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On Children's Memorial Day, Dec. 10, we remember young lives lost
Saturday, December 02, 2000
By Jeannine Lanigan
Having a child, someone once said, is like agreeing to have your heart permanently walk around outside of your body. You become forever vulnerable.
And losing a child? When explaining what it's like, I usually employ analogy and metaphor, struggling to make my experience palpable.
It's like walking around with a hole in your heart.
It's an injury that is permanent, just as an amputation would be. You don't so much get over it as you learn to live with the loss - even if it means frequently walking with a sort of emotional "limp."
As parents, we all have had the experience of having our hearts stop while we hold our breath, when the feeling in the pit of our stomachs tells us that something is Not Right. You pray over medical tests for your unborn child. You search for a toddler who's wandered off in a store. You're ready to phone the hospitals when your teen-ager misses curfew. And the test results are normal, the toddler reappears, and the teen-ager walks through the door. Then comes the relief, that blessed moment of gratitude when you realize that, for now at least, everything is all right.
This is what it's like when that moment never comes.
Losing a child, it is said, is the most painful of losses, the overwhelming sorrow which is every parent's worst nightmare. Perhaps because of this, those of us who have lost children often find that support for our losses is painfully lacking in those who should understand it best: other parents. Acknowledging that such an unthinkable tragedy can occur is beyond the psychological comfort level of many people, because to accept that such a thing can happen at all means that it can happen to them, too. And so bereaved parents frequently find themselves avoided, even shunned, by people they had previously considered friends. The unlucky parents are treated as though their affliction is contagious.
Over 20 years ago, I watched my grandmother sob in my grandfather's arms as they realized that my mother, their youngest daughter, was going to die of the cancer that she had battled for several years. My mother was 48 years old at the time, but the ferocity of my grandparents' grief was the same that any anguished parent feels, whether the dead child is killed in a traffic accident at 25, succumbs to leukemia at 2, or is miscarried during the first trimester of pregnancy.
In the past four years, I have experienced first-hand echoes of my grandparents' grief. Twice, I lost babies in miscarriages. I grieved for their loss, and for the abrupt and early conclusion that miscarriage means. Three years ago, my daughter Ivy died in my arms following a premature birth.
But while the warmth and weight of Ivy's tiny, perfect body is forever enscribed in my memory, it's the very privacy of her birth that makes it difficult to receive proper acknowledgment. Our sorrow is as legitimate as the pain of someone who has lost an older child, but because no one knew our children, these losses tend to be invisible and our grief given little credibility. It would have been worse, we are frequently told, if we had lost our children at a later age.
"At least you didn't get a chance to know her," we hear from misguided people who don't understand that their role is to simply listen, not offer medical or spiritual explanations. They don't realize that the bond with our babies began the instant we learned they existed.
Although the pain we grieving parents feel is often magnified by lack of support from families and friends, there is a group that understands the particular sorrow we feel, because all its members have felt it, too. The Compassionate Friends is an organization that provides ongoing support for parents whose children have died at any stage of life, from loss of a pregnancy to the death of an adult child. Four years ago, this organization established Children's Memorial Day, dedicated to the memory of all children who have died. To commemorate these children, on the second Sunday in December, at 7 p.m. around the globe, candles are lit, by parents themselves or by anyone who wishes to acknowledge the lives of these children.
For it's acknowledgment that we crave. Acknowledgment that these children lived, that they died, and that we will forever miss them. Cruel fate has already snuffed out their lives, and when our grief is invalidated by denying or ignoring it, our pain is prolonged.
The emotional limp that develops in the aftermath of a child's death can be mild or pronounced, depending on the emotional support that we experience. Just as a broken limb knits cleanly if set properly and allowed to heal, so do our broken hearts. The light that these children brought to our lives, whether for a few weeks or for half a century, will never be fully extinguished.
Their light continues to glimmer in our hearts, an unquenchable flame. It grows a little brighter each time you mention our children by name, each time you remember a birthday or anniversary that cannot be celebrated, each time you share a memory with us, each time you allow us to cry.
The holidays that most of us will observe this month are represented by symbols of light: candles, stars, blazing logs - manifestations of hope, promises and miracles.
Next Sunday, let us remember our lost children for the joy that they brought us, and acknowledge that, however much others may wish it to be brief and neatly disposed of, the grief of a bereaved parent is ongoing and complex, and the road we did not choose to walk is dark and lonely. Join us on it. Walk in our world for a few moments. The light that we kindle together will ease our journey and comfort our hearts, and will bestow the greatest gift a grieving parent can receive: knowing that our children have been remembered.
Jeannine Lanigan is a writer and editor living in Edgewood. A Web site about Children's Memorial Day has been established at: http://dying.about.com
/health/dying/library
/weekly/aa111400a.htm. 