Oh Janine xxxx
I dithered as to whether or not I should reply to your email, but I thought long and hard about it and decided to x mainly because nobody ever advised me or even gave a hint of the living nightmare that could be.
Firstly I am truly sorry for your loss and I truly understand your feelings, I really do xxx
While my Daughter was battling Cancer I also lost my beloved Dad and a very close friend, I loved my Dad he was my hero, but somehow I coped I think it’s because it’s the so called nature of life that your parents go before you. But to lose your child is an agony that cannot be understood, cannot be explained and never, never accepted. Losing a child is the loss of hope, it’s the loss of all the possibilities that could have been its all the futures, the weddings the grandchildren ect. When I try to explain how I feel inside the closest I can get is the scenario when you take your children out to say a beach, and one wonders off, and then you realize with the most excruciating panic that they are gone, for us who have lost our children, we feel that pain every day, every minute, every second. They are in our minds when we try to sleep at night and they are the first thing on our minds in the morning x I would love to tell you that time heals I can’t, I’m so sorry but I can’t. Time just ticks on for everyone else but us, we are stuck in that perpetual moment of agony. We cry and scream inside when we go out shopping, we look at their friends continuing life, getting married having families and we hurt again and again and again. We want the world to stop and acknowledge our loss, but it just goes on as normal, and then after a year people think you should be going on as normal. I went to my Doctors six months after my beautiful Daughter passed as I thought I can’t live with this pain any more, he asked me what was wrong I just wanted to punch his face after all he came and administered her morphine in her last hours, then he says to me your always sad !!!
Dear Janine, they do say grief is different for everybody, and I pray it is. All I know is that I re live her last month’s again and again, always the questions what if the doctors would have done this or that, the anger I feel is like nothing I have ever experienced, but I guess the worst feeling is the guilt that I could not save her, that I could not help her that I could not ease her suffering. That is the worst I blame myself for her suffering, after all I am Mum and Mum always makes things better. I also now have to watch my other beautiful Daughter disintegrate in front of my very eyes, you see she was only 21 when her sister died and they were more than siblings they were best friends. And there was only the two of us to nurse and bath my Daughter at the end, only the two of us to be there for her at her passing. The guilt is so unbearable as I said I couldn’t save my Daughter and I cannot save my surviving Daughter from her loss and unimaginable suffering.
The one piece of advice I can give you is ALLOW , allow yourself to cry, to ask all the questions even if you know they will never be answered, to shut away, to scream, to look at the Tv world and the world around you and feel you don’t belong any more. I could go on and on and I know you know what I am talking about x
Then to know that you will get through some weeks without crying, and not to fear when you wake up and feel so desperate like it just happened, don’t fear those days, as they will walk by your side till the end.
You see to simply put it Janine our Love for our children will never die, so our grief for our children will never go.
Please email me any time and take care xxxxx I know how you feel
Sandy xxx