When a child dies, we want an answer to the question, “Why?”. We wrestle over and over again with the question all the while knowing we’ll never really get an answer — at least not an answer that makes any sense. Cancer. Car accidents. Choking accidents. Drug overdose. We know “what” happened, but when a child dies we want to know “why”. Why my child? Why now? Why did this have to happen? The first time I understood that young children can die is when my thirteen-year-old sister died from an asthma attack. It was a warm June evening in New Jersey — that humid, salty, sea air kind of…

We’re full of questions following the loss of a child, and rightly so. This is a path that is new to us. This is something we never planned to be part of our life, yet here we are on this lifetime journey of grief and loss. I’ve been writing about grief and loss for over thirty years now ever since experiencing several life-altering miscarriages and the stillbirth of my precious son. Naively I hoped and prayed that child loss would never enter my life again, but as life sometimes goes, that was not the case. Once again, the death of a child shattered my heart — this time an adult…

Every parent of child loss knows this lonely pain. It’s the pain of watching life go on without your child. It hurts and it hurts really bad. It feels all wrong, and nothing makes sense. We are plagued day after day with the gnawing questions of “why?” and “how can this happen?”. Yet….despite our questions and our pain, we see it happening before our eyes every day. New memories are being made. People have gone back to smiling and feeling joyful. People are busy with their own lives building and nurturing their own families. And parents of loss……well, we feel left alone. Isolated. Lonely. Broken. Sad. I love hearing from…

Every parent suffers through the loss of a child in his or her own way. But, there is one thing that is uniformly the same for all. The pain. The pain of losing a child is intense. And, the pain is ongoing. I am convinced after losing two sons, that the grief of child loss never goes away. There will never be true closure — not in the sense that some people think. We do ourselves a great disservice by thinking that one day we’ll wake up and everything will feel A-okay. That’s not how it works. When a child dies, everything in our world as we once knew it…

As a mother of child loss, I often wondered if we mothers grieved longer and harder than fathers. Fathers of children who died seemed to be able to move on to a place of semi-normalcy in a rather quick way. At least that’s how it seemed to be to me after my baby boy died. It took me literally several years to be able to look at another baby and genuinely feel joy, whereas my husband was able to move on almost without hesitation. As I heard from more and more mothers of child loss, I knew I wasn’t the only mother of loss feeling this way. It’s been thirty…

The first two years after my son died, there was a constant pain in the center of my chest. That pain never let up. I knew that my heart was broken and I also knew that nothing I could ever do would fix this kind of brokenness. In the next few years following that pain began to feel a bit more dull. In fact, it turned into an ache. The ache wasn’t noticeable every minute of the day — especially when I was busy — but at night the ache turned into a throb. Sometimes it got so bad that I pulled the covers over my head and never wanted…

I never knew how important it was for parents of child loss to tell their story until I became one of those parents. If you’re like me, though, finding people to listen has not been easy! I’m sure you’ve heard things like, “that’s too sad”, “you need to move on”, “don’t keep living in the past.” We’ve heard those things time and time again, and yet…..we still feel that empty hole that aches and throbs and ” we need to tell our story.” Sometimes it’s not the pain of losing our child that is the most empty feeling. Instead, it’s knowing that NOBODY is there to listen. NOBODY seems to…