MSI Press Blog

  After losing a child, the world often grows strangely opaque. People avert their eyes, conversations shift, and the ordinary rhythm of life resumes around you as if nothing has changed. You walk through grocery aisles, attend meetings, answer emails—but inside, you’re transparent. You exist, yet you feel unseen. 1. The Silence Around Loss Grief makes others uncomfortable. They don’t know what to say, so they say nothing. That silence can feel like erasure—as if your child’s life, and your love, have vanished from the collective memory. You begin to wonder whether your pain is visible at all. 2. The Disconnection of Identity Before loss, you were a parent with a living child. After loss, that identity becomes invisible too. You still feel like a mother or father, but the world no longer recognizes that role. Self‑compassion becomes the act of affirming your identity even when others cannot see it. 3. The Need to Be Witnessed Being seen is part of healing. When someone listens with...

  Grief after losing a child is not a wound that heals neatly. It’s a lifelong reorientation—a new way of being in the world when the world no longer feels trustworthy. In that landscape, self‑compassion isn’t indulgence; it’s survival. 1. The Body and Mind Need Permission to Breathe Loss shakes every system—emotional, physical, spiritual. You may forget to eat, sleep, or even breathe deeply. Self‑compassion begins with permission: to rest, to cry, to pause. It’s the quiet voice that says, You are allowed to be undone. Without that permission, grief hardens into self‑criticism—“I should be stronger,” “I should be over this.” Compassion softens those edges so healing can begin. 2. Grief Is Not Linear You may feel peace one morning and rage by afternoon. You may laugh at something small and then feel guilty for laughing. Self‑compassion reminds you that grief moves in waves, not steps. It allows you to ride those waves without judgment, trusting that each emotion is part of love’s e...

  Letting go is one of grief’s most misunderstood phrases. People say it as if it’s a destination—something you reach when you’ve “healed.” But after losing a child, letting go isn’t about release; it’s about learning how to hold love differently. 1. The Myth of Closure Closure suggests an ending, a sealed chapter. Yet love for a child doesn’t end. It changes form. The challenge is not to close the door on that love but to find a way to live with its absence—without losing yourself in it. Letting go, in this sense, means loosening the grip of guilt, regret, and self‑blame, not loosening the bond of love. 2. The Fear of Forgetting Many parents resist letting go because it feels like betrayal. If you stop crying every day, will that mean you’ve forgotten? If you laugh again, does that mean you’ve moved on? The truth is, memory and joy can coexist. Letting go is not forgetting—it’s allowing love to breathe without being suffocated by pain. 3. The Body’s Memory Grief lives in the body....

  There are losses that rearrange the world. And then there is the one that erases it. When a parent outlives a child, time itself becomes disoriented. The calendar keeps moving, but the heart refuses to follow. You wake up in a world that feels wrong — not just empty, but misaligned , as if the laws of nature have been broken and no one noticed. The inversion of the natural order We’re built to imagine our children as the future — the continuation of our story. When that story ends too soon, the mind rebels. It keeps trying to rewrite the ending, to find the missing paragraph that would make it make sense. But there isn’t one. The loss of a child isn’t something you “get over.” It’s something you carry differently over time. The silence that follows People often don’t know what to say. They avoid the child’s name, afraid it will reopen the wound. But silence doesn’t protect a grieving parent — it isolates them. What helps is acknowledgment: “I remember her.” “Tell me about him.”...

Name: Patricia Young Book: Life after Losing a Child   Date of Interview: August 5, 2018 Who are you? What do you want readers to know about you? Pat Young has written for the Daytona Beach News Journal, South Bend Tribune, Flint (Michigan) Journal, Clarkston (Michigan) News, New Mexico Magazine, Silver City (New Mexico) Life Magazine, and other publications. She earned numerous awards for her writing, including National Newspaper Association and Michigan Press Association awards. She earned two media awards while at the South Bend Tribune. One of her stories (Giant Wind Harp in Tune with Nature) in New Mexico Magazine was chosen for inclusion in SIRS Discoverer data bases. Why are you qualified to write this book? Pat, and her late co-author Joanna Romer, are both widows. Though neither has lost a child, both women understood the painful bereavement process one goes through after the loss of a loved one.   What is th...