All grief is difficult because of its irrecoverable loss. We can reconstruct some of that which is no longer there, but a remnant always remains, sometimes as an indelible mark on our lives. One of the most complex griefs to experience is the loss of a child. The meaninglessness of death is redoubled in this case, apparently an unnatural fact: dying before those who gave you life.
The pain of this loss is aggravated if it occurs suddenly (accident, catastrophe...) because it leaves the parents mute, without words to weave a minimal story that restores the immense brokenness – real hole – that has occurred in their lives. The initial perplexity is mixed with anger, sadness and an intense feeling of helplessness in the face of this cruel twist of fate. "Because the?" “If he had done…then he wouldn't have passed.” Guilt is inevitable because it always seems more reasonable to think that we could have avoided it than to accept the disastrous fate.
A son or daughter has a very important value in the parents' libidinal economy because of what they project onto them and because of what they themselves, as parents, imagine themselves to be for their children (emotional support, material support). Losing them means giving up that imagined future and that function of encouragement and reference that builds themselves as parents. Sometimes some of that loss can be alleviated with other children arriving, but other times that is no longer possible.
Freud thought of mourning as a psychic work of reassembling the pieces that have been left loose, not to restore the initial image – an impossible task – but to inhabit a new landscape in which to recover the desire to live and the bonds. This means giving yourself time, without rushing, adjusted to each situation and the subjective impact of that loss. Do it, also, in company, using rituals, whose function is to accompany the pain. Time and others will allow us to know what we have lost (who, it is obvious), what of us is gone, to assume it subjectively. Burying someone is simple, saying goodbye to them in our unconscious is more complicated. For this reason, we continue to dream about the dead, or we imagine them in the hallways or on the street.
It is not about turning the page or erasing memories, but about finding new ways to name that void to give new life to what is gone. Sadness is not a pathology, you have to go through it to continue living. Each one, with the resources at their disposal.
