Surrounding Ourselves With The Right People

After a significant loss, it is important to protect ourselves. We become very vulnerable, so we must find people who will be respectful of our grief. Otherwise, we might be deeply hurt and begin to supress our grief. If the people closest to us are telling us to stop crying and to "get over it," it is important to begin seeking out support from other people. One way to do that is to find others who have been through our same loss. Often times, it is possible to find grief support groups, some of which might be focused on specific types of loss.

Griefnet.org is a great resource on the internet. This link will take you to a comprehensive list of support groups of several kinds: http://www.griefnet.org/support/sg2.html#spouse. Specific support groups exist for those who've lost loved ones to suicide, murder, cancer. etc. Part of the beauty of the internet is our accessability to resources that were once only available to people who lived in larger cities.

The best possible form of support is through family or friends, but if we do not have sufficient support there, our next step would be to find a grief support group in our community. If we are unable to find a support group focused on our specific loss, we should look for a support group nonetheless. A support group for parents who have lost children now exists in my community, but it didn't exist in those first months after Jacob's death. I found a group that was general in its grief support, but there were other parents there who had also lost children. Widows and widowers found others who had also lost a spouse. The causes of death varied as well. What I found most helpful was that we all validated one another's grief, even if we couldn't understand it fully.

If family and/or friends have not experienced our same kind of loss, they might not be able to offer the support we need, despite their best attempts to do so. Others who have walked on the same path we walk can be an unexpected source of comfort, encouragement and support. Hopefully, they will reach out to us, but we may have to seek them out and see if they are willing to talk with us.

My community has an extraordinary number of parents who have lost children, so many of them reached out to my husand and me. They offered the best advice and pure honesty, even some that hurt to hear at first, but proved to be helpful in the long run. In return, we reached out to parents who lost children after Jacob died. Within 15 months of Jacob's death, four families we knew experienced the death of children who were in their teens. Two of them were classmates of Jacob's.

We are never in this alone.