JIM O'SHEA
Counselling Service

To conclude this set of posts, I would like to say that there are many ways of helping yourself to grieve. Writing a letter to the deceased is a good one, keeping a journal to record your thoughts and feelings is another, painting or drawing is also an excellent way of expressing emotions. You don’t have to be an artist, by the way. Colour is the main ingredient. Your instinct will tell you what colour to use. Poetry is also a very good way to vent grief. I would like to conclude with one of my own grief poems

 Cathal

 The Lights of Christmas make me sad,

For they remind me of my dead child

Who was a light in my life

And who passed from me

Like a candle

Quenched by the cruel fingers of fate.

Oh, how I hate to think of it.

That child reminded me

Of me

When I was young and carefree,

Wild, quiet,

Full of mischief and of glee,

Blushing with the bashfulness of innocence.

He was to me

Myself.

Six Christmases have come and gone

With each the easing of my pain,

But all the same, the memories remain,

And live within me,

And I see him every day.

I always fear that somehow

In the distance of time

Since he was placed in the cold earth,

Alone,

Waiting for me to come

And join him in eternal sleep,

That I will forget the sound of his voice.

And every day I listen carefully

To ensure that it remains with me.

For the voice is the sign of the spirit,

It is the essence of the inner soul.

And his voice was soft as silk,

Like the music of the rain in spring

It falls upon my hardened heart.

And no! I will not forget

As long as breath remains within me

That lovely sound,

Which echoed in our lives

For thirteen short summers

Before it died.

 I composed this poem as I drove into the town of Thurles on Friday 20^th of December 1996, almost 7 years after Cathal’s death. I had celebrated the end of term with my staff, and was in a happy mood. Then without warning the bright Christmas lights of Thurles reminded me of the darkness that had descended upon our household in February 1990, following a joyful Christmas, when Cathal had presented us with a lovely fruit bowl. It must have taken him a long time to save that much money from his frugal pocket money. I feel my tears anew as I contemplate his generosity. And I still remember the soft sound of his voice.

having finished my posts on grief, my future posts on grief will be a serialising of my book ‘When a Child Dies’, which I hope will help those unfortunate people who have lost a child

Infant death evokes much sympathy for society, but a miscarriage and perhaps a stillbirth is less noticed, so that a mother may experience a sense of isolation that sharpens her grief. She may experience worries about future pregnancies, a sense of failure, anger at herself, and perhaps anger at her partner.  A miscarriage is a shattering of the expectation of birth itself, and the lack of a ritual, e.g.a funeral can add to the isolation.

Some mothers are not even hospitalised for a miscarriage, and this can diminish the loss and adds to the grief. It is important to remember that a mother bonds with their unborn child in the first stages of pregnancy. It is equally important to remember that both parents grieve at this loss. There are a great range of emotions arising from a miscarriage, with grief complications arising from the fusion of the experiences of birth and death. Parents may search for the dead child’s identity, and they are faced with the difficult task of mourning someone they did not know, but who is such an intimate part of them.

Finally, there is the question of an abortion. One of the important points to remember is that a failure to mourn an abortion loss may give rise to delayed grieving in the context of a later loss. Failure to grieve an abortion loss is very much an individual response, and may be influenced by such aspects as relationship with parents, culture, and religious upbringing. Some women simply put it out of their minds and get on with life, experiencing a surface feeling of relief.

In the near future I will begin serializing my own book on the death of my child. In the meantime I will look in general at the death of a child and its impact. The death of a child can lead to complicated grieving, because it is a particularly painful loss. It is not the natural order of things that a child should die before its parents. There are so many hopes and dreams unfulfilled. My child, who was killed when he was thirteen, would be thirty-three now. I often wonder what he would be like as an adult, how would I relate to him, who would his wife have been, would he have been a good and kind husband, would he have had children, what kind of parent would he have been.  It is natural to have such thoughts and memories, it does not mean living in the past. People say that the death of a child is the saddest of all losses, but it is important to remember that every person experiences loss differently. I can certainly say that the loss of my child was immensely more painful than the loss of my father. I can say no more than that, and I cannot project this onto other people. All people grieve differently. Sometimes the death of a child is so painful that some parents try to blot out the memory. I have met individuals who lost their children, and they seem to carry on normally in the very early stages of the bereavement, and show good humour and a sense of optimism about their lives. I am very consciousness of the terrible pain that they have buried. Sensitive and skilled counselling is required to support them in bringing out this pain, and in supporting them as they struggle with the reality of the loss of their child.