We Support Each Other but we Journey Alone

The title of this blog was posted on a support group FB page just now. I read it and thought that it summed up our new world perfectly. Bereaved parents form a unique group within society, and although we understand each other’s loss, can be a shoulder for each other to lean on, and even empathise in a way that muggles will never understand, we still walk through life alone. You can be lonely in a crowd.

Even being part of a marriage or partnership doesn’t pull you together and it can have the opposite effect when you lose a child. Patsy’s journey through this hell is very different from mine. We’ve lost the same wonderful girl yet our pain is quite different. The language that we use, the pain that we experience, the emptiness that we feel is totally different no matter how similar it may appear to the outside world.

But ….. the second word in the title is the key. Support. We support each other. We listen, we talk, we cry together. And we can laugh together too. It isn’t a crime, nor is it wrong. We can laugh and cry all at the same time.

A strange world, that is as alien as Mars.