When our children die, we are reborn. Just as they leave the warmth and comfort of their fluid home to the harsh reality of cold, lights, and noise, we too are reborn into a cruel world. When our children die, we lose our innocence; no more do we believe that our children can outlive us, take care of us, that we can walk at their weddings or hold THEIR children.

We are reborn into a world of chronic sorrow, pain surrounding us, knowing that pain will continue for the remainder of our lives. We cringe in the dark, imagining, feeling, knowing, all the pain of the world and the ugly possibilities our children must face, if they live. We know, as no one else does, this awful reality; this is truly the hell God speaks of.

We are judged, too. Judged for many aspects of our grieving. The nonbereaved judge our grief work, not understanding that it IS work, that we must go through it with no choice, no map or plan, no hope but to continue.

Disabled children and adults know this pain from their birth. Discriminated against for their movement, speech, and supposed lack of intelligence, they become embittered and hardened to what life can hold, just as bereaved parents do.

They too know the senselessness of thoughtless comments and asides, sideways glances and backs turned to them. Exlcuded, pushed aside, just as the feelings of the bereaved are. Together, both the disabled and the bereaved have a common bond; they know the stigma of their realities, the pain of societal insignificance, of ignorance.

The parents of disabled children who die get another blow. Not only do they get the well meaning and well intentioned comments that all the bereaved do, but they add to that comments such as "He/She is better off now", "He doesn't hurt anymore","She can walk in Heaven". This offers no solace; their children are still dead, gone. The hours and days and years they spent caring for that child, with their needs being the focus of their entire life, is suddenly gone, ripped from them, leaving a hole as big as hell itself, the same hole all the bereaved must deal with daily.

There are commonalities among any group of people--finding the common ground, working together, and educating family, neighborhoods, cities, and eventually society, in true understanding and nondiscrimination; then they might finally see the world as God intended . . . a whole place for all peoples, all groups, to support, care, and nurture each other instead of judging the road each must travel.

Until that happens, we continue to hide--meeting in churches, libraries, on the internet, educating as we can, trying for a third rebirth, one of dawning into a new world of acceptance, of helping, and drawing together to make a stronger meld than before. The disabled too have striven for this, and do so all of their lives. We say to the nonbereaved, "But for the grace of God goes YOU" . . . and so, too, but for the grace of God, goes US.

We do not have the right to compare losses. There are many different types of grief and not just for the loss of a child, aunt, or mother. There is the loss of time; for parents forced to work, unable to spend precious time with their children; there is the loss of a arm, leg, or eye; the loss of a parent through divorce; the loss of a living child to a custodial parent or agency.

The King James Bible says, "Judge not, lest you be judged." No one of us has the right to decide another's grief work; we do not want to do the very thing the nonbereaved so often do to us.
Judge not!

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