A Mom's Perspective on Siblings and Child Loss

One thing I have tried to be aware of as I share here is to only tell my story, which is unique from my husband's or my daughter's story of losing Oliver and moving forward while carrying grief. While it was a shared experience, we have our own perspectives, feelings, pace, struggles, and victories. Grief is a journey we have walked together and always strived to support each other in, and yet so much of the heart work is individual. With that in mind again, I do want to try to share today a bit about what grief was like for my daughter, not as a way to tell her story, but from my perspective as her mom, in hopes that it is helpful to other parents who have lost children and are helping siblings grieve.

Oliver loved my daughter from the moment he met her three days after his second birthday. My mom helped him bring her a teddy bear and some homemade cake to the hospital. When she was an infant, he often called for both of us to come and look at what he was doing, using a combined version of mama and my daughter's name to make one name for the two of us together. From the moment she could pick up her head, my daughter was in love too. I often had to nurse her in the other room because otherwise she wouldn't stop looking at him long enough to finish eating. She was the happiest baby once she was strong enough to lay on her belly, push up her head and chest, and watch him.

One of the reasons we homeschooled was so my children could have a close relationship and enjoy spending time together. This was also enhanced by being a military family who moved frequently and had to say "good-bye for now" to many friends over the years. They were each other's one constant friend. While we faced plenty of sibling squabbles and what we called "trying to get each other's goat", in general they enjoyed being together and were always each other's biggest cheerleaders. Although, they did both think the other played the most boring softball or baseball games ever. They did school together, played legos together, and waited for the bus to bring the neighbor kids home so they could play outside with them together. When Oliver passed away, all of that just disappeared. Suddenly my shy, quiet, perfect mix of independent and go with the flow, eight-year-old daughter was all alone.

I have so many pictures of my daughter 
and Oliver together, but I do try to protect 
her privacy on the blog, so flower pictures
it is!

When she was in the freshest stages of grief, she was still OK and even happy much of the time. Ice cream still tasted good, Uno with cousins was still fun, and making a strawberry pie still sounded like a great idea. She could swing from happy to sad and back again quite quickly. We included her in the decision-making process as we planned a funeral and memorial and encountered many firsts without Oliver. We also tried to give her space to still be a kid. 

Much of how she dealt with her grief didn't look like sadness. There were plenty of tears, but there was also a lot of whining, resistance, and eruptions of emotions. These eruptions of emotions could almost be scheduled for a while. They would build over a few weeks and then  come spilling out. The trigger was always different, but the timeline was predictable. For a time, any parenting challenge we faced seemed to be driven by her grief. We tried to help her give a name to what she was feeling and dealing with. We offered comfort, grace, understanding, and a tiny bit of correction, and prayed for wisdom and healing.

One of the hardest parts for all three of us was sleep. It was hard to fall asleep, and especially hard to stay asleep for an entire night. Again, there seemed to be nothing to do but offer comfort and understanding, and pray for wisdom and healing.

She had to learn how to play again. And I had to learn to play with her as moms of only children do. She has always been an artist, and her art became even more important during this time. In addition to the painting and drawing she was already doing, she learned to embroider, crochet, and sew. I think the creative outlet ended up being a big part of her healing journey.

Books have always been something I wanted to share with my family and have always helped us as we encountered the challenges of life. Books ended up helping us all in our grief as well. In addition to the books I read to her, she started listening to audiobooks and continues to do so to this day. For the most part the books were not specifically about grief, but were just good books that spoke truth about the world, reminded us that we weren't the only people experiencing suffering, and offered hope of victory. I will share some of these books in a future post.

One thing my husband and I were immediately thankful for in a new way after Oliver's death was all the teachers and pastors who had taught our children at church, Sunday School, VBS, AWANA, and Bible study. Nothing can prepare a person for an unexpected death, but our daughter was able to stand on her child-like faith, growing Biblical knowledge, and relationship with Jesus. She knew the truth of salvation, redemption, love, and heaven and continued to grow in her knowledge and understanding. One of my favorite keepsake of Oliver's is a little craft from VBS that he made shortly before his death. My daughter found it in his desk several weeks after he died. It is made from popsicle sticks taped together, and on it he wrote, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. John 20:31". With this new gratitude for teachers and mentors, we continued to let other people pour into my daughter's life and faith.  

My daughter is a very private person and does not often share about her loss with others. She does however love to share stories and memories of Oliver with her family and old and new friends, whether they knew Oliver or not. My mom has a stepping stone in her garden which reads: "If I had a flower for every memory of you, I could walk through my garden forever." My daughter likes to linger and share in her garden of memories, and I am thankful she brings me there. I have been afraid at times of the grief I will find there, but she is right and I always find joy in the garden of memories too.

Looking back, I can recognize all the stages of grief in her journey, not linearly but circling around a few times. Compared to my husband and me, she moved through the stages quickly. She achieved a level of acceptance by one year that I don't have at almost five. By God's grace in ways I don't understand, her child-like faith, our prayers, the love of her friends and family, time, and the relentless growth of childhood pushed her through the dark valley. To watch her is to see: this is her life, she loves it; she misses her brother, yet she is happy. 

Recently I have noticed she has moved to a new place in her grief. She is a teenager now and is seeing and feeling things through the eyes of a teenager. She has had to re-grieve some things. As I admire her bravery and her acceptance and strive to achieve the same, I also see in her example that grief will never be over. The goal is not to arrive in a place where we no longer feel grief or sadness, but to carry the grief well and faithfully and to live in joyful contentment in the present moment. 

I see a knowledge in her that few kids and even many adults don't have. I can't really describe it, but it's a deep understanding of how painful life can be and how we can't prevent that pain. By God's grace when I look at her, I see this knowledge not as a weakness but a strength. I wish she didn't know this, and yet I know that the empathy and care she gives to others stems from this and is a beautiful thing. I pray that God will continue to use this knowledge she holds for His glory. 

When I asked my daughter for permission to write this post, I also asked her what she thought we did well or poorly in helping her grieve. Predictably, she said the most important thing we did was get her a dog! Our dog has been a comfort to her and also a firm reminder that God does answer prayers and does have good things for her. The other thing she mentioned was just our willingness to still do things together. To still go camping, sign-up for sports, go to the pool, visit the ice cream shop, etc. These things were so painful to do in the beginning and occasionally still bring fresh sadness, but I too agree it was important for her healing journey that we did them. 

Many times I wished I knew someone who had lost a sibling so I could ask them questions and know what my daughter needed. It took surprisingly long for me to realize that I was that person. I had lost a sibling, and even though our situations were different because I was much older when my sister died, I could use what I had learned to help my daughter. I knew what she needed was time, space, connection with family and friends, creativity, music, biblical truth, books, honesty, acceptance to feel whatever emotion she was feeling, comfort, and a little push to try new things and get to work again. 

When Oliver passed away, my husband and I were so worried about what would happen to our family and especially our daughter. How could we give her a beautiful life without him? How could we care for her when we were so sad? When everything felt so broken? When there would always be a hole in our family where Oliver should have been? Could we believe that God would work even this for our daughter's good? That her faith would not be destroyed in this valley but built in it? Part of us wanted to be in heaven with Oliver, while the other part of us knew we needed to be here with our daughter. We resolved to trust God and do our best to move forward for her and with her. By God's grace, she has and we have. If you are facing a similar valley of grief, turn to Him and He will lead you as well.