Metaphors for grieving a child.

There is so much about losing your child that is totally beyond comprehension… so much that is ineffable… there are so many feelings that are overwhelming that not only are you grasping for words to explain how you are feeling, how you are doing, what you are going through to others, your whole head is occasionally and frequently wrapped up in trying to figure out what combination of words or images in the English language will do justice to what is going on inside. 

Often the task seem to be a choice between old, used metaphors about broken hearts and other missing or damaged internal organs and inarticulate babble. About hearts and souls and endless tears… You talk of pain and void and numbness and the mixture of sadness and confusion and anger and how every little thing affects you. You talk around it. You speak of what it is not and then try to say that it is really really bad. Or you think you have found something that in all of human history, no one has thought of… And when the clash of ill chosen words and conflicting imagery goes awry, it can truly be comic, but no one wants to laugh or say anything. 

But it isn’t about the words. It isn’t about the colors on the canvas or the melody of the song or whether your heart is ripped out or torn or broken… or whether you are in an eternal night or deep well or pit of pain… or whatever. It is there… and it is yours and yours alone. There isn’t some soaring rhetoric that is going to make it feel right, even if it made perfect sense. 

And a couple of years down the road when life is more or less back to normal and the good days now outnumber the bad or you have returned to the set point of your happiness index… that deep wound of ineffable quality is still there… and you know it. I think the people you love know it and can sense that change in you. I know what the truth is. And if I could say it to you in words or draw you a picture or sing it to you in a song it would make no sense to you.