Where am I now and how do I feel?

The death of your child has changed you.

Life as you knew it prior to loss no longer looks or feels the same, and you may find yourself questioning who you are now and how you are to move forward.

Those are very good questions, and there is no set timeline in which you need to answer them.

It may not feel like it now, but with time, you will start to see small changes in the intensity of your grief and how you react to it.

You will learn healthy ways to look ahead to coming days without feeling overwhelmed or anxious, and as impossible as it sounds, you will eventually find yourself looking forward to enjoyable activities again.

There will come a time when you won’t dread breaking down in tears whenever a certain song plays or a memory surfaces.

Instead, you’ll find yourself embracing the emotion because you will slowly learn how cleansing and healing tears can be.

Fortunately, the coming year isn’t thrown at us all at once; but rather, it arrives

one

moment

at

a

time

and each of these moments can be taken one small step at a time.

A great question to ask yourself whenever you are feeling overwhelmed or upset is:

“What is the next thing?”

One decision,

one action,

one commitment

at a time will lead you into healing at your own pace.

Along the way, continue to ask yourself how you feel and what can help you to keep walking on a healthy path.

There is no right or wrong answer!

There will be hard days and there will be times when it may feel like all of the grief work that you have accomplished has been in vain and that you’ve regressed into deep sadness or despair ~

but hang in there!

Your emotions will come in waves that will overtake you one day and recede and allow you to breathe again the next.

Every feeling that you have is valid and normal.