I lost my child

What this looks like

Your child died. At any age. Of anything. The world after them is not the same world. People who haven’t experienced this don’t know what to say. The friends who tried have mostly drifted. The marriage is strained or it’s broken. The other children, if there are other children, are watching you. The grief is bigger than any framework that exists for grief.

This is the loss our culture has the least room for. The lack of room makes the carrying harder.

What you’ve already tried

• A bereaved parents support group
• Therapy with someone trained in child loss
• Marking every anniversary, milestone, birthday
• Creating something in their name
• Withdrawing from people who don’t understand
• Trying to keep going for the other people who need you
• Surviving one day at a time

The loss hasn’t gotten smaller.

Why nothing was ever going to make this manageable

The grief for a child isn’t the same as other grief. It violates the order of things. The cultural framework that says grief moves through stages was built for losses that fit a recognizable shape. This doesn’t fit. The standard timelines don’t apply. The standard advice doesn’t reach.

You very likely organized your life around this child to a degree no other relationship would justify. Their death has rearranged what your life is for. You may have absorbed the message that you should be functioning by now, and the gap between that message and your actual experience has its own weight. You may have other people who depend on you and you’ve been carrying them while carrying this, and you’ve started to feel like you can’t carry both.

For the broader grief framework, see I’m grieving . If the loss was a miscarriage, see I had a miscarriage .

The loss is permanent. The way you carry it can change.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy doesn’t ask you to process them, move on from them, or find a silver lining anywhere in this. We work, very slowly and very gently, on what you’ve been doing with the rest of your life while the loss has been the only weight in the room. The point isn’t to make the loss smaller. The point is to make room for you to keep living without that being a betrayal of them.

Your child stays with you. The carrying changes shape so that other people who need you also get some of you back.