Losing the Living: Grieving a Child That’s Still Alive
By: Katie Guyer
Tags: Parenting, Divorce, Children, Parental Alienation

For years, the room sat silent, like a shrine: bed sheets undisturbed, clothes never removed from hangers, books and toys on shelves left untouched and forgotten. Birthday cards and Christmas presents sit gently on the bed, years since their gifting, patiently waiting to be opened. The photos on the walls and in the frames are years old — as are any memories I have of you. The door closed… that’s the rule. Always, ALWAYS keep the door closed. If opened, if I dared to enter, I’d be smacked across the face with the reality that this place may never hold you again: the same fear that overwhelms me every day.

After years of grief ruining every facet of life, I try to move on. Maybe being in a place you’ve never been will ease the constant wave of memories of your existence, your laugh still echoing through the halls. But how do you plan for the next phase of life with someone who may or may not be there? How do you set up for the future, one that is undoubtedly bright, when the current reality is so dark that you don’t know where to start? Should I buy a house with another room that may never be used? Do I buy new clothing, knowing it will likely be outgrown long before you’ll ever see it? Do you even remember any of the many things you have here and would you even care if they were gone?

You’re like a ghost: I feel you there, and everywhere else for that matter; your existence always just out of my grasp, but nobody else will ever see it no matter how hard they look. Ah yes, all of them. Nobody else seems to understand and, over time, they seem to care less and less. “Family” never ask about you or even bother to ask how I am, as if saying your name or acknowledging my pain might make the situation real. Friends offer blanket condolences or, worse yet, misguided advice down avenues already exhaustively pursued to the point where it hurts more to let it out than to keep it in. They want to help, not knowing that the only thing that will fill this open, gaping wound in my heart is something they’ll never be able to provide.

Rumors are started in small-minded, small town circles: “Something must be wrong with her if her own kid doesn’t love her” by mothers who themselves have clearly never once stopped to consider that the tidal wave of sorrow under which I’m currently drowning is exactly the reason why I may have become someone they don’t know anymore. Every day, the exasperation of living every day with this constant, suffocating ache in my soul grows; the energy it requires just to get through the day without a breakdown increases; and my resolve to care about the relationships, friendships, and responsibilities in my life plummets. After all, if the very person for whom my heart beats every day no longer wants me around, who gives a shit if anybody else loves me anyway?

Another week, another phone call — steeling myself and the nausea in my gut as the phone rings, never knowing what I’ll get on the other end. Will today be the day when I finally hear your voice again? Will you scream at me, tell me you (still) hate me, that you want me to die — not knowing that without you that’s exactly what I want to do? Will today be the first time in over 2 years you’ll again say the words I would literally kill to hear just one more time: “I love you too, Mom.”

No, this time, it’s something new: your phone no longer has a voicemail box set up for some reason, so now I cannot even leave you a message so you’ll at least hear *my* voice for now. So I send a text — just another green bubble in a long string of nothing but green, unanswered bubbles spanning nearly two years. I’ll make sure to check my phone, obsessively, for the rest of night.. despite knowing a response will never be there.

Let me say that I don’t know what it’s like to have a child pass away. I know nothing about that grieving process, nor will I ever even attempt to pretend that I understand the (likely) lifetime of pain and anguish that brings. My heart aches just thinking about being a part of that exclusive ‘club’ that nobody ever wants to join. But for all the resources, articles, counseling, and networking I’ve done, I’ve yet to find an answer to the question I long so much to understand: How do you grieve a person — your own child — who’s still alive?

In death, there is finality: life as we know it ends and a new phase of life begins, whether we want it to or not. All you have left with the deceased individual are memories, moments frozen in time, with no possibility for new ones to ever be made. Depending on your religious preference, you might pontificate about their being in a ‘better place’ and wonder about what it may be like, but you don’t spend every day, or sometimes every hour, wondering where they are, who they’re with, or what they’re doing. You might painfully consider who they would have become had life not ended, but you don’t sit in the moment and wonder who they actually are right now. Who are their friends now? What size shoe do they wear? What’s their favorite song, color, thing to eat? Those answers don’t change in death, but they do in a life that goes on without you.

When your child has been ripped from your life — seemingly for no reason and all and with no respite despite your every legal, physical, and emotional avenue pursued — it destroys every fiber of your existence. You find yourself taking the blame for things you didn’t do and accusing yourself of thing that never happened. You believe every lie that’s been told, every whisper that’s heard, every shameful societal construct that you can possibly come across. Don’t Google it; don’t talk about it; don’t let anybody in.. because trust me, as soon as you do, you’ll be cut wide open all over again. So, then, where do you find the instructions for how to heal a heart that people want to tell you could be fixed if you just “give it time” for her to “come around”? How long do you wait? How do you reconcile that the beautiful child you created is now a stranger that you don’t even know? How do you stay hopeful when you watch the seasons change, the holidays come and go, and the years go by without a word? How do you keep living when the one person for whom you’d give your life tells you they wish you’d just die?

The tricky thing about this strange grief is that it has a habit of popping up at times that make absolutely no fuck-all of sense and pulling you down into a deep, dark rabbit hole that is almost impossible to climb out of. Seemingly innocuous things that aren’t even noticed by most people at all take me to places that break me when I’ve been doing everything I know how to do to put the pieces back together. A girl your age at the grocery store rolling her eyes at her ‘totally annoying’ mom. I find myself staring at them, analyzing their boring and mundane interaction like a sociological experiment, wanting to shake the exasperated mother and scream at her “Don’t you realize that some people would give ANYTHING for this stupid fucking moment?!” Another piece of my heart breaks and another brick is put into the wall in which I surround myself in a ridiculous effort to shield myself from hurting anymore. The reality, though, is that until I’m a part of your life again, a piece will always be missing.. and, until then, I’ll never be whole.

Grieving a child likely comes with so many questions. Grieving a child who’s still living, breathing, and moving through life without you does, too; questions that in the grand scheme of loss sound so stupid, but whose answers have the ability to comfort and heal. When you hear ‘Classic’, do you still remember dancing around in our living room and singing it at the top of your 7 year-old lungs? Do you still think about the day you first saw Tahquamenon Falls, caught your first walleye, or got your first dollar from the Tooth Fairy? Do you miss — or even care at all about — the little sister that you wanted so badly that you wrote it on your Christmas list to Santa for years? Do you even still believe in Santa Claus? (I doubt it, but I also can’t tell you when you stopped believing because I haven’t seen you on Christmas in 4 years.) Most of all.. do you miss me? Am I the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about at night? Does your chest ache, your world go dark, at the mere thought of never seeing me again? More than anything, I hope so much I’m not. I hope it doesn’t. I hope you remember, but I hope you don’t hurt.

As much as it shatters my heart to say, I hope you don’t miss me at all. I hope your days are filled with the opposite of hurt.. with joy, with hopefulness, and with excitement. Your future is bright. You can and will do anything and everything you set your mind to. I hope you know that no matter how long this continues — even if you’re gone forever — that my love for you will only grow stronger every day. I have never and will never be mad at you, blame you, or hold it against you for being gone from my life: you are a child and, until the end of time and no matter what, you are my child. Things may not make any sense to you now just like they don’t make any sense to me.. but, if there’s any justice in the world beyond the family justice system that has failed us, someday it will. Until then, my girl, I will wait for you — and if takes beyond the end of this life, I’ll be waiting in the next one, too.