All bereavements are difficult because of irretrievable loss. We can rebuild something from what is no longer there, but something always remains, sometimes as an indelible mark on our lives. One of the most complex griefs to process is the loss of a child. The nonsense of death is redoubled in this case, because it seems an act against nature: to die before those who gave you life.
The pain of this loss is aggravated if it occurs abruptly (accident, catastrophe...), because it leaves the parents speechless, without words to weave a minimal story that restores the immense break - a real hole - that has been produced 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. "Why him?" If I had done... then it wouldn't have happened." Guilt is inevitable, because it always seems more reasonable to think that we could have avoided it, than to accept the fatal fate.
A son or daughter has a very important value in the libidinal economy of the parents because of what they project in them and because of what they themselves, as parents, imagine they are for their children (emotional and material support). Losing them means giving up this imagined future and this function of encouragement and reference that builds them themselves as parents. Sometimes some of this loss can be alleviated with other children arriving, but at other times this is no longer possible.
Freud thought of mourning as the psychic task of putting back the pieces that have been left loose, not to restore the initial image – an impossible task – but to inhabit a new landscape where the desire to live and bonds are recovered. This means giving yourself time, without rushing, adjusted to each situation and the subjective impact of the loss. Do it, also, in company, with the help of rituals, which have the function of accompanying the pain. Time and others will allow us to know what we have lost (who, it turns out obvious), what of us has gone, to assume it subjectively. Burying someone is simple, dismissing them in our unconscious is more complicated. For this reason, we continue to dream of the dead, or imagine them in the corridors or on the street.
It's not about turning over or erasing memories, but about finding new ways to name this void to give new life to what's gone. Sadness is not a pathology, you have to go through it to continue living. Everyone with the resources at their disposal.
