My children's grief

My children and I are extremely close: far closer than we were prior to their dad and my husband dying.  We came to depend more on each other over the last few years because we were all each other had.  I became both mom and dad to my kids – there when they were lonely, there when they were scared, there to provide the butt kicking they needed to get their homework done or their piano practiced.  And there to make all of the screw-ups in parenting that are inevitable.  It was all me.

I think I have a greater insight into my children’s emotional lives as a result than a parent in a two parent household. And I have tremendous sympathy for the normal every day emotional roller coaster that is pre-teen childhood.  That said, I know I will never understand their experience of grief.  Certainly I don’t understand it the way someone who has lost a parent would, and maybe I have even less insight than a stranger would.  Their grief doesn’t look like my grief.  It is so profoundly different that at times I am at a total loss in how to help them deal with it.  Adult grief and childhood grief are not the same.

When he died, it was a profound life changing event.  It shaped everything for me from that day forward – good and bad.  I cried, I talked about it, I found solace in people and activities around me.  It was sharp, it was deep and it went through the pattern I have read in so many books: numbness followed by an even greater feeling of loss and then a long slow battle back to some semblance of normalcy.  I did not see that pattern in my kids. 

When he first died, my kids seemed to continue moving through life okay.  My daughter left the day after her dad died on her scheduled school trip to Washington D.C.  It was her choice to go and she did okay.  My son went back to school a day or two later and he was okay.  They were both affected by it certainly – my son didn’t want to leave to go with his grandparents for a day at a festival – in part because he didn’t want to leave me alone – felt a responsibility for taking care of me.  He was more clingy than he was before, my daughter became less clingy and more independent.  But their lives continued. 

I had expected to see them cry frequently – they didn’t.  I had expected them to want to include memories of their dad in celebrations of anniversaries or holidays – and while they took those suggestions and were ‘good with it’ they didn’t seem to crave it.  I had expected to see the haunted look on their faces that was on mine, but it wasn’t there. I had expected their lives to go on a temporary hold the way that mine did – and theirs didn’t.  It isn’t as though they didn’t cry – it just wasn’t what I had expected.  Their lives seemed to continue in a way that mine couldn’t.  As if in my adult grief experience – life as I had known it ended, and I had to start again.  For them, it looked more like life continued – just with a giant piece missing.  I had read that for children grief was a more drawn out, slower process.  And certainly that is what I have observed in my own kids.  That missing piece will go with them – continue with each new success that they have that they can’t share with their dad, and with each new failure where they can’t run to him for safety and security. 

For me, I will always love him – will miss him on some level, but I also don’t want my life to return to where it was.  I do not crave him returning.  My life is in such a different place than it was 4 years ago, that it would be inconceivable for me to picture him coming back into it.  But for his children, that isn’t the case.  Without that profound break in life that I experienced in grief, their lives are still missing a piece.  I see it when my son is upset practicing piano – he will go find his dad’s photo and stare at it as he cries over the piano piece.  I see it when my daughter is angry at me and yells ‘Dad wouldn’t have made me do that’.  But I really don’t know what their emotional experience is like.  I ask – I bring up their dad and missing him, however, both kids indicate that just makes them feel worse when we talk about it.   

Perhaps it is also the difference between losing a parent and losing a spouse.  My parents are both still living so I don’t know what losing a parent feels like – and of course losing a parent as an adult will be very different than losing one as a child.

I am an outsider in my kid’s grief.  It is a shared event, but our inner lives aren’t shared.