“There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, American president
Let’s begin with the sobering statistics: 21,000 children die every day around the world. That translates to a child dying every four seconds. In the United States, 53,000 children from infancy to age 19 die each year. That doesn’t count the young adults and older “children” who die – even a 50-year-old is someone’s child, after all.
We like to pretend that child death is rare. But it isn’t, it’s just more hidden than in the days when parents routinely expected to lose children to scarlet fever or diphtheria. With improved public health and technology, many more child deaths are preventable. But kids still die. Life offers no guarantees. Lisa Buske, who blogs at One Sister’s Journey invited me to write about this “unthinkable loss.”
Before it happens to you or someone you know, or even someone you read about, the death of a child truly is unthinkable. We just don’t expect to bury our children. As parents, we need the protective illusion that our love will keep our children safe.
I was 24-years-old when I became a mother and fell hopelessly in love with my bright, beautiful little girl. I could never have imagined that 19 years later I would be staring down at Maya’s face in a coffin.
Maya’s death demanded that I step into a new level of mothering – radical letting go. At the age of 43, grieving for Maya forced me to mature spiritually and emotionally, and to reach a new understanding of the meaning of love. Love, in my new universe, included the ability to allow my child to have her death, on her own terms.
I can’t sugarcoat this process of letting go. I thought it would kill me. Swimming with Maya shows how day by day I fought to raise my surviving daughter, Meghan, continue my professional life as a writer and editor, and find my balance in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.
Grief recovery is a dance where for every step forward you take two steps back, and yet somehow in the end you begin to spiral upward. Other than mothering, grief was the hardest work I’ve every done. I was fortunate to have a strong inner core, a set of spiritual beliefs, innate resilience, and a host of friends and family. Even so, there were days when I thought I wouldn’t make it.
How do we get back up after life knocks us down? This is the question Swimming with Maya attempts to answer. As a memoir, my book is a very personal account of one woman’s journey. It is not a self-help book, but it is inspirational and motivational because it shows how I became more resilient than I ever thought I could be.
Deciding to donate Maya’s organs and tissues to strangers in need was a huge factor in my recovery, and in the way Meghan dealt with the loss of her sister. We were privileged to have something miraculous came out of something horrific. That gave us hope. Having hope motivated me to keep on keeping on.
In Swimming with Maya I recount our journey in detail. Please visit Lisa Buske’s blog, One Sister’s Journey, and leave a comment on my guest post. I’d love to hear from you!
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