Episode 6: Finding Answers to the Hardest Questions in Grief | Beyond the Loss

What happens when the questions after child loss never fully fade?

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Loss: Life & Identity After a Child Dies, I explore the emotional weight of living without clear answers and the quiet search for meaning that often follows profound loss.

Why did this happen?
Why my child?
How do we move through life when everything feels altered?

Over time, many grieving parents come to realize that healing is not always about closure. More often, it involves learning how to carry sorrow, love, memory, and identity in a new way.

In this conversation, we reflect on grief after child loss, mourning, emotional healing, identity shifts, and the gradual inner changes that can unfold with time—not because the pain disappears, but because we begin to relate to it differently.

🎧 New episode every Wednesday on Beyond the Loss: Life and Identity After a Child Dies with Dr. Sharon Spano.

📌 Connect & Continue the Conversation:

Website: https://sharonspano.com

Podcast: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/podcast-beyond-the-loss/

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

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

If this episode resonates with you, I hope you’ll consider subscribing, sharing, or leaving a comment. These conversations help create more compassionate space for grief, reflection, and life after loss.

Take gentle care.

Transcript: Here

#ChildLoss #BereavedParents #GriefSupport #BeyondTheLoss #LifeAfterLoss #ParentGrief #IdentityAfterLoss #TraumaticLoss #Mourning #DrSharonSpano

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. What if meaning doesn't come from answers, but from how you begin to live inside the questions? I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, and welcome to Beyond the Loss, a podcast that explores life and identity after a child dies. Today I want to talk to you about something that often sits just beneath the surface in this experience, but it isn't always easy to name. And that is this. How do you begin to experience a life that still holds meaning when there are no answers? Because at some point, most parents who have lost a son or daughter come up against this truth. These are the questions that don't resolve. Why did this happen? Why my child? Why did our lives unfold in the way that it did? And no matter how much time passes, those questions don't necessarily go away. We've been taught as a culture, often without realizing it, that meaning comes from understanding. If we can explain something, if we can make sense of it, then somehow we can live with it. But this kind of loss doesn't fit into the model, and there isn't an answer that brings relief in the way that we expect or that society expects. And so what can happen is this we keep searching, we keep longing, we keep trying to figure it out, hoping that if we just think about it in the right way or find the right perspective, something will finally settle and I'll have peace. But often the opposite happens. You've often heard me say what you resist will continue to persist. So the harder I fight against the process of grief, the bigger it becomes. The more we try to force meaning through answers, the more disconnected we can feel. But whether we realize it or not, there is a shift that is occurring deep within us. And this is a miracle. This is an amazing piece of this whole process. This is where something begins to shift and dramatically change. That's why people say to you, Oh, time will heal. But those words have come from history, from experiences, from people who have been through traumatic losses, and they know that over time something does begin to shift. But you've got to do the work around that. If you stay stuck, it may be harder to recognize the shift. And it's different for each and every one of us because it doesn't happen all at once and not in a way that is easy to see. But over time, meaning starts to show up in a different way, not in the form of resolution, not as an answer, but as something that begins to take shape in how you're actually living your life. And it's what you'll often hear me refer to as integration. It's what I've experienced myself and what I long for each of you to experience when the time is right. It's not about resolving the loss. That will never happen. And it's not about moving on, it's more about moving forward, but not finding closure necessarily in that way that we typically think of closure. It's the capacity to live a life that includes both loss and love without needing to resolve either one of them, just accepting that we're leaning into the practice of what I call non-dual thinking. I can hold space in my human existence for the experience of both. And this doesn't happen in big dramatic moments, but it shows up in small ways. You find yourself present in something, you notice a moment that doesn't feel as heavy as it once did. Perhaps a friend of yours has a child or a grandchild and you rejoice in that moment. You start to experience and appreciate things in bigger ways. You might even feel a connection to someone or even to yourself in a way that you never have before. But it doesn't mean that the grief is gone. In my early years, I used to make the distinction between grief and mourning. To me, mourning is that early process of you're in it and you're doing what you need to do just to breathe, to stay alive, to get through the daily routines of life. But the grief to me is the long after, that process of knowing that I will never be the same and that this person will always be someone I miss or long for. What it means when we think of integration, then is that something is shifting. And part of this we always have to remember is about our identity because that has changed dramatically. How you are becoming a different version of yourself. Who you were before is no longer, and nothing will ever be the same again after this dramatic loss. Who you are now is an evolving self that carries a profound experience of life. And the quiet work of allowing those two realities to coexist together is where the work is done in whatever form you choose to take. So you're not replacing one with the other, and you're not trying to go back to the life you had before because that's impossible. But you are slowly integrating what you live through into who you are becoming. As I said, this takes time, often years, and those years are different for each and every one of us. And I do believe that that is somehow dependent on how our child died, the circumstances around the death, the age, all of those many factors. There often isn't a clear moment where we say, this is when it changed. I hear different things all the time from parents. But one day something feels differently. And you realize you're not only surviving your life, you're actually living again, even if just a little. And how are you carrying your child with you in your life today? For me, because of the way and the nature of my son and his disability and his long illness, I always try to remind myself, because Michael was so much about joy and happiness. I try to remind myself that I honor him every time I experience a moment of joy. It's not always easy, but I try to live my life in honor of him. That just is something I do in my own head that makes it easier for me, even when things feel kind of dark. So to help you on this journey, I want to offer you a pattern to practice every week when I'm doing these solo casts. Something very simple to think about, carry with you, not in an effort to fix anything, but just to begin to notice what may already be shifting within. And don't worry if you don't feel things shifting. That's part of the process as well. We're just trying to call attention and deepen our awareness so that when and if something does begin to shift, you will have awareness of it. So here's a pattern that I see often again and again, and is why I want to offer this to you is again, we keep searching for this meaning through answers, but most of the time there are no answers. There's always something that's going to go wrong or off that's going to put us in this place that we're in today. So when over time meaning is actually revealed, I believe, through how we're living. And that's why I'm asking you to call attention to that. So here's the practice. Over the next few days, I want you to just gently notice moments, however small, where something in your life feels different than it once did before. I'm not saying it has to be better and we're not trying to fix anything. Just notice if it is different. That is enough. You might notice, for example, a moment where you feel slightly present, maybe where at other social events you're kind of in a fog, or maybe a moment where something didn't feel as heavy as it once did. You might notice a moment where you feel connected to someone or even more connected to your own self. And pay attention to your body and to what we call the somatic experiences or energies that might be rising up within you. Let me remind you that these moments are not going to answer any of those harder questions for you, but they may be showing you something. They may be showing something that you're intended to know. I don't want you to think you don't need to do anything with them. You don't need to try to understand them. Just notice that is enough. And what might these moments be telling you about the life you're slowly stepping back into? Remember that meaning doesn't always arrive as an answer. Sometimes it reveals itself quietly through how you're already living and the questions. That's so important. The questions that rise up. A meaningful life for yourself and the people around you after loss doesn't come from those answers. It comes from how you begin to live slowly, honestly, and in your own way, inside a reality that may never fully make sense again, but may never need to. Until next week, this is Dr. Sharon Spano reminding you to take gentle care. 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.