We aren’t sick.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. -Henri Nouwen

Grief is not a disease. We are not sick. Please don’t tell us to feel better soon. Feeling better is reserved for when you have had the flu, food poisoning, or a root canal. You are expected to recover and feel better when you recover from the flu, food poisoning, or a root canal. More often than not, after said flu, food poisoning, or root canal, your life pretty much picks up where you left off. Not so much after burying a child.

Grief is not a disease. We don’t recover from grief. To expect that is to expect the unnatural. The meaning of the word “recover” is to get back or regain something lost or taken away. If we examine no further than this first definition, we have shown that recovery is impossible. We cannot regain Justin, we cannot replace he who was taken most abruptly away.

Grief is not a disease. We are not sick, don’t try to make us feel better or tell us that one day we will feel better. It is not about feelings. Feelings are capricious, they ebb and flow all around us, all the time. Humble yourself with the reality that you can’t make us feel better. You can’t fix this, it is not a puzzle to be solved, a riddle that if you are clever enough you can answer. Stop trying to fit parental grief in a box that you are comfortable with, it is all rather uncomfortable and unpleasant.

This is what I wrote a couple of nights ago when I couldn’t sleep,

We don’t ever feel better. We learn to live feeling this way. We make room, restructure our lives to allow this grief, this longing, and pain to become part of us. We can’t escape feeling this loss, grief for a child is life long. We learn to accept this grief.

As new parents, we experienced a “making room”, a restructuring of our lives to embrace the newborn baby that rested in our arms. Our Justin. Now our arms are empty, we cannot embrace the young man that once graced our home. That structure that once was is no longer, room has to be made now to encompass this strange entity called grief.

We are “new” parents again, grappling with a grief that is bigger than we ever imagined. How does one “parent” a dead child?  A valid question, don’t shake your head. Touch that chill, you don’t have to get fully into the icy channel – but touch it – see, you never stop being a mom, you never stop being a dad.

Accepting grief is not recovery. Accepting grief is integration. Grief is not a sickness, it is a metamorphosis. This metamorphosis is not a physical change, but a deep interior change in structure, successive changes as we adapt to an environment where our child no longer lives.

Did you know that butterflies can fly with tattered and torn wings?  They can, they are not the prettiest butterflies, no one would really exclaim over them except to point out their brokenness. Their wings and scales don’t ever grow back, but they can still fly. They don’t “recover” their wings, they embrace their brokenness and fly.