If you are a couple grieving the death of your child, know that couples often have opposite grieving styles (a person’s style usually operates somewhere between avoidance and immersion):

·If one is immersed in work, the other is disorganized

·If one avoids things that trigger memories, the other dwells on them

·If one talks about their feelings, the other shows no feelings at all, and

·If one struggles to find meaning in what has happened, the other is disinterested or has a stock answer.

Even as you and your partner change styles during your grieving, this pattern of being opposite often sticks and can further isolate you from each other. But at the same time it ensures the family unit maintains a balance so it can keep functioning during grief.

This is normal!

So please be patient with each other!

Don’t tell your spouse s/he needs to move on or that s/he should be better by now—help encourage her/him find someone s/he can talk to if you aren’t at a place to listen.

It’s normal for people experiencing grief to feel distant and out of touch with other people. (I remember how alone I felt when my sister, Cindy, died – as much as I wanted to feel a connection to my family—wanted them to feel what I was feeling so they would understand me and I would not be left feeling so alone, none of us were ever psychologically at the same place at the same time because our experiences, personalities, expectations, feelings, thoughts and needs were different. Everybody was grieving in his or her own way, and according to Hospice none of it was right or wrong. It just was what it was.)

There are many different ways to grieve.

It is so necessary to be respectful of a person’s personal journey and choices of coping.

If you feel your spouse is not supporting you in the way you currently need, it helps to have a friend or counselor who takes the time to listen to you and allows you to work through whatever you are feeling and thinking.

Remember, you can “push down” or “turn off” or “deny” or “get away from” your grief for a time but it will always come back (often at inconvenient times) until it is dealt with. The grief process is natural and it will go forward better if you don’t fight it.

And if you “keep holding on” without working through the grief, you can enter prolonged and complicated grief.

Be gentle with yourself and each other.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My Friend
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The unsolved mystery of the death of Cindy James