“I knew her face better than my own. Still, I had to say goodbye. I had to walk away. That’s what you do when someone dies. Except this wasn’t just someone. It was Ana, my sweet girl.”
In a heartfelt piece for The Huffington Post, Jacqueline Dooley shares the story of how she has struggled to survive the sixteen months since losing her daughter, who was diagnosed at age eleven with a rare form of cancer. Ana’s adolescence was marked by suffering, taking her mother into the darkest corners of grief and pushing her to confess that at times, she would rather have died than go on living without what felt like a part of herself.
Still, Jacqueline has learned a few lessons through her mourning—lessons she feels compelled to share, both to ease her own pain and to reach others who may be walking the same road.
The many faces of grief
A grieving parent is a declared enemy of the saying “time heals all wounds”. Jacqueline found that, at first, time only takes you further away from the one you lost—the first day, the first month, the first summer, the first Christmas without them. The mind refuses to accept that life will go on—disfigured, stripped of its familiar joys—that the sound of your child’s laughter will no longer echo through the house, that no texts will come, no calls. Before it soothes, time deepens the wounds of a grief that cuts with unbearable sharpness.
What Ana’s mother came to understand is that grief changes its shape over time, even if it never becomes anything other than what its name suggests. In the first year, the pain was sharp, piercing, enclosing her heart in an excruciating shell. The following year, she noticed it felt more like a cloak—sometimes it covered her completely, but at other times it rested lightly on her shoulders, allowing moments of joy to once again filter through.
But Jacqueline has also learned that joy can be just as difficult to bear for a grieving parent—it often comes hand in hand with the guilt of feeling okay while their loved one is gone. Parents who outlive their children hate hearing words like “healing” or “moving on,” she says. To them, such notions feel alien—a future in which their child will never become all they were meant to be is a future clouded by confusion and, at least for a while, terror.
The struggle with memories is exhausting. While Jacqueline knows it’s not safe to cling to a past that will never return, she also knows she can’t let go of the most precious thing her life has ever held.
Searching for meaning in a shattered life
“In the years following my son’s death, I discovered, no matter how great my loss, or how deep my grief, the world does not stop,” Sandy Peckinpah says. It’s one of the harsh lessons she learned after her 16-year-old son died in his sleep from a deadly but undiagnosed form of meningitis.
Eventually, she came to realise that her own life would also have to move forward—if she could find a purpose strong enough to pull her out of the isolation of grief. For a time, she believed that her pain would define her, becoming her new identity: “I’m Sandy Peckinpah and I’ve lost a child.” But she soon recognised that her three other children still needed a mother. That truth gave her the strength to keep going.
Her journey toward healing began in a simple but difficult way. A friend handed her a journal and encouraged her to write whatever she was feeling. At first, even that felt impossible. The only words that came to mind were: “My son died and my life will never be the same.” She wrote that one sentence. Over time, though, the words began to flow. Her grief surfaced—still overwhelming, but easier to face once it took shape on the page, line by line.
In truth, says Sandy, healing doesn’t follow a schedule, and there’s no magic in a journal. The healing happens through the effort of staying engaged with life after loss. The journal simply tracks that progress, making it visible in the darker moments when the pain convinces you that you haven’t moved an inch from the tragedy.
Sandy says she chose to honour her son’s memory by healing—something she believes he would have wanted. Now, she shares that hope with other grieving parents. “There is life after loss,” she says—a message for anyone who needs to hear it.
Strengthening the bonds with those who remain
Louise Woodbridge experienced a devastating loss when she was seven and a half months pregnant. While checking on her children after their afternoon nap, she discovered the door was blocked—an antique, heavy wardrobe had toppled over, crushing Betsy and William, her two-year-old twins, as they had tried to climb it.
Now surrounded by their four living children, Louise and her husband speak about the twins often—because, as Louise says, they will always be part of the family. Although the grief they endured was “all-consuming,” the couple searched for ways to keep moving forward. Their daughter Fleur was born five weeks after the tragedy, becoming the third living child in the family. In time, Louise deeply longed for another baby, who was conceived more than a year after the twins’ death—during the first moments of physical closeness the couple shared since the accident. As Louise recalls, in those early months, “because in grief […] when someone touches you, it is too raw, like your skin has been burnt.”
Then came another blow—the pregnancy was not viable, even though Louise had hoped she might be carrying twins again. Five years later, Teddy was born, and once again, Betsy and William’s bedroom was filled with life. But the couple had already begun to regain their balance earlier, through their decision to face their grief hand in hand.
“We have lost two of our children and we are the only people in the world who know how that feels—we are not going to lose each other,” Paul told his wife. Louise admits there were moments of despair, but the two were determined not to let their grief tear the family apart.
Parents who bury their children desperately need support from others, Louise says. She recalls a time when acquaintances would cross the street to avoid running into her. While she understands the discomfort people feel when they don’t know what to say, she insists that “you are always better to say something than nothing”—because isolation is the last thing a grieving parent needs.
The Woodbridges found healing not only in caring for their large family but also in supporting other bereaved parents. Having received help from counselors with the Child Bereavement UK organisation, they became some of its most dedicated fundraisers. On one cycling trip alone—from London to Paris, marking what would have been the twins’ 10th birthday—they raised £105,000 in donations.
One of their joint projects with the charity involved hosting school roundtables, where children could talk about what it might be like to lose someone close to them. Drawing on the experience of their two older children, who also had to navigate the mourning process, the couple believes that while children don’t need to know everything about this kind of tragedy, they do need to understand that death is a part of life—and that it’s okay to feel sad and talk about it. “And there are lots of adults who need to know that, too,” Louise says.
Parental grief under the microscope
Earlier studies have shown that the loss of a child is associated with more intense grief than the death of a spouse or a parent—regardless of whether the child’s death was sudden or the result of a chronic illness.
The pain caused by this kind of loss follows a particularly complex trajectory, with emotional responses that may overlap or resurface at different stages of mourning. As the grieving parent is forced to adjust to a new reality, the entire constellation of family relationships is inevitably affected by the shift.
While normal grief typically involves a range of cognitive, emotional, and behavioural changes—ultimately leading to acceptance of the loss and a gradual reintegration into daily life—complicated grief is marked by an inability to detach from the deceased and a profound struggle to envision a future with any sense of hope or normalcy. In this form of grief, at least three out of four separation distress symptoms often reach extreme levels: intrusive thoughts about the person who died, intense yearning, constant searching for them, or overwhelming loneliness.
Bereaved parents are among those most at risk of experiencing complicated grief. They frequently exhibit symptoms of traumatic stress, such as disinterest in the future, emotional numbness, difficulty accepting the death, a profound loss of meaning, and a shaken worldview.
Because a child represents the future—and because parents invest so many hopes and dreams in that future—the death of a child often feels like the total collapse of all aspirations. It’s as if the future itself disappears. The loss triggers not only a sense of failing in their role as caregiver and protector, but also a feeling of having lost a part of themselves—what some experts have described as the “amputation metaphor.”
Many grieving parents reject terms like “healing” or “recovery,” insisting that while grief may change over time, it never truly fades. Words like “reconciliation” or “rebuilding” tend to resonate more, seen as more realistic ways of describing the inner transformation that comes from living on without their children.
As a collateral consequence, the trauma of losing a child can place significant strain on a marriage and may even lead to divorce. A study by Judy Rollins Bohannon from East Carolina University found that 19% of fathers and 14% of mothers reported that their relationship worsened after the death of a child. However, the loss itself is often only the visible part of a much deeper and more complex relational iceberg. It is not necessarily the direct cause of a marriage’s breakdown. In fact, a 1999 survey of more than 14,000 bereaved parents revealed that 72% of couples who were married at the time of their child’s death remained together.
Loss has no age limit
Research has shown that, beyond individual, family, and cultural differences in how grief is experienced and expressed, the age at which a child dies adds a distinct layer of stress to the separation.
In cases of infant loss or stillbirth, guilt often becomes a second skin for the mother. There is even a pattern of mothers blaming themselves for the death (26% of mothers and 13% of fathers do so), despite the explanations provided by doctors. Parents often reject well-meaning but dismissive reassurances like, “You’ll have other children,” and recover slowly from the loss; depression may linger for as long as two years. Despite pressure from family to move on, many feel their grief is not shared by relatives who barely had time to know the baby.
The loss of older children or teenagers carries some of the same characteristics as the grief felt after the death of an infant, but adds the pain of a deep attachment formed over years, during which the parent’s life revolved around the child.
At the other end of the age spectrum, parents who lose adult children endure a form of suffering that is difficult to fathom. The coping mechanisms that can help younger parents regain their footing after a loss become less accessible with age, says Jan Greenberg, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Older or elderly parents can no longer rely on the possibility of having more children to help them move forward, and if they’ve also lost a spouse, they are left without a vital source of emotional support.
In fact, an elderly parent who buries their child may feel more vulnerable than someone who never had children, because they had no time to prepare for such a loss, says Kathrin Boerner, a gerontologist at the University of Massachusetts.
Far less is known about how to support parents grieving the loss of adult or even elderly children—a situation becoming increasingly common as populations age—compared to what is understood about parents who lose younger children or teenagers.
Even so, the most important factors in recovery remain the same: the ability to (re)discover meaning in life and the emotional support of family and community.
Writer Mandy Hitchcock is a bereaved mother who describes her life as permanently split into two eras: before and after. Through her writing, she tries to help others who are walking through the same desolate landscape of grief. And she hopes, in turn, to be met with a measure of compassion from those who are merely spectators to tragedies of this magnitude. “I wish people could understand that grief lasts forever, because love lasts forever,” she says.