Get counseling to help you process your grief with your spouse and on your own. You will process it differently. My husband and I were very different. I had a lot of feelings of guilt that I was a bad mother because I could not “heal” or “help” my daughter.
Mother
I stopped second guessing myself
You can go back and you can second guess every decision that you made while your child was alive. It’s really easy to play Monday morning quarterback and say “if I’d only done this, if I’d only done that, if I only didn’t do this…” I realized a couple months into this that every decision we made for our son, every single one, we made, first of all, with the best of intentions and second of all, with all the knowledge we had and all the information we had at that time. So I stopped second guessing myself. In the beginning I did that a lot. I would say to my husband, “What if I hadn’t had that conversation in the hallway, would he still be alive? Would he have lived for another day?” But, the end result was the end result. I think one of the most beneficial things I ever did, and I can thank my husband for it, was I accepted that we did what we did with his best interest, and with every bit of information we had.
Mother
Was I a bad mother?
Get counseling to help you process your grief with your spouse and on your own. You will process it differently. My husband and I were very different. I had a lot of feelings of guilt that I was a bad mother because I could not “heal” or “help” my daughter.
Mother
I stopped beating myself up over decisions I had made
I realized that a lot of parents second guess every decision they made. The best thing that you can do is not to do this because you would never have made a decision to put your child in harm, even when that is the only decision you can make.
Mother
The guilt that everybody has as a parent, the “if onlys” and the blaming of yourself, start to slowly wear off. I think after six months, that’s when I was ready to say “This is life now and I suppose we better get on with it.”
Mother
The guilt machine
As a mother, you have an built-in guilt machine that goes into overdrive when something goes wrong. Yeah, “if I hadn’t gone past a diesel truck” or something as ridiculous, like “if I’d worn blue on Wednesday,” it’s just silly little things that make no sense but you can’t help it because that’s what you’re meant to do.
Mother
Glad that he’s not in pain
I remember the first time that I realized I didn’t have to drive to the hospital. And I remember thinking that’s kind of nice that I don’t have to come to the hospital. I remember feeling so guilty that I thought that because I still, as much as I love not having to drive here every day, I still would do it and I would happily do it. So being happy that I didn’t have to do it didn’t mean I was happy that my son had died. But when you first have that thought, like this woman I was talking to, and she said the first time after their daughter died they were able to go out to eat, because their daughter had a lot of feeding issues. And she said “I feel so guilty that I thought ‘wow this is nice.'” And I said “Thinking ‘wow this is nice’ doesn’t mean ‘oh wow, it’s kind of nice that she’s dead.'” You know, I don’t ever think “I’m glad my child died.” No, of course not. But you know you get to a point where I’m glad he’s not in pain, even though I would take him back that way like that. Just because I can accept that I like the fact that I don’t have to drive here doesn’t mean that I wished this to happen. There is a huge amount of guilt that any parent carries.
Mother
I appreciate that no one should have to make those difficult decisions, least of all for their kids. Most adults haven’t even had those discussions never mind for someone they’re in charge of that they’re supposed to protect and secure, and feel like they can keep anything from happening to them. I think it adds to the amount of guilt that parents feel after their death. The guilt is inevitable. Their parents are going to find something that they should have done or “What if? What if? What if?” I think it just adds to that. The heaviness of the weight of the decisions, always wondering “Did I tell them it was ok too soon? Did we pull the plug too early? Should I have given it another week? Did I try everything? What didn’t I do? Should I have talked to another doctor? Should I have…”
Mother