Death of a Child

After Loss: Fear Can Be An Asset to Grieving Individuals

  “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear”– C.S. Lewis This first line in C.S. Lewis’s book A Grief Observed , inspired me to reflect on how I experienced fear during the early days of grief following my daughter Jeannine’s death. Jeannine was eighteen when she died on March 1,2003 from cancer. My fear manifested in uncertainty about my ability to live again in a world without my daughter. I feared that my other children would also die. These fears were triggered because my once predictable ,orderly and safe world was a distant memory. To […]

Death of a Child

The Terms of My Surrender

From the moment you came into my life, I hated you. I despised you. You came on the heels of my worst nightmare come true – the death of my young daughter. I didn’t know your name at the time. I just knew that you brought with you all the horrible feelings and emotions I had spent a lifetime learning how to repress and ignore. You broke my defenses down like they were candles trying to stay lit in a hurricane. You pounded me with pain, panic, anger, confusion, hysterics, anguish…and too many more to list. Mostly you came in […]

Death of a Child

Grief and the Loss of Control

Possibly one of the hardest aspects of grief for me has been that I can’t control it. I spent the majority of my life trying desperately to control everything in it. I wanted life to be predictable and – above all – peaceful. The problem has been what I tried to control and how I’d gone about it. I spent many, many years trying to control the people and situations around me through careful, strategic use of my own words, actions (or lack thereof), and responses. It was exhausting and depressing. And as you can imagine, it never really worked. […]