know:  I am only able to focus on a single task, thought, desire or problem at a time. If I try to multi-task, I might as well cry, “Uncle!” from the start.

It’s a little discouraging.  

Often I feel like I’ve wasted an hour or a day or even a week. What exactly did I get done?

But it’s also a kind of freedom.  

My household isn’t nearly as busy as it once was so there’s really no need to rush from here to there or stack task on top of task.

I’m learning that taking time, talking to people for as long as they need me, doing something well even if I don’t do it quickly are all perfectly acceptable ways to spend a day.

And while I miss so much of who I was before Dominic ran ahead to heaven, I don’t miss the frantic craziness of trying to do too much in too little time.

I will receive THIS change as a gift.  

if you are always racing to the next moment

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: Physical Manifestations of Grief

Grief is not *just* feelings. It is so much more.

I shared this last year around this time in response to many, many comments and questions from bereaved parents about what felt like random or unusual physical manifestations of their own grief.

I hope it helps another heart navigate this life none of us would choose.

It’s a well known fact that stress plays a role in many health conditions.  

And I think most of us would agree that child loss is one of (if not THE) most stressful events a heart might endure.  

So it’s unsurprising that bereaved parents find themselves battling a variety of physical problems in the wake of burying a child.  

Read the rest here: Physical Manifestations of Grief

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: What Grieving Parents Want Others to Know

I wrote this post December, 2015.  It hadn’t been long since I joined an online community of bereaved parents and began to see that I wasn’t the only one who had friends and family that misunderstood child loss.

I was spending a lot of time in my life trying to help others comprehend, just a little, what it felt like to bury a child.

Trying to give them a tiny taste of how this pain is so, so different than any other I had experienced.  Begging them to toss the popular ideas bandied around that grief followed “stages” and was “predictable”.

I re-share every so often because it seems to help, a little.  I’m re-sharing today in  honor of Bereaved Parents Month. 

People say, “I can’t imagine.“

But then they do.

They think that missing a dead child is like missing your kid at college or on the mission field but harder and longer.

That’s not it at all.

Read the rest here: What Grieving Parents Want Others to Know

Lament For Texas

It’s been hard listening to the news about the flooding and tragic loss of life in Texas.

I say “listening” on purpose-the images are too painful for this mama to see.

I don’t have to imagine what desperate hope was still burning in parents’ hearts in the early hours and days as they waited, waited, waited to find out upon which side of that awful line they would land.

Would they be the lucky ones who got to take their children home or would they be the forsaken, planning a funeral for a too-small body of their beloved whose life had only just begun?

Even before the count was tallied folks were weighing in with opinions and pointing fingers and posturing in front of their pet political or social position using these poor people as props without their permission.

Worse yet, in my view, are the outsiders offering what they undoubtedly believe, are “reasons” for the tragedy-trying to spin sense out of the senseless and urging those whose lives have literally been tossed upside down to adopt a philosophical view and find the blessing in the bruising.

I can’t tell you the hours I spend speaking with parents who have had to untangle the web of well-meaning but misguided advice and spiritual counsel after burying a child. Their hearts are not only burdened by loss but by other people’s ideas about how they should be processing it.

I understand that humans are wired for meaning making. I know people feel compelled to apologize for God, to speak for Him and to create an understandable narrative of what He may or may not be doing in the world.

But Scripture is clear:

  My intentions are not always yours,
        and I do not go about things as you do.
 My thoughts and My ways are above and beyond you,
        just as heaven is far from your reach here on earth.

Isaiah 55: 8-9 VOICE

So this is my offering as we mourn out loud for lives lost and for those who have, like us, been thrust into a life they did not choose:

LAMENT FOR TEXAS

O, LORD! Where were You when the waters rose in the dark? Why didn’t You send armies of angels to guide these little ones to safety? Why were children ripped from the arms of their parents as they struggled in the black night against forces too strong for even their determined grasp?

My heart is shattered.

My own grief and fear has broken out of the heavy-lidded chest where I’ve learned to keep it locked away so I can function in a world where things like this happen over and over and over.

I won’t pretend that this is good. I won’t plaster pretty words across devastation.

I can only lean into what I know is true. I can only hold on to the hope that has led my heart back to light and life after my own dark day of tragic loss.

You are God.

And though sin has marred your good, good creation,

You are still good.

In Your mercy and by Your power You will weave what the enemy intends for evil into the eternal story You are writing for the display of Your glory. The black threads of loss will be part of it.

Death is awful.

It is the last enemy to be conquered.

Until then, I wait for Your redemption.

I trust in Your love.

img_0776-1

Bereaved Parent Month 2025: Why Friends Abandon Grievers

It happens in all kinds of ways.  One friend just slowly backs off from liking posts on Facebook, waves at a distance from across the sanctuary, stops texting to check up on me.

Another observes complete radio silence as soon as she walks away from the graveside. 

Still another hangs in for a few weeks-calls, texts, even invites me to lunch until I can see in her eyes that my lack of “progress” is making her uneasy.  Then she, too, falls off the grid.

Why do people do that? 

Read the rest here: Why Friends Abandon Grievers