"I don't know how you've survived. It would kill me to lose my child." Oh, to have a nickel for every time I heard that statement! I'd spend every one of those nickels for an answer, for you see, I don't know how I've survived. Part of me didn't survive. Part of me died with my son. All those hopes and dreams I held close to my heart suddenly became memories along with my son.

Since that moment of his death I am a different person. I even have a different label; I am one of The Bereaved. Along with the overwhelming grief of no longer having my son to hold and care for, I faced the daunting task of adjusting to this new role I was forced to take on. The transition from active parent to bereaved parent is as full of challenges as becoming a new parent, only more difficult because it lacks that element of joy.

Up to this point, the transition has come in four different phases: 
First was the question: How do I live without him? He was nearly my whole life . . . his needs came before mine. Joy came from satisfying his need of nourishment for his body and mind and soul. Food and love and attention were easy to give to him. When he died, I lost my purpose . . . he no longer needed anything from me. And so began the daily struggle to find a purpose . . . the struggle to keep living. Each day, after the initial despair of waking and realizing anew that he was still dead, I worked hard just to get up, to find some activity to keep me occupied. After all, I was still here--my task must not be finished.

Then came the second transition with its question: How do I accept he won't ever be coming back? Once again, the search for purpose became my major occupation. The answer, in my particular situation, came in the form of another pregnancy. I was not trying to replace my son--I knew I could never do that--I was trying to be a mom with all the challenges and joys of raising a child, which of course meant a living, breathing, demanding child. My son's death also carried the high price of lost innocence; no longer could I believe that "it couldn't happen to me." It had happened to me, and the truth that life holds no guarantees would not be ignored. 

The third transition in redefining who I was in the face of my son's death is rather ongoing: How do I live in the face of others' expectations I cannot meet? Many people expect the grieving period to brief, no longer than two to three weeks--after all, life is for the living, right? The easy answer is to ignore those expectations and simply do what is right for me. The problem is that bereaved parents don't generally have role models for how to function as a bereaved parent, and we grasp around for help, for clues, for anything that will help ease the intensity of our pain. When my grandfather died, no one told me to get a new grandfather; when my best friend's dad died, no one told her to find another dad. Why would so many think that I would be fine once I had another child? My living children fill my time, but everywhere I look, I see the hole left by what might have been if my first son had not died. 

People who expected me to return to "normal" have been disappointed, bewildered, annoyed that I continue to make references to my first son. Memories of deceased parents aren't met with the rolling of eyes or changing of the subject the way mention of a deceased child is. My son's death took my future--each day is a loss, a loss of someone whose care was my primary responsibility and my defining purpose at this stage of my life. I can no longer be the person I was, a person untouched by the ripping pain of losing the presence of a child I loved more than my own life, of letting go of the hopes and dreams I had for him, of watching my vision of a future as his mother fade. 

The last of the four transitions is also ongoing: How do I find my way back to living fully? Every day, each of us decides how to spend our time--each hour, each minute. Do I spend those moments grieving? Not all of them. With each day that goes by I find fewer moments of grief and more moments of either joyful or mundane activity. Of course, some moments are filled with a flood of grief nearly as intense as the rending of my heart when he was taken from my arms that last time. But joy has returned--in painfully slow increments--to our house, to my life. 

How have I survived? I don't know. What choice did I have? Each transition has been work, hard work, sorting through what it means and learning to function in the face of these circumstances not of my choosing. My work has served me well: my role as a bereaved parent is no longer the first way I define who I am, but it is ever-present in my life and cannot be separated from all that I am . . . for the rest of my life. 

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