‘Healing from the loss of a child’

Last April 6 would have been the 18th birthday of KC de Venecia, who perished in a fire shortly before Christmas Day in 2004. To celebrate that day – which her mother first thought would be unbearable – Gina thought of bringing together other bereaved mothers for the blessing of a symbolic fountain in the grounds of the proposed INA Healing Center in Quezon City.

The fountain, which was inaugurated in the presence of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, "will serve as a shrine of a mother’s overflowing and undying affection for her child," according to Gina.

There weren’t tears, but smiles during the day that KC would have turned 18. Her Kuya Ipe (Cruz) said that knowing how practical his sister was, she would have surely opted for a car, instead of a grand debut, on her 18th birthday.

That Gina was able to smile, even as her eyes glistened with tears that did not fall, is due in large part to the counseling she got from clinical psychologist and child-family therapist Lourdes "Honey" Arellano Carandang, Ph.D, (mom of broadcast journalist Ricky Carandang.)

Before the KC fountain was inaugurated, Dr. Carandang shared with Gina’s guests the story of her own grief at the death of her parents and younger sister 23 years ago, after a fire razed their ancestral home.

In this season of reflection and recollection as Christendom marks the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, I’d like to share with you excerpts from Dr. Carandang’s sharing, which was entitled Healing from the Loss of a Child.

I, too, lost a prematurely born child 14 years ago, and though I but held her for just few seconds, I grieved her loss for many years. I still do, but I refuse to be sad. Former Press Undersecretary Deedee Siytangco, who lost her beloved husband Sonny last year, says, "Grief is different from sadness."

I hope those of you who are grieving over the loss of someone will find solace in the words of Dr. Honey Carandang:

Twenty-three years ago, my parents and my younger sister perished in a dawn fire that razed our ancestral home to the ground. The shock was indescribable. The pain was unspeakable. For me and my surviving family, life has never been the same again.

In the family therapy classes that I have taught for many years, I always ask my students to think of their own family metaphors. They say it gives them a picture of their family as a whole and it allows them to have a more objective perspective. They usually come up with metaphors that capture the "essence" and the "gestalt" or the total "sense" of their family. What comes to mind now is the metaphor of a hanging mobile. We know that the family is a system where everyone is connected to everybody else. That the pain or joy of one member is inevitably experienced by all members of the family. In the hanging mobile, the pieces must have their own place in order to be balanced. If you remove one piece, the mobile loses its form and balance.

When a family member dies, the family system takes a whole new form, the system changes and tries to find a new equilibrium. Something is exposed, we begin to see things differently, we begin to look at each other and notice things we never saw before. Reactions come out with a vengeance – the repressed anger, jealousy, sibling rivalry spew out to each other or to someone, to another surviving family member. In our case, it was the kuya and the ate. Our issues surface, the family goes into a cleansing painful, hurting process as the family seeks new equilibrium and a new system is born. It’s not the same hanging mobile anymore. We don’t go back to normal. We change (in our case, we became orphans). We are transformed as new meanings emerge and new dreams are formed out of the ashes.

When a child loses his/her parents, the child becomes an orphan, when someone’s spouse dies, he becomes a widower and she becomes a widow. But there is no word for a parent who loses a child. Perhaps the concept is too unthinkable. The natural order of things is destroyed. How does one make sense of the death of one’s son or daughter? How can the unthinkable be accepted, the pain embraced or dulled and be transformed? Perhaps, it starts when one realizes that sorrow is not a state but a PROCESS. In the beginning, whether the loss has been anticipated or not, there is shock, numbness and disbelief – "things cannot be happening"… "No, it cannot be true"… waves of grief alternate with periods of "stunned incomprehension."

It seems that what follows is a longer phase of intense, almost unbearable emotional pain, of weeping, crying, feelings of helplessness, and hopelessness, of regret and despair… this period feels endless.

Then somehow, there is anger… anger at doctors for not saving our loved ones, anger at ourselves for not doing something we think should have been done, anger at God for letting this happen to us and for abandoning us… anger at the universe for being what it is. For a parent losing a child, anger is accompanied by guilt. Guilt feelings dominate – both irrational and justified guilt… "I should have paid more attention to him." "We should not have allowed her to go." "I should have seen it happening." "I should have been kinder, more loving." As a mother laments "Missing him now, I am haunted by my shortcomings; how often I have failed him."

Every parent seems to feel a sense of failure and guilt just because she remains alive and her child is dead. A parent sometimes feels that it is not right to live when one’s child had died, that she should somehow have found the way to give her life to save her child’s life.

We feel guilty and sorry for our imperfect love and at the same time we feel the need to know and proclaim that the child who died is perfect. Sometimes this gets to the point of forgetting that there are other children who are still alive. Idealizing the dead child somehow helps to keep our own painful feelings at bay. And the process goes on. We experience some moments of respite or joy as the process continues… a father dreams of his son… "I dreamed that he was alive and we were walking together, we realized that the death and the funeral were fictitious. In that brief moment, the joy remained. Then came the knell that wakes me up every morning – "he is dead, he is dead." A mother dreams of her daughter, "It’s very ordinary, my dream. She is just there. She’s not dead."

Somehow, slowly painfully in our own unique way, we confront our unacceptable losses and we can begin to come to the end of the mourning process.

We come to terms with the world in which it is possible for children to die, a world described by Judith Bernstein as "A world of different hopes and dreams, a world of muted sunsets."

There will be sadness, a certain sadness that will never really go away. But with acceptance comes peace – there is peace in sadness. We accept despite dreams and fantasies, that the dead will not return to us in life."

Parents need to tell their own story but also to bond with those who have experienced similar losses. To belong to a community. To be understood, to be heard, and to help others who are in the same situation. Parents who have gone through the process are transformed. They become more sensitive to the suffering of others. They start to feel a desire to be of service and to relieve the pain of others.

Pain suffered alone is very different from pain suffered alongside another. It is healing to know that my pain has formed part of a much larger "suffering." We feel a deep bond with others. In communion with all humanity, our little lives participate in something larger. As Henri Nouwen says, "Our mourning can lead into dancing."

Together, we can ultimately find healing that lets our wounded spirits dance again. We stop centering our lives on ourselves. We pull others along and invite them into the larger dance. As Nouwen says, "our sorrow turns into expectancy, and even joy."

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