Episode 3: Why Grief Gets Harder When the Support Stops | Beyond the Loss

Most people assume the hardest part of losing a child is the beginning.

But many parents will tell you—it’s what comes after.

In this episode, I want to sit with you in what I call the long after—that quiet space where the support has faded, life has moved on, and you’re left trying to make sense of who you are now.

This is the part of grief that isn’t often named.
The part where you may be functioning again… showing up… even appearing “okay” to others—
and yet, something inside you still doesn’t quite fit.

If you’ve ever found yourself asking,
Why does this still feel so hard?
Why am I not further along by now?

I want you to hear this clearly:

Nothing has gone wrong.

What you’re experiencing is not something to “get over.”
It’s the slow, often disorienting process of identity reorganization—learning how to live in a world that no longer feels the same.

In this conversation, I explore the difference between acceptance and integration, and what it means to hold both sorrow and a sense of peace at the same time—without needing to resolve either.

Listen & Connect:

Podcast: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SharonSpano-BeyondtheLoss-Host

Substack: https://substack.com/@drsharon

Website: https://sharonspano.com

For inquiries or to connect directly: sharon@sharonspano.com

If you are in the long after, this episode is simply here to meet you—without pressure, without expectation.

You are not late.
You are not doing this wrong.
And you are not alone.

Take gentle care, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Sharon

#ChildLoss #GriefIntegration #BeyondTheLoss #DrSharonSpano #IdentityAfterLoss #BereavedParents 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Beyond the Lost. This is a space for parents who have lost a child in any way at any age, where no grief is ranked, explained, or excluded. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, developmental coach, systems thinker, and a parent whose life was forever changed by the death of my own son Michael. When a child dies, life doesn't return to what it was. Identity shifts, meaning fractures, and yet life continues to ask something of us. These conversations are for parents living this reality and for the professionals who support them. My intention is to offer a space where loss is not compared, judged, or explained away. Most parents assume the hardest part of losing a child is the beginning, the shock, the funeral, the first year. But many parents will tell you the hardest part comes later, after the support fades and life expects you to return to normal. Because that's when something deeper begins. Not just grief, but the slow work of identity reorganizing. Today we're talking about what that long after really looks like. I'm Sharon Spano, and this is Beyond the Loss, Life and Identity After a Child Dies. Welcome and thank you for being here today. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, your host of Beyond the Loss. And today we're going to talk about what I like to call the long after. And that is that point after loss of a child that isn't talked about very much. It comes after the early days, after the casseroles and after the rituals of support and the celebration of lives and all those things. And those things begin to fade and people move on, but you're still not in a place where you're quite sure how to move on. It's the moment when the world starts moving again and you're expected to move with it. And I think of this period as the long after. When the attention moves on, in those early days after a child dies, there's often a great deal of attention. People show up, messages arrive, support feels very visible. And then slowly the world returns to its rhythms, as I alluded to a moment ago. And this isn't because people don't care. It's often because most cultures don't have a way to stay present with loss over time. And also people really just don't know how to support you beyond those early days. And I can remember being called to different events, parties, and you know, celebrations and things that we obviously wanted to be at and needed to be present on. My son died in September. And so here we were faced with the holidays very quickly. And most of uh those celebrations, particularly Christmas Eve, was at our house. And I know that first year my husband and I were not up for that. But even the things that we were going to, I really felt like I was very much in a fog, disoriented. I couldn't remember. People would come up and talk to me. I couldn't remember had they been at my son's celebration of life or not. Did they know that he'd passed or not? And I know people were concerned about me, but I remember feeling, you know, kind of awkward and disoriented in that I didn't really know how to communicate with them based on this confused state I was in. And I'm sure they felt as awkward as I did. So it can feel very disoriented. Let's talk a little bit about why that is. The long after isn't just lonely, it's confusing. And by this point, many parents are functioning again. You go back to work, again, you're going maybe to birthday celebrations or whatever the case may be, but it's like you're in this fog and nothing is working, nothing is showing up the way that it used to be. Other people around you may even appear strong, they may perceive you as being strong, but basically we're all kind of tiptoeing around the elephant in the room and we're really in a state of survival. But inside, something doesn't quite fit for that parent. And this is often when parents begin to wonder, why does this still feel so hard? It's been X amount of months, weeks, years even, and I'm still not quite myself. Why am I not further along by now? And I can remember, and I've been heard to say this often on podcast interviews, my husband at one point, and this was probably a year in, maybe, after our son Michael had passed, and my husband saying to me, Why are you doing better than I am? And my response was, I'm not doing better than you, I'm just doing things differently. And so that's an important thing to acknowledge that we're all going to be in this messy state of confusion and disorientation as we move to try to restructure our identity. We're going to be doing it at different paces and in different ways. So the question, why am I not further along by now? is not really the question, because the problem isn't you as the parent. It's the expectation that we put on ourselves or that we feel others are putting on us. And loss of this magnitude, the one of the most important people in your lives, doesn't resolve. I want to really stress that we keep talking about on my short videos, it reorganizes. We are actually reorganizing every system within us from the inside out. And I remember feeling that sense of reorganization. And I remember it just being very nuanced, moment to moment to moment, and often holidays being a moment. Like Mother's Day is one that for me, uh, people want to make it a big deal and they want to feel sad for me. But Mother's Day is not something that I feel sad about. And it's maybe kind of weird, and it's even interesting to me myself that I don't feel sad about it. But the reason is I've reframed it in my mind. Mother's Day for me was a day to help my son learn how to honor women. And I feel I did a good job of that. But Mother's Day to me now is just another day, and we do what we do, and I do it more for my husband than even for myself, or to honor my friends. So there'll be moments like that where you have to figure out who you are in the context of that moment. Then there's this pressure to perform normal. The long after is also where that sense of performance creeps in. There's an unspoken pressure to show resilience. And I remember feeling that very keenly, particularly around the preparation for my son's celebration of life, demonstrating that you're growing, that you're shifting, that you're moving, signaling that meaning has been made. And parents often feel caught between wanting to be honest and wanting to protect others from the discomfort. That's really why I wanted to create this space, because I found for myself I can be really truly honest with other parents, other friends of mine who have lost children, and about the things that often would seem weird or silly to someone that hasn't had this experience, because they're thinking you should be back to normal, and then you share this odd little idiosyncratic thing that's still gnawing at you, and people don't know what to make of that. And so we, as parents, we learn to carry the loss, as I say, quietly. We learn to internalize it. So here is something that I just wanted to share. And I've talked about it a lot in different interviews that I've done. But one of the things that was one of those quirky things for me was going to back in the day, Hallmark stores before they kind of disbanded, we all started buying at Target or at the supermarket. But it was something my son and I used to do where we'd go and get all the holiday cards together or Valentine's or whatever it was. And for me, that was just something that was very difficult for me to do without him. And it literally felt to me like when I walked into a Hallmark cards shop that all the other cards disappeared and all I could see were the cards that said, you know, that were meant for your son. And of course, I didn't have a son to buy a card for anymore. So I stopped going to those shops. I stopped sending out cards. I now do them electronically. But that's a weird little thing that I'm almost embarrassed to share because it's hard for people to understand. Like, why couldn't you get past that? But I think other parents out there, parents like you, can understand and probably have your own examples of things that just kind of rub you the wrong way or trigger a moment of sadness. Why is this phase often misunderstood then? Part of it is because many grief models focus on the early months of the first year, what we call acute grief, and they don't account for the ongoing nature of identity change that occurs. And you'll often hear me talk about the reason that child loss is more significant, not less important, but maybe significant in terms of the long-term effect of it, is because it totally disrupts the order of the family system. We technically say that a mother or father is not supposed to bury their child. That is not the order of nature. So the long after is not a failure to heal. It's the space where life and loss begin to coexist, what I often refer to as integration. But in the beginning, it is without resolution, and even later, more so in the long after. There is no resolution for this. We're not going to bring this person back. So I have to learn to reorganize myself, my systems, my identity in that liminal space. And so after that coexistence, something is required different, very different than support or sympathy. It requires presence. One of the things that I love about that moment is when people are comfortable enough to listen to me tell stories about my son. I love to tell stories about Michael. I have a lot of funny stories that I love to share. So one of the greatest things you can do as someone on the periphery of the person who's experienced the loss is to simply ask them, well, tell me about your son. I'd love to learn more. Tell me about your daughter. So integration, then, I want to be very clear about this. You'll hear me talk a lot about non-dual thinking, and that is being able to hold the capacity for both things at once. So the example that I often give is it is perfectly normal and okay for me to grieve the loss of my son. That won't ever go away. I will always miss him and wish he were here at some level. But is also equally true and okay for me to feel peacefulness, I guess is the word I want to use, in the reality that I do not miss the stress associated with my son because my son was physically disabled from birth. And there was a lot of caregiving and pressure on us as parents to keep him alive and to give him the best quality of life. So that part, the pressure and the stress and the responsibility, I do not miss. And I'm perfectly clear and understanding that the life and the reorganization of that life as I now know it is joyful and a wonderful opportunity for me to honor who he was, and I know it's what he'd want for us as well. So there is a point then where I just want to make this very important distinction. Integration, then, as I've defined it somewhat to you in this moment, is not the same as acceptance. Acceptance implies a form of resolution. Integration allows for the contradiction of both things to be in place at the same time. It allows for, as in the example I've given you, joy and sorrow to exist side by side. And I want to add that actually the sorrow is what increases the joy because it's sort of like, you know, you go through a long winter where everything is frozen and dead. And that's how we feel inside in those initial stages. But then spring comes and the flowers start to bloom and the trees come back bigger and stronger than ever. And that's the opportunity that's there for us. I think a lot of times we miss the opportunity because we feel guilt and shame, like we shouldn't be feeling the joy given the fact that we've lost this person in our lives. But I just want to encourage you in your own time and when it feels right for you to know that it is possible. It allows love to continue without explanation. And it allows, meaning integration allows life to move forward without leaving anyone behind. So we're not leaving them behind. When it shows up, it shows up. And again, there's no perfect way. But it can be the long after can be a key turning point for you. For many parents, the long after is when the deeper questions emerge. Who am I now? What really matters to me? What kind of life is possible? How can I honor my son or daughter? And these questions don't demand answers, they just invite attention and they deserve time. So if you find yourself in the long after, know this. You're not late and you're not doing it wrong, and you're not alone in this phase, even if it feels that way. And I know many days that it does. In the next episode, I want to bring in a different voice, a parent that I'm looking forward to interviewing, who has lived in this long after and can speak to what life looks like when old maps no longer apply. For now, thank you for listening and staying with the conversation. Again, take gentle care and I'll see you next week. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this conversation stirred something for you, you don't need to make sense of it right away. There's no timeline for understanding and no right way to carry what remains. Beyond the loss exists to honor parents who've lost a son or daughter and all the complexity that this implies, and to support the professionals who walk alongside them without comparison, judgment, or explanation. Wherever you are in the long after, you are not required to arrive anywhere else. Until next time, take gentle care.