A mother's pain when losing a child.

A mother’s pain when you lose a child is not something that can be reasoned away, it can’t be explained in words for people to really understand the girth of it. When you lose a child it feels as if you have been abducted and left on another planet where people don’t understand your language and you don’t understand theirs. If anyone has the time they can read up about it. To lose a child to suicide is likened to the suffering of holocaust survivors.  Can you imagine trying to placate those people with all kinds of word of wisdom or advice?

I think not, and that is exactly the way for parent survivors of suicide. The horrific pain you live with every day of your life is the worst thing that anyone can try to survive. If you have never lost a child there are no way you can ever understand what we go through on a daily basis. When you parents die you are an orphan, when a husband dies you are a widow. Why do you think there is no word to call a mother who lost a child? Because to lose a child to death it is not in the natural order of things.

You carry that child for nine months, you give birth to him and nurture him all his life. You take care of him when he is hurt and you kiss the pain away. You pick him on your lap when he is small and you comfort him and make him feel safe and loved. Have you ever seen a mother not help her child when he is in pain? It is an inborn instinct to protect our children and when you find yourself in the situation where you child is dead you feel absolute helplessness. You feel incapacitated and useless as a mother. It is so easy to tell me to think about the wonderful and happy memories I had with Emile, but do you know? That hurts as well, it rips my heart out that there will be no more happiness for me to be had in this life with him.

Your heart never heals and only a scab forms over the wound that can be ripped off by any little memory of Emile. I try to live with this as best I can and be there for other mothers who find them self in this same situation. Because only a mother who has lost a child can really and truly understand what another is feeling. This is not something that can be fixed, nothing can ever fix my heart. I miss him every day of my life. I wake up in the morning with him on my mind and I go to sleep with him on my mind. It is not just that my child died but a whole future I was going to have with him is now a big black void gaping in front of me. There is a bond between a mother and a child that can never be broken, it is so easy for people to say to me that I must think about the wonderful place he is in now. I don’t want him there in that place, I want him here with me.

However, I can’t and I try as hard as I can to live with this. I will always love my son and nothing can ever take that away, so nothing can ever make me feel better about it. I wish someone will understand what I am trying to say here. Nothing you can say will ever make it better for me, nothing at all. Not all the wise words or good advice in the world will ever take my pain and longing for my son away. I don’t like to feel this way, if I had any say in the matter or if there was any way to do it, I would not cry about him and I would be happy and have a great life without him. It is impossible because I have tried for almost five years now and it doesn’t work that way, unfortunately.

My son Emile died from suicide by hanging himself in a weeping willow tree in a park near my home on 5 February 2006, seven weeks before his 21^st birthday.