Mind Moves: It is hard to write about the death of a child. It is something too sacred. To describe is to diminish. Words do not suffice.
Those who have suffered the death of their child need no depiction from others who have no right to describe their world. Only they have that right. They have passed through the darkest night of the soul and a child's death is beyond human words.
It is hard to write about the death of a child for those who have not experienced it. Who would want, even momentarily, to imagine that event? Better not to. Fate should not be tempted by thoughts. Better to hope, as all parents do, that it will never happen to them.
But it does happen. When it does there are a thousand angers. Why me? Why us? Why my child? What purpose under heaven could such suffering have? Why go on when you outlive the child who should outlive you? What life is this that could allow this death? Grief is exhausting. Grief is active; a brain in pain with memories and images, eidetic of remembrance, remembrance of moments that made up a life cut short.
It is no wonder we are fearful to think about the death of a child or that research has found it to be the most protracted, the most painful and the most difficult grief to overcome. Each family and extended family member is affected in his or her own way. Grief is unique to the person who grieves.
There is no childhood stage and no parent age that is easier than another to lose a child. No child is it acceptable to lose. It may be eldest, youngest, only son or daughter, one of many children or an only child. It may be a miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, sudden infant death, childhood illness or injury, an accident in adolescence, a car crash, the tragedy of suicide or the horror of murder.
When a child dies, how the death occurred, why it happened, if it was inescapable or preventable, the circumstances surrounding it, if there was time to prepare or no forewarning: all of these factors affect the grieving process.
Grief is especially complicated when death is sudden, particularly if there were any prior angry parent-child exchanges to torture parents with the thought that this was their last conversation with their child. They forget that everyday parenting often involves demands and commands. Adolescence inevitably contains some days of discontent. It is unfathomably hard if death occurs on that day.
Parents in that situation need to remind themselves that it is only those whom we love that we bother to admonish. It is in the context of care that parents censure. Their children know this.
Regardless of how or why a child dies, guilt is the conventional companion of grief. Witnessing an ill child evokes a sense of helplessness in parents. Anticipatory grief may allow some preparation, or perhaps it just removes the element of the unexpected and its associated shock. It takes much courage, the process of living through the dying of a child.
Guilt is dominant in the sad situation of suicide because families feel that there must have been something they did that contributed to the despair, or something they did not do to alleviate it. Unimaginable is the agony of discovery. Grief is interwoven with trauma, anger and the crippling belief that what the person was feeling and planning should have been noticed, could have been stopped.
Suicide brings apprehension about what to tell, to whom, how and when? How private or public should the funeral be? It brings the ignominy of an inquest, that sadness of hearing the details of death, a sense of stigma that death should have happened this way.
Research reveals a child's murder to be the most extreme, excruciating and long-lasting sorrow. Death that was preventable is never acceptable. Anger and outrage abound. There is autopsy, inquest, arrest or no arrest, and what has been described, as the criminal injustice of a system that many parents perceive to be more protective of perpetrators than of their dead child.
And overriding all grief is the difficulty for couples, each of whom may be too pained to help each other; or both parents too overwhelmed by grief to help their other children; whole families enveloped by mourning in a world where life outside grief has ceased. Grief is physical, heavy, immobilising and blindingly difficult to see beyond.
It is hard to know how to help families who lose a child. But if we do not learn to help those who mourn, we may hurt them by our absence or blunder into their grief adding to the already unbearable.
Because parents of a dead child want no empty words: no clichés, no assurances about time healing or death having a meaning in the greater scheme of things. No reminders that burdens are not more than we can bear. No statements that one "knows" how they feel: only those who have lost a child can know that. Nor at the start, do they want "angels in heaven" but to hold in arms that ache, the child of their lives, here and now, on this earth with them.
For information, assistance and links: The Bereavement Counselling Service www.bereavementireland.org or bereavement@eircom.net or tel: 01-8391766
• Marie Murray is Director of Psychology at St Vincent's, Fairview, Dublin