When you lose your beloved child, finding purpose is one of the most difficult tasks you must face, in my opinion. When you lose your child, no matter when or how, your life suddenly becomes meaningless and purposeless. For a certain period of time your whole life comes to a halt. You find yourself out of space and time, void surrounds you. And, at least in part, it remains so as long as you shall live. However, there comes a time when the vacuum cannot be born anymore and for your survival, whether you really want it or not, you are to find some purpose for your ‘new normal’ self or life so that your existence could be bearable.
But let’s not be so hasty, and let me write about the reasons first. The arrival of a child gives a different perspective to your life. You reframe everything the moment you learn about your baby, and you go on to live a new normal life (without the inverted commas, though …) from that very moment. With hopes, with dreams and maybe even with expectations. About the nearest and the furthest future as well. First and foremost that you can have a healthy and sweet little baby boy or girl, and then you say yes to all those childhood and teenager years, him or her becoming a young adult, then a hopefully happy and content adult. And in the meantime you grow old. This is the ordinary way of things.
But you are not prepared for the unthinkable, namely that for some reason none of this may happen. What you experience is pain and grief and your ‘new normal’ life, with all your dreams, hopes and expectations, becoming torn apart. Death takes place, your child’s death. At that point you may want not to live anymore, it hurts so much. You would give your own life so that dearly beloved child of yours could live. It is devastating to realise that you must suffer all this and nothing can be done.
When you want to put together what is left of your life as you knew it and make it function in some ways you must find some purpose, some meaning to it. This, just as the entire process of mourning and grief, is completely individual, there will be no two identical ways of this, I am pretty sure.
I remember I wanted to do something that would help me get up in the morning. Out of the blue, as a life-saver, I got offered the possibility to teach a course in literature. Afterwards some other work oppportunities presented themselves, so I felt that life, fate, if you may, wanted to give me some compensation. While it was immensely important it could not, did not compensate for the loss I had just suffered. The void inside was still clearly tangible and it hurt. I tried to fill it up with all sorts of things. I became a volunteer in the children’s hospital, I started learning languages, I went out more often, I even started a university. All these things have added different values to my ‘new normal’ life, which I could and can appreciate to a great deal. Yet, when I allow myself to look beyond the activities my feeling is that I am over-compensating. For losing someone that I shall miss for the rest of my life. The void is still there and it still hurts.
Losing your child may show you ways, alternatives, you have never thought you could explore. It changes your attitude and it may turn out to be impossible to go back to your life before. The ‘after’ comes with a ‘Still Mother’ who has had to stick together the pieces of her own self and her former life. As a result new perspectives may be brought to you, and while you can learn to see the benefits these give you, you also know that you would trade all in in the blink of an eye if you could just hold your precious baby in your arms.
Have you begun to find purpose in your life again?
- What Child is This? - December 24, 2016
- A New Schoolbag - September 5, 2016
- No Simple Path to Okay - August 19, 2016