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What I Learned in the Three Years Since Losing My Daughter
It’s still year three and I’m still learning.
The first year
There is no timeline for grief after the loss of a child. That’s one of the first things I learned after I lost my 15-year-old daughter, Ana, to cancer on March 22nd, 2017.
It’s been 32 months since Ana died. At first, it was impossible to believe that she was gone. I used to obsess over her last breath and the cold, somber funeral home where I saw her body for the last time, just to prove to myself that it was real.
In those first early months of grief, I learned how to carry the pain. I spent the twelve months following Ana’s death trying to make sense of my life and attempting to connect with her spirit rather than dwell on the last, terrible months of her life.
Celebrating holidays, birthdays, and events was out of the question. Celebrating anything at all was impossible. Navigating the world as a family of three, instead of a family of four, also presented a tremendous learning curve.
Losing a child is not unlike bringing a new baby into the world. There is a period of disbelief. There is a reevaluation of your worldview and your priorities. The key difference (besides the obvious) is that most people can relate to the joy new parents…
