Creating a Child Loss Recovery Plan

When we lost our baby, my friends and family were understandably grieving with me and so worried about my physical and emotional health. After I lost 15 pounds in a couple of weeks, my mom started blending up peanut butter, bananas, and protein powder to get me to stabilize my weight. I was so lost that I had no plan and no will to move forward, but the people around me knew that I could find a way.

I wanted to want to live, so I promised them that I would do “all the things” I could think of to support myself.

It wasn’t until we went to Golden Willow Retreat that we really had a concrete set of components to be sure we were covering “all the things.” Certainly just writing them down here is not the same as working through a plan with a trained therapist’s support, but for everyone who loved the lost child, it’s helpful to think through which aspects of your life have been affected (all of them…) and how to commit to addressing them.

From personal experience, recommending goals in each and daily commitments in most.

NOTE: This is not just for parents, but for grandparents, family members, teachers, and anyone who misses this child.

EMOtional

The emotional piece may be the most obvious because our love for our children is so powerful, and the pain, despair, and rage have to be addressed. As the phases shift, the feelings shift as well.

• Friends and Family - Which friends and family you want to support you, in what ways, and how often is valuable to tell them.

• Counseling - Grief counselor? Someone focused on traumatic grief specifically? Therapist? Psychiatrist? How often?

  • One thing that we were told was that it’s easy to think you can rely on friends and family, but after a while, they might need a break.

• Meetings - There are so many types of grief meetings, and the big question for us was whether we wanted meetings only focused on child loss specifically or on grief generally. Sometimes it can be hard to connect to the loss of someone’s cat (however much they love them) when you are mourning your little girl.

• Medication - Losing a child is a catastrophic trauma, and medication can help in the transition as you build a support structure and during the initial waves of pain that can feel like drowning.

For us, we both have different therapists, we have tried two types of meetings, and every month I have been writing an email to my friends and family like this to enlist their support in the most helpful way. My only wish was that I had started medication sooner (I started at a month), so that I could have smoothed out the grief and not had so many days of hopelessness and drowning.

PHYSICAL

Maintaining your physical health is not only the key to survival, it’s also a way to renew your commitment to your life. I loved what Paula Stevens said in her book From Grief to Growth - that basically exercise gave her the structure to save her life until she had the will to survive. A plan can include:

• Exercise - Preferably daily, even if it’s just walking around the block

• Healthy diet

• Sleep - Nothing is as exhausting as grief

• Hugs and physical contact - Especially if your baby lived at home

For me, I actually did okay with the exercise and the sleep at the beginning, especially with all the people in the house the first couple of weeks.

Spiritual

One of my healers told me that it’s common for mothers who lose children to die young because they are so connected to their child that they can’t let go. Basically she dies of a broken heart because she’s so connected to her child on the ‘on the other side of the veil.’

• Faith tradition / community - Going to your place of worship and reading your sacred text on grief.

  • Learning the strategies and philosophies of other faith traditions on healing and grief can also help you identify practices that give you comfort. As an example, rose quartz is a crystal known for healing so my prayer beads that I use for my daily prayer list are in rose quartz.

• Walks in nature - Nature is an easy way to connect to your higher power whether that is ‘compassion’ or God. Getting to nature in NYC… not as easy (but a good challenge).

• Connecting to your baby - Building a new meta-physical relationship to your baby is one way to address the hole in your heart - receiving signs, wearing jewelry with his name or birthstone, lighting candles, building a sacred space at home… the options are endless.

For me, the biggest change in my life after Tepley has been building a strong, multi-dimensional spiritual life. The agony of her loss was not just fleeting emotions but severely damaged my soul.

INTELLECTUAL

There are so many frameworks and strategies to tackle grief, and reading about this new, unfamiliar world allows you to intellectually engage with this new world.

• Books - Building a grief curriculum on gives a structure to the path.

  • Here are a few I liked, but there are so many others

• Videos - Videos are so easy when you are so miserable and have a low attention span.

  • Here’s a great video, not on child loss, but on moving forward with grief.

• Great articles and blogs of people in the same circumstance to help you feel less alone.

  • Compassionate Friends blog

  • A Bed for My Heart

For me, I read a couple of grief specific books when Tepley first died, but then I shifted to more spiritual books to help me move forward with her in a new way.

SOCIAL, PLAY, AND REST

One great video on child loss with the actor Rob Delaney on the death of his son talks about the fact that he still sees the rainbow of colors of life, there’s now just a stripe of black in the rainbow. For the first few weeks and months, it seems like there is no joy like there used to be

• Planning time with friends - Figuring out how much time and how many people you can handle at a time and then letting people know to schedule that time with you.

• Invest time in a hobby that brings you joy - Maybe it’s an old hobby that you are doubling down on or maybe it’s something new you are doing in honor of your baby.

• Self-care - It’s a bit of a cliché to say that you should invest in self-care, but at the basic level, it’s you telling yourself that you will be here in the future so you need to take care of yourself.

For me, the biggest issue was that I got so tired - so tired after an hour or two with even my closest friends, too tired to think about even taking a shower. And the play I loved so much, I wanted to do with Tepley. So I had to make a list of things that I liked to do before Tepley or could think of doing in her honor and then slowly plan them into my schedule.

PROFESSIONAL and CONTRIBUTION

Are there issues with your job, your career, or work that you care about that you need to address?

• Job and career - Is your career a good support in this time of change? Or do you need to make a change?

• Contribution - For many parents who lose children, they want to build a legacy with their love for their baby - through a foundation, a website, or just contributing to causes in their honor.

We were very lucky that our careers were flexible enough to take a few weeks off, and we connected with our coworkers well enough that going back felt like a safe place to maintain structure in an abyss of uncertainty. I had started consulting to have more flexibility when Tepley was little, so it was a huge loss to lose that structure and I am still working on my next steps.

But for me, writing is a way of processing, and after writing letters to friends and family, they encouraged me to put these lessons ‘on paper’ / online to share and support others.

FINANCIAL

Are there financial issues that need to be addressed? Is this tragedy a time to re-evaluate anything in your financial life.

For us, we were working on expanding our family, so losing Tepley significantly changed our financial situation - both because I am taking time off to start a new phase of my career and also because we are planning for new children to come into our lives.

FUTURE PLANNING

In one sense, even months after the loss of your child, it seems almost impossible to think about the future without them. But in another sense, that loss of the future - all the milestones you were looking forward to with them - is one of the most painful aspects of the tragedy. So you may not want to think about it immediately, but setting aside time to think about the future can give breathing

Is there a time when it makes sense to think about what this means for plans that you had?

For us, our first grief counselor suggested that we have sessions separately except in areas where we might have joint decisions that need a supportive person to help us. We set aside time at a grief retreat to think about a few decisions that were deeply affected (like a planned move that was now off the table).

OTHERS

Only you know the pieces of your life that have been displaced.

As mentioned, the most valuable part of this exercise for me was writing down each section, looking what I am doing today and then adding on things like might make sense. Getting a grief counselor and going to church were relatively easy, but adding things that bring me joy in honor of Tepley were important additions. This baby was all about joy, and it’s a disservice to her memory to not add more joy to my life (not that it’s easy right now).