Click Here for the January-February Edition of Tears to Hope (PDF)

• WISHful Thinking
• Two Roads Diverged
• Transitions Through Grief
• Bereaved Mother’s Support Group Interest Form
• Contributions, Memorials, Honoraria
• The Compassionate Friends Meeting Dates
• Poems & Quotes

As we approach the end of 2008, we want to thank you for your continued support of our programs even during these difficult economic times. As you all know, we are dependent upon your generosity to continue to provide counseling and support at no charge. So many of you have been faithful over the years, attending the Tears to Hope breakfast, purchasing Amelia Center Calendars and making annual donations to sustain this most important work. So, thank you for your on-going support.

There are a couple of things we want you to be aware of as we look toward 2009. First, we will not be printing an Amelia Center calendar this year. We know there are many, who look forward to the calendar each Fall season, but the project has become much too costly over the years and we want to divert these funds to program services, which continue to see increased demand each year.

In addition to this change, we have also decided not to hold the Tears to Hope breakfast in 2009. Though this has been an excellent event, we want to find a more economical way to share about The Amelia Center and to encourage community members to support our program. So, during the first quarter of 2009, we will be sending out packets to our contributors that will give you information about our financial needs for next year, new ways of giving to The Amelia Center and ways you can share that information with others. Please keep an eye out for this information as we start the New Year.

For now, we ask that you consider what you might be able to give to help us reach our financial goals for 2008. We have enclosed a donation envelope with this edition of Tears to Hope in anticipation that you will send your financial support. Every gift counts!

Wishing you all the best during this holiday season,

The Amelia Center Staff

Therapist Marsha Linehan believes that people who are experiencing pain can still find “lives worth living.” Helping others find a life worth living with their pain is one of her major goals. This goal is accomplished not exclusively through acceptance and change, but these are two of her concepts that I would like to focus on. The two concepts of acceptance and change are relevant to grieving, and in discovering how to make one’s life worth living with pain.

In dealing with the death of a loved one, you may find yourself asking “Have I accepted this person’s death?” What acceptance does not mean is that I approve of it or I agree with what has happened. While one may be quick to associate a positive connotation with acceptance, it is used in this context as more of a neutral tone. To accept means to “get” the reality of what has happened in your life.

Acceptance is being able to say, “I accept having this pain, aching and loneliness in my life. I hope that these feelings will not feel this intense forever. But, for right now I accept that this is where I am and how I feel.”

Can you begin to see, as you practice acceptance statements, how change may occur? As you begin to say these type of reality acceptance statements about what has happened in your life, your thoughts will begin changing. Thus, as your thoughts begin to mold and change, there is the potential to behave differently, and ultimately to experience different emotions.

You may say to yourself something like, “I cannot tolerate this excruciating pain. It’s so hard.” After several days of these non-acceptance thoughts you reside to staying in bed all day and crying, ultimately withdrawing from the world and others.

Imagine instead saying this acceptance statement to your self, “I cannot understand why this has happened to me. It is awful. But, I must try and make a life worth living even with this pain.” And so you get out of bed and take a shower. After taking a shower you feel a little better and you decide to eat breakfast with the rest of the family. At breakfast, you laugh at something your spouse or child says aloud.

These two examples have a very different ending to them. One does not accept the pain of what has happened in their life and this leads to a negative outcome. The other example displays acceptance this pain in their life, and seeks to find a life worth living.

Acceptance does not always come easy, but in its modest form, it boils down to saying yes to the reality of what has happened in your life. It is saying that my grief is not pleasant and even incredibly overwhelming at times, but I can live with it.

The key is to focus on finding a life worth living.

The blending of two families can be a challenging process in and of itself, and when you include the complexities of grieving the death of a child to that process, it can enhance the potential for misunderstanding, resentment and discord. So, here are a couple of things to keep in mind if your spouse is grieving the death of his or her child, along with some suggestions about how to be helpful to your spouse in their grief.

First, grief changes the griever. Perhaps you have noticed changes in your spouses’ behavior since the death of his or her child. Possibly they cry more often or seem short tempered. Maybe they come across as aloof or they have stopped going to church or social events as frequently. Or, perhaps they have a decrease in their desire for sexual intimacy. The death of a child has a lasting impact on the life of that child’s parent(s). A parent is now living one of their worst nightmares. The death of a child goes against the natural order of things. Plainly put, no one plans to grieve their own child’s death. So, the pain a person feels after the death of a child brings about changes in that person on many levels. While many of these changes are temporary, many are not.

One thing you can expect from your spouse is that they will never be the person they were before the death of their child. This is not to say that the new person they become is negative. The pain of grief often produces many positive changes over time in a person’s life. A person might become more compassionate or sensitive to others going through difficulty. A person can come to a deeper understanding of how precious life really is and how important their loved ones are in their life. A grieving person is not trying to go back to how they were before their child died, their hope is in moving forward, finding a new normal and learning to live with their new-found perspective, their new identity and their new reality.

Secondly, grief will take longer than you think it should. You will find that many of the intense grief reactions will subside over time as you observe your spouse. But, keep in mind that there is no set time table for this and it will probably last longer than you might anticipate. Grief is a process that has momentum, yet it moves at its own pace. Well meaning attempts to share advice, to lecture or to press your spouse to “bounce back” or “get over it” does nothing to shorten the length of the grieving process. In fact, it probably does more to lengthen and sharpen grief’s impact, not to mention, to cause alienation and resentment in your relationship with one another.

So, what can you do to help your spouse during such a difficult time? Two of the things many bereaved parents have shared with me that they need in large supply from their spouse are patience and encouragement as they navigate the stormy waters of change that come with grief. Patience and encouragement will serve you well as you attempt to be supportive to your spouse for the long term. Endeavor to avoid setting arbitrary time tables or unrealistic expectations upon your spouse as they learn to live with their new reality. Being patient and encouraging involves a lot of listening, silent moments, shared tears and loving embraces. Allow yourself to change along the way as well. This will give opportunity for your relationship to grow. In time, you will find yourselves at a different place in your lives than you ever would have imagined. You will be able to look back and know you made this long, difficult journey together.

Grief tends to be mixed with trauma when a loss is sudden and unexpected — a fatal heart attack, an accident, a murder — or it’s perceived as being outside the normal cycle of life, as in the death of a child. For example, someone who nurses a spouse through a long illness will grieve when the spouse is gone, but the person who witnesses the sudden death of a spouse in a car crash will likely be traumatized as well. A sudden loss can be even more difficult to deal with if you don’t have a socially recognized outlet for mourning, as may be the case with a miscarriage or stillbirth.

While trauma always incorporates grief, the two states are very different in how you experience them and what effect they can have on you. Grief is a normal reaction to loss, with its symptoms diminishing over time. On the other hand, trauma is a disabling reaction that can block the grieving process, disrupt your life, and leave you psychologically vulnerable. If you are coping with a traumatic loss, you may want to think about turning to a counselor or other professional for help.

The National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children presents a chart, contrasting the experiences and effects of grief and trauma:

“Guilty Days.” There is neither rhyme nor reason to when they will occur, even eight and a half years after my daughter Nina’s death. I had one just the other day. I suppose it didn’t help that it was a dreary stereotypical Minnesota day in February with depressingly gray skies and temperatures outside registering teeth-chattering, sub-zero cold with just enough snow fall to make venturing out problematic. These surroundings made it quite easy, even without any apparent good reason, to plummet into a “blue funk.” My state of mind then heads in a negative direction ultimately sliding into a bottomless pit of senseless guilt.

In my experience with my friends who are bereaved parents, most admit that they experience this same phenomenon. I don’t think there is anyone among us who can say after the death of their child that they don’t regret something that they did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, to that child while they were living. It doesn’t matter that the reasons for our feelings of guilt may be unfounded or even seem foolish, the fact remains that we have them.

For example, on birthdays or holidays where I would customarily give a gift, if inexplicably I recall the “toy cash register incident,” I am guaranteed an instant “guilty day.” In explanation, year after year Nina requested a toy cash register for a present; even to an age that I thought was unreasonable to want such a thing. For some reason, unbeknownst to even me, in my eyes it was a silly gift; something that she couldn’t possibly really want, or even use once she got it. Needless to say, I never bought it for her. I can tell you, though, that even to this day when I walk through the toy department and I see a toy cash register I feel a deep sadness and tears come to my eyes because I didn’t buy her the so-called “silly” present that she obviously really wanted.

Just innocently strolling through a toy department and seeing a toy cash register can begin a domino effect of guilt feelings, a chain reaction of remembering even the tiniest self-perceived slight or any incident that I wish I could take back where Nina is concerned. Such as the time she wanted me to give her a ride to Girl Scouts, which was only four blocks away from our house. I had a migraine headache and could barely lift my head off the pillow and therefore couldn’t give her one. So she hopped on her bike and about a block from our house hit a bump in the road and was thrown over the handlebars breaking her collarbone! Even though I know realistically that I couldn’t have done anything different considering the circumstances, when I am in the throes of a “guilty day,” the thought of that particular occurrence can send me in a downward spiral of culpability.

In actuality, chances are pretty good that if my daughter were alive today and I brought up these two happenings from the past she would probably tell me that I was correct in thinking she would have tired quickly of the toy cash register, and that she knows I couldn’t physically have driven her to Girl Scouts with a migraine; that she never blamed me for the collarbone fracture in the first place. But because our child died cannot give us confirmation that they understood our reasoning and that our actions were “okay” with them, we are left to wonder what they were thinking and feeling regarding the particular situation that makes us feel guilty. Therefore, when we are having a “guilt day” our tendency is to blow it out of proportion and thereby imagine the worst.

Expressing those feelings of guilt to a trusted friend or family member can be helpful. Talking about your feelings may also help you to let some of it go. That person may even remind you of something you had forgotten about on those days when you are sucked into a vortex of guilt and rendered incapable of remembering any of the positives. For example, a dear friend reminded me — one time when I was bushwhacked by a “guilt day” – of something she thought was extra special I had done for my daughter; something that she thought went above and beyond the call of duty as a mother. Nina had called me from school to sweetly beg me to pick up a Valentine’s gift for her boyfriend. One of the gifts was a glow-in-the-dark stars like she had on her bedroom ceiling. She told me where to get them (a specialty store at a mall about 30 minutes away). I could tell by her voice how important it was to her, so I dropped everything and off I went to the mall. Little did I know that it would take three trips to three separate malls in different parts of town before I found a store that had any left in stock! Luckily, I made it home just minutes before she and her boyfriend arrived. I recall her exquisite smile and hugs of genuine thanks for my efforts. I remembered how gloriously radiant and pleased she looked when she came upstairs to show me the red shirt with the Tweety-Bird (her favorite) insignia on the turtleneck collar that her boyfriend had given her. Thankfully my friend steered me in the direction of these happy memories and positive reflections of Nina’s last Valentine’s Day, and thereby broke the cycle of more negative thinking.

I believe that no one is harder on themselves than bereaved parents. Even as irrational as it is, we feel that we failed as our children’s guardians, that we should have been superhuman and able to protect them from cancer, drunk drivers, criminals, drugs, depression, congenital illnesses, and a host of other unspeakable evils with the potential to take away their precious lives.

The bottom line is that we are not invincible or perfect; we are only human. We did the best that we could with what we had to deal with at the time. Our children know this — they love and forgive us for our own humanness and associated imperfections, and I believe would want us to forgive ourselves as well.

With gentle thoughts,

Cathy Seehuetter

TCF, St. Paul, MN