Category: Grief, Trauma, & Resilience

The word ‘heal’ comes from the Old English word hælan, to make hale, whole, or free from infirmity. Among traditional therapists and counselors, it is a favorite word that means next to nothing when applied to the aftermath of losing one’s beloved.

I constantly felt a tender ache of longing for my missing child. The finality of death was stunning and cruel, something I hadn’t expected to experience so bitterly, because I had every hope in an afterlife.

I called Olivia’s birth mother and told her that our daughter was dying. We wept together. I felt the strength of two mothers and the will to go on.

My dying daughter’s prayers were answered. From the depths of where dreams grow, she dreamed of beauty, wholeness, and friendship. There are malls, dogs, and best friends where she was going, and people float like hovercraft–and there’s ice cream.

We waited in fear, but didn’t tell our daughter that her hospitalizations were futile and would eventually end in complete renal failure and death. How could we tell our child such a thing?

The ongoing emergencies were traumas, brutal assaults on our daughter’s wellbeing that destroyed her trust in the world’s safety, robbing her of all joy.

The first in a series of reflections on losing my child, this is my journey of walking her home. Through love, loss, and grief, I search for meaning and try to find a way forward.

I came to hate the hospital. I feared its bureaucracy—the faceless paternalism, the quiet erosion of our agency. With each visit, it took control of my child, my family, her body. We weren’t being helped. We were being swallowed whole by its vast, impersonal maw.

People say [unkind] things to relieve themselves of feelings of pain, anxiety, and loss, not to offer you any relief. It is, in fact, a denial of your humanity to say those things.