A good friend recently lost her husband and suffers from acute grief. Knowing I lost my son almost five years ago, she asked:
'How do you do it?'
'How do I do what?' I asked
'It just comes and comes. How do you deal with it?'
She was asking me how to deal with feelings of grief. Hers were so severe that she just wanted to make them go away. She knew that I experienced the severest type of loss, losing a child, and she thought I had an answer. I told her the sad reality. We can’t make grief go away, we can only deal with it. It’s called riding the wave of grief.
Riding the Emotional Waves of Grief From Child Loss
Feelings of Grief Are Like An Ocean Wave
Imagine an ocean wave. At times, waves come in quickly, one after the other. Other times each wave is further away from the one before it. Sometimes the waves are bigger, and sometimes they’re smaller. A wave may gently rolling over the shoreline, or come crashing down with ferocious might.
During the first year of my son’s passing, intense waves of grief kept rolling in one after the other. I thought about him 24/7. Sometimes I cried a lot, sometimes I cried a little. Over the next few years, the waves of grief still kept coming, but they were less frequent and less intense than before.
How I Dealt With My Waves of Grief
Here’s a mental technique I used when strong waves of grief hit me. I closed my eyes and pictured a large ocean wave coming in, rising up and up, then coming down and crashing over the rocks with a deafening roar. For each wave of grief, I imagined the waves pounding on the shore, pounding on my heart. This exercise didn’t make the feelings go away, but it helped me get through each wave as it came.
Riding the Emotional Waves of Grief By Expressing Feelings
Part of riding the wave of grief is allowing expression for our feelings. This helps cope with grief better. Sometimes grieving parents ignore, or even belittle their own feelings because they think it’s not normal to have them. Here are some examples.
Crying is Important
This affects men more than women, but some women also avoid crying. Typically, this occurs when the child passed several years earlier. ‘Why am I still crying? Why can’t I get over it?’
There’s nothing wrong with crying, even years after. The Harvard Health article Is Crying Good For You? discusses the emotional and physical benefits of having a good cry:
‘…emotional tears, which flush stress hormones and other toxins out of our system, potentially offers the most health benefits. Researchers have established that crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. These feel-good chemicals help ease both physical and emotional pain.’
Grieving parents never get over losing a child. Crying at any time is normal.
When You Want to Cry But Can’t
Some parents experience this feeling because they’re still in shock over their child’s death. This may happen at any time, even years later. Even now, I still experience this feeling. What happens, is I get angry or agitated about something unrelated. Then I start thinking about my child, knowing that I need a good cry, but the tears won’t come. The solution? I don’t have one. Eventually I cry, and when I do, I feel better.
Experiencing Grief Triggers
Then and now, a lot of my sadness comes from a trigger of some sort. It could be seeing the same make, model, and color of car my son drove. Quite often, I see a young man with the same height and build, and tears well up in my eyes. Crying when these grief triggers occur are totally normal.
Feelings of Grief That Come From Nowhere
Then there are the feelings of grief that come from nowhere, out of the blue. Why is it that when I’m not thinking about my son, random imagery pops up in my mind. I think about the day he died, the funeral, etc. Although these thoughts appeared suddenly, it takes awhile for me to get them out of my head.
Well, that’s normal too, and I have to ride the wave of grief.
Conclusion
Whether losing a child occurred recently, or years ago, grief is something a parent always lives with. Our feelings of sadness are normal, it’s just learning how to deal with it.
Coping With the Death of a Child 
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