Grief Graffiti

I posted the following on our HPH page last week:

I just dropped my son off at the airport for his first trip since his brother passed last year. I am so grateful that he made the decision to go on this trip to meet up with some old friends of his brother’s. He’s barely left the house since his brothers passing so this is a huge step.

But I have so much anxiety about him being away, couldn’t sleep last night, and can’t stop crying. He gets seizures or mini-strokes when he doesn’t take his meds correctly. And when he misses a dose he gets a sort of brain fog & forgets that he missed a dose. I’m doing my best to breathe & trust him to the Universe…and asking his brother to look out for him. But it’s really hard right now.

I have PTSD since losing my older son & I hadn’t really realized how severe it is til now. Dropping my surviving son off at the airport the day of his flight brought on a panic attack, difficulty breathing and elevated heart rate. As I stood on the sidewalk outside the airport entrance hugging him goodbye I realized this was the exact place I had hugged his brother for the last time. And that triggered a whole new flood of emotions.

I am a certified meditation instructor & have been meditating since I was very young. I know what I need to do to find peace & let go of fear, but in this case no amount of meditating took the anxiety away. I tried to keep busy with work, read and exercise, smoke some weed, etc, all helping for a moment, but the anxiety was still there. Then my worst fear came true; the day after he got to his destination he called from an unknown number saying he had lost his phone & didn’t remember his friends address. He was wandering, lost & all his meds were in his bag in his friend’s apartment. He told me he was going to find a place to sit while I found his friends number via Instagram & he’d call me back. He didn’t.

Three hours later I get a call from a hospital employee informing me that my son had passed out in a coffee shop & hit his head. Paramedics were called & they had taken him to the hospital. Thankfully he was ok & they released him a few hours later after running tests & giving him an IV, but it was terrifying for me. I know my being so overprotective is not helping him. I know I am enabling him. But I don’t know what else to do. How do you trust God or the Universe, or life in general when it failed you so miserably already? How can you not live in fear of losing another child when you know it can happen so easily?

Like I do with every new emotion since my loss, I researched it & found it’s very common in grief to have PTSD/fear of losing another child. I’m sharing some of what I found so those of you in this stage will know you are not alone:

“I lost my oldest son 8 months ago. I’ve come a long way in my grief, I can get out of bed now and I can talk about him or think about him sometimes now without completely losing it. The issue I’m having is I still have two children and I’m absolutely terrified that I’m going to lose another one. I try to be rational about it, to talk myself out of the fear, but it’s progressed into having a panic attack almost every single day now. Like full-blown terror, racing thoughts, sweating, can’t breathe, racing heart that feels like it’s going to explode, nausea, in and out of the bathroom level panic attack. It’s exhausting. I can’t sleep. My body hurts. I’m so overwhelmed, I can’t live like this but I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to rely on anti-anxiety medication, and I can’t afford therapy. Does anyone who has also lost a child and gone through this have any coping strategies that have helped them? I don’t want to keep drinking to cope.” ~Forever Weary

“I lost my son last year. He was 22 and literally at the top of the world. He got in a freak accident that normally everyone would have walked away from but he just got hit perfectly. I have a younger son & an older daughter and soon she will have a baby, which is exciting. That being said, I have the same fears as u. I worry every time I don’t hear from one of them for a bit, I just go crazy. I am not going to say I know how u feel, but I am sure I feel similar. Anxiety attacks, crying out of the blue. My wife has some of the same issues. But I think somehow she is dealing with it so much better. I can’t sleep. Slowly things are helping. But it is like 2 steps forward and 1.5 steps back. The way I look at it, and u may have heard this before, is that i just put on a 100 pound backpack of stress and anxiety overnight and I didn’t have time to build the muscles and strength to carry it. Some days I can’t & others I can. But every day I try to focus and try to be stronger knowing that it will never go away cause u will never forget ur son and that loss.” ~ UP

“There are so many different layers of grief after the passing of a child. So many that we couldn’t possibly understand all the emotions that come into play. I never anticipated the depth of my daughter’s grief after my son passed and how it feels to her being an only child. Her grieving journey is no less painful than ours. I never anticipated how we would all worry about losing each other and the amount of reassurance we all need on a regular basis. When the unthinkable happens we feel vulnerable in so many ways. And we feel sad when our surviving children are so very devastated by the loss of their sibling. So many layers upon layers of emotions to wade through.” ~ Susan M.

“I have severe anxiety about my daughter’s safety after losing my son. I hear from people that pray for the children’s well-being but I cannot pray for some reason. Praying to whom? God did not save my son.” ~ Artur F.

“My son transitioned last year at almost 19 and he is a twin. I get anxiety whenever my other son goes out of town. I still have a tracker on his phone (and his car ) just to help with my anxiety. I don’t pay much attention to them, but just knowing they’re there controls my freak outs. Poor kid-I’ll prob still be tracking him when he’s 40. Ugh.” ~ Courtney R.

Clara Hinton wrote an article on this topic in her Blog & you can read it in full at www.silentgriefsupport.com/child-loss-the-shadow-of-fear/ but here are a few key excerpts:

“We fear losing another child because our thinking process says, “If the unimaginable can happen once, it can happen again.”  And, so we begin to smother those around us.  We worry continuously — never do we rest peacefully for fear of getting another phone call hearing the most dreaded of all words, “I’m so sorry.”

After my sister died at age thirteen, our family changed so much.  My mother became depressed and practically immobilized with grief.  My dad seldom smiled and he wore his grief on the outside for a very long time.

Something else changed.  My mom and dad were so overly-protective of me and my younger sister.  I didn’t at all understand then, but I sure did learn some hard life lessons in fear later in my own life!

I was almost sixteen when my sister died, and when I turned eighteen I wanted to go to college.  In fact, I had a full scholarship to further my education making me about the happiest person alive!  Until……..it came time to talk about college with my parents.  They flipped out on me. Why?  Because they didn’t want me moving away! They had such a fear of losing me.  They had a horrible fear that if I moved away they’d never see me again.  Or, if I moved away something terrible would happen to me such as a car accident or sickness and they wouldn’t be there to help me.

Fear.  Fear is a sidebar of child loss.  That horribly, paralyzing, underlying fear of losing another child.

After I got married and began my own family, there was one constant prayer I said daily.  “Dear God, please don’t ever take one of my children away.  Please.  I don’t ever want to go through that kind of pain. ” I repeated this prayer morning, noon, night and anytime I had a spare minute in-between! 

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake that fear.  I never, ever wanted to be as full of pain as I was when my sister died, and I never, ever wanted to go through what my parents did when my sister died.

And, then the one thing I feared the most happened.  My son Samuel died.

It is now twenty-five years since the death of Samuel and I sincerely wish that I could tell you that all of my fear is gone.  I wish so much that I could say I never, ever worry that one of my living children will be taken away.  I wish I could say that I live in total peace and harmony every day of my life.  But, if I’m being honest, I can’t say that.

Every day I pray over my living children asking God’s protection on them.  Yet, I know from experience that this life is full of sorrow and pain.  And, children still die.  And, when I go to that place in my private thoughts, I begin to shake with fear.  Why?  Because if it could happen once, it could happen again.  And, I’m so afraid.  Nobody that I know of who has lost a child ever passes that off lightly and says, “Well, if it happens, it’s just one of those things.”

We shake from the inside out with fear.

Losing a child leaves our hears broken and shattered in so many different ways! 

I’m finding that the more I bring to surface my fear of losing another child and talk about it, the less power the fear holds over me.  And, it helps me to never go to bed angry with one of my children.  God forbid, should something happen, I don’t want to be grieved by guilt for the remainder of my days on this earth!

As parents and grandparents of loss, we walk such a fine line, don’t we?  We want to hope and trust in life again, yet…….that nagging fear seems to always cast its horrible shadow over us.  It never seems to go away completely no matter how hard we try!

Our living children need us to be parents — not hovering over and keeping them from spreading their wings and tasting the deliciousness of life.  It’s easy to say those words, yet so very hard to do!”

~ Clare Hinton, Child Loss: The Shadow of Fear

I went on to research ways to cope & found some helpful ideas. While nothing will take the PTSD away completely, these tips can help us to navigate it better and make it less debilitating.

• One of the strategies shared with me was the 54321 grounding technique. You can Google it, but essentially you think of 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. It’s meant to bring you back to the moment.
• Therapy & counseling. If you can’t afford therapy, consider joining a support group for parents who have lost children. These are usually at no cost….and if there is a small cost, they usually do not apply it to those who can’t afford it. Call your local hospital as well, they often have free resources for parents who have lost a child. You need support, compassion and love. 
• Prescribed Medication. I can understand the feelings of not wanting to “rely” on anti -anxiety meds…but sometimes we need some help and there’s no shame in it . And if it makes you feel better I promise you that you’ll be wishing you had done it sooner.
• Journaling. Journal your thoughts and fears.
• Breathing techniques for panic: 5 sec inhale, 5 sec hold, 5 sec exhale. Repeat as needed.
• When I’m in full panic, it helps to wash my face with cold water or put an ice pack on my face. It kind of resets everything. I actually have a face mask, ice pack thing in my freezer for these moments.
• One of the therapies that is helping me is EMDR eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It helped me go back and process the first week he passed. 
• Cognitive Therapy (CT-PTSD). The aim of the treatment is to help the patient to shift their focus from loss to what has not been lost, from a focus on their loved one being gone to considering how they may take their loved one forward in an abstract, meaningful way to achieve a sense of continuity in the present with what has been lost in the past. This is often achieved with imagery transformation, a significant component of the memory updating procedure in CT-PTSD for bereavement trauma. 
• Learning to trust in a higher power (whatever it is you believe, does not have to be religion) is a critical part of grieving. Spirituality as we know it is really a manifestation of what or whom you trust, and it influences your fundamental views of life. This trust is a source of strength and support, and can be a powerful antidote for the loneliness that accompanies loss. Trust doesn’t immunize you from pain or grief, but can offer peace, comfort and clarity – welcomed friends at a time of loss.