You are plunged into the cold. It all goes dark, there is movement around you, objects are touching you, pulling you down deeper into the depths of nothingness; you want to open your mouth and yell but you know you can’t. Panic is setting in, your body begins to do things involuntarily. Your lungs are screaming for breath, every fiber and cell is telling you to breathe but your brain tells you not to do it. Don’t do it. You can’t help it, you suck in a breath and evil fills your lungs and you begin the slow agonizing dive. You go deeper, you give in to the darkness and you sink. You know you will never resurface.

You aren’t drowning, you just lost a child.

The pain of bearing a child does not compare to the pain of burying one.

The loss of a child is universally considered the most agonizing loss and grief to enter. Most of us don’t even allow ourselves to fathom it. It is too awful.

The loss can be the death, kidnap, or runaway of a child. As agonizing as death would be, a kidnap or runaway situation where you are left with the not knowing would be a completely different gutting every minute of every day. Can you imagine looking into the face of every child for the remainder of your life always adjusting your search for the age your baby would be now?

Loss of a child is not just the death of one you have watched grow, play, love and learn, it is a miscarriage, or a still birth.

The loss of a child can be the loss of any potential children such as in the case of infertility or an adoption that falls through. Women grieve their empty wombs; parents their empty arms. The loss of hope and a future is very real. Everything, every dream is dead.

The death or loss of a child is so devastating because even if not blood related a child is an extension of their parents. Losing a child is the wrong order of things. Parents are not supposed to experience their child leaving anything but the nest. They are to go first.

As with all grief, the death of a child places their loved ones smack dab on the tracks of the train that will take them through denial, anger, bargaining, and so on. This particular train never stops though. It is not like other grief cycles that lessen over time. This train goes on for eternity. The child will always be gone and the loved ones will always miss them and their place in the world will forever be void. Unlike other grief, time just continues to march through milestones that the missing child is not experiencing instead of time soothing the soul.

In the case of miscarriage or still-birth, the death is just as real as if the parents had watched their child take their first breath, first step, graduation, and so on. Having an extension of one’s DNA and love extinguished before a life lived, is no less horrible than having walked hand in hand with a little one. The loss of a child is a loss at any stage in the living process. Whether a medical dream, an adoption, or a blood relative, it is a loss.

One parent is not affected more than the other by the death of a child. Even in miscarriage, where mom was the only one to experience the physical presence of a child, the other parent is effected in a powerful way as well.

As with so many situations, bystanders to this grief do not know what to say or do. God forbid they try to remind the grieving that they can have other children, that they do have other children, that it in any way was part of a greater plan. Whether any or all of that is true, a grieving parent or lost child’s loved one is not capable, nor should they be, of accepting words such as these.

If you are attending to a grieving parent, presence and space, help with day to day, caregiving and silence, love and empathy are gifts that will be appreciated. Maybe not recognized outright, but appreciated because they are not hurtful or intrusive.

There is no title for a parent who has lost a child. Is that because it is so awful and not in the natural order of things that unlike a widow/widower, or orphan, the relationship cannot be described; the grief cannot be defined?