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Respect the dynamics of each person’s grief. The often-visible expressions of pain and confusion shown by grieving parents are normal. Grief is an ongoing and demanding process.

DO NOT:

Avoid the parents or the grief. Refrain from talking about the child who died or referring to the child by name.
Impose your views or feelings on the parents or set limits for them about what is right or appropriate behavior.
Wait for the parents to ask for help or tell you what they need.
Tell them you know just how they feel.
Be afraid to let the parents cry or to cry with them.

Bereaved fathers and mothers try to cope with their grief by:

Admitting to themselves and others that their grief is overwhelming, unpredictable, painful, draining, and exhausting-that their grief should not be diminished or ignored.
Allowing themselves to be angry and acknowledging that they are vulnerable, helpless, and feeling disoriented.
Trying to understand that to grieve is to heal and that integrating grief into their lives is a necessity.
Acknowledging the need and desire to talk about the child who died as well as the moments and events that will be missed and never experienced with the child.
Maintaining a belief in the significance of their child’s life, no matter how short.
Creating memorial services and other rituals as ways to commemorate the child’s life.
Deriving support from religious beliefs, a sense of spirituality, or a personal faith.
Expressing feelings in journals, poetry, prayers, or other reflective writings or in art, music, or other creative activities.
Trying to be patient and forgiving with themselves and others and refraining from making hasty decisions.

When you accept what has happened, you aren’t acknowledging that it is okay but rather, that you know you must find a way to keep growing and living-even if you don’t feel like it…[Don’t let] grief be your constant companion…Realize that your grief is born out of unconditional love for your child and rejoice in that love which will never end… Embracing life again is not a sign that you have stopped missing your baby, but an example of a love that is eternal. – WISCONSIN PERSPECTIVES NEWSLETTER, SPRING 1989, 3

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Counting on, confiding in, and trusting those who care, listen, and hear, those who will walk with them, and not be critical of them, those who will try to understand their emotional and physical limitations.

Increasing their physical activity and maintaining a healthful diet.

Volunteering their services to organizations concerned with support for bereaved parents.

Obtaining help from traditional support systems, such as family, friends, professionals or church groups, undergoing professional counseling, joining a parent support group, or acquiring information on the type of death that occurred as well as about their own grief.**

Reassuring themselves and others that they were and still are loving parents.

Letting go of fear and guilt when the time seems right and the grief seems less.

Accepting that they are allowed to feel pleasure and continue their lives, knowing their love for their child transcends death.

Children are valuable and precious symbols of what lies ahead. Children are considered the hope of the future. When a child dies, that hope is lost.

Two universals stand out when reflecting on parental grief-a child’s death is disorienting, and letting go of a child is impossible. Parents never forget a child who dies. The bond they formed with their child extends beyond death. As survivors, bereaved parents try to adapt to the new existence forced on them. They try to pass on to others the love and other special gifts they received from their child; they try to make the child who died a part of their lives forever; they constantly try to "honor the child who should have lived" (Finkbeiner 1996, xiv). Bereaved parents encourage others who care for and about them to do the same. They ask others to help them, to be for them "a lifeline of support, a lifeline to survival [and to understand]…the crying of their souls" (Donnelly 1982, ix).

Bereaved parents say, "Our children are in our blood; the bond with them doesn’t seem to break [and they attempt to] find subtle and apparently unconscious ways of preserving that bond" (Finkbeiner 1996, xiii, xiv). Bereaved parents need to do this to deal with what seems like an endless roadblock of loss and sadness. One bereaved parent expressed it by saying that the wound heals, but the scar remains forever.

What has happened to these parents has changed their lives; they will never see life the same way; they will never be the same people. As they attempt to move forward, bereaved parents realize they are survivors and have been strong enough to endure what is probably life’s harshest blow. By addressing their grief and coping with it, they struggle to continue this journey while making this devastating loss part of their own personal history, a part of their life’s story, a part of their very being.

Bereaved parents learn to live with the memories, the lost hopes, the shattered dreams. [They] never ‘get over’ the death, but [they] do recover, adjust and learn to live with [the] pain. – DONNELLY 1982, X

In writing about bereavement, Rollo May, the religious psychologist said that the only way out is ahead and the choice is whether to cringe from it or to affirm it. To be able to continue this lifetime journey and to make it manageable and productive, bereaved parents must move ahead and affirm this loss while also affirming their own lives.

Eventually, time will cease to stand still for these parents. Painful and terrible moments will still occur-striking, poignant, but in some ways comforting, reminders of the child who died. There will also be regrets for experiences that were never shared. But at some unknown and even unexpected point, these parents will come to realize that there can be good moments, even happy and beautiful moments, and it will not seem impossible or wrong to smile or laugh, but it will seem right and beautiful and a fitting way to honor and remember the child who died. One day, bereaved parents may come to be "surprised by joy" (Moffat 1992

, xxvii).

But in time… nature takes care of it; the waves of pain lose intensity a little and come less frequently. Then friends and relatives say the parents are getting over it, and that time heals all wounds. The parents themselves say that as the pain lessens, they begin to have energy for people and things outside themselves…This is a decision parents say [they] must make to live as well as they can in [their] new world… They can come to be happy, but never as happy. Their perspective on this and everything has changed. Their child’s death is the reason for this and is a measure of the depth and breadth of the bond between parent and child. – FINKBEINER 1996,12, 20, 22, 23