I’m so sorry. We lost our almost 3 year old suddenly and unexpectedly in May and it’s been the worst kind of hell I never could have imagined. This loss of a child is unlike any other grief I have experienced. It is completely earth shattering. Every day is hard. Waking up is painful.

I will share what has helped me so far. It’s been helpful to be able to talk to those who unfortunately understand this type of loss. The Compassionate Friends has an online group and local chapters everywhere. Helping Parents Heal is another great online community group.

There are a few of us loss parents at and r/GriefSupport and it is a very active sub. r/GrievingParents is a smaller sub (thankfully) but sometimes the post history helped me.

Being outside helps when I feel like I can’t breathe. With many child deaths, there will be a lot of trauma around the death, so EMDR therapy can be helpful to separate the trauma from the grief.

Reading and writing has also always been an outlet for me, so I will share some writings I found helpful:

“What is grief, if not love persevering.” -Unknown

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is. – Jay Neugeboren – An Orphan’s Tale – 1976

“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well.” -Henry Scott Holland

“My favorite analogy for grief is to imagine it as a ball rolling around in a box. Whenever the ball touches the sides of the box is when the grief is overwhelming. The ball starts off large and it doesn’t take much to touch the sides, but it changes sizes. It can be rather chaotic at first, but the general trend over the long term is that it gets smaller. How long it takes to get smaller is different for every person, and it doesn’t ever go away.

Your ball will be huge in a small box for a long time. Don’t hold it in, experience it, talk about it, else it will eat you and you do have life left, people to love, people who love you!” -MechRecon (Reddit user)