There are several ways to describe grief. Mourning is sadness over the loss of someone due to death. Grief is also described as the price you pay for being attached to someone. But you can’t live without attachments so grief is inevitable. Everyone grieves in their own way and takes as long as they need.
The stages of grieving when losing a child
Freud calls the process mourning work, from this it can be concluded that something also has to be done, the mourning process has to be done. Grief processing has several phases, the first is acceptance. This phase has to do with accepting the fact that the baby is dead and will not come back. There are people who refuse to give in, which is why this phase is sometimes called denial. In a case of denial, the process comes to a standstill and it will first have to be admitted that the person will not come back before the process can continue. Many people are still looking for the deceased at this stage. If this is not found, it usually only dawns on you that the person is dead and will not come back. The second phase is processing the pain, recognizing the sadness. You cannot ignore sadness and some parents will try to do so. Then the sadness will return at another time and this may be in the form of a symptom or abnormal behavior. People around will not experience it as pleasant if the mourner expresses sadness and pain. The third phase is the phase in which the parents begin to get used to life without the child.
Only now will the parents realize what roles the child fulfilled. And the parents have to learn to deal with the fact that some of those roles have to be taken over . This phase becomes stuck if the parents cannot adapt to the loss. The fourth phase is picking up the thread of life again. Give it a picture and move on. When losing a child, parents often experience it as the loss of a part of themselves. This phase also involves re-establishing bonds. If the grieving process has been completed properly, it will be possible to resume life, it is often experienced as the most difficult phase. Parents are often afraid that forming new bonds will hinder the memory of the deceased child. If this fourth phase is not completed, people will have more difficulty committing or even become unable to commit at all.
Standard operating procedure?
No one grieves the same way. There is also no normal way of grieving, any way could be considered normal, because everyone has their own way. The process of grieving as indicated above is one way it usually goes, but everyone experiences each phase in a different way and everyone takes as long for each phase and the entire process as they need. When losing a child, it is also experienced as unnatural, a child should survive the parent and not the other way around. How people grieve depends on four different factors: the personal characteristics of the mourner, the meaning of the relationship with the deceased, the circumstances after the death and the nature of the death. When losing a child, the grieving process will generally take longer than when losing a neighbor.
How grief proceeds after the loss of a child
Everyone grieves in their own way and everyone needs a different amount of time to do so. But grief generally has a 4-phase process. The first phase is the phase of accepting the death of the child. The second phase is the phase of processing the pain. In the third phase, the parents begin to get used to life without the child. And the fourth phase is the phase where life is resumed. Some parents get stuck in one of the phases. And will later have difficulty making new bonds. How people mourn depends on four factors: personal characteristics of the mourner, the relationship with the deceased, in this case an older child relationship, the circumstances and the nature. All in all, there is no fixed way to describe the grieving process, but there are some kind of guidelines.