Episode 9: Life After Child Loss: How Grief Changes Shape Over Time | Beyond the Loss

In this episode, I begin a new series called *Life After Child Loss* by exploring the difference between grief and mourning, and how both may shape the long journey after the death of a son or daughter.

For many grieving parents, the early experience of loss can feel like survival. We do what we need to do to breathe, to function, and to move through a life that no longer feels familiar.

Over time, grief may begin to change. It does not disappear. It does not mean we have moved on, found closure, or left our child behind. Instead, grief may become part of the ongoing relationship we continue to have with the child we love.

In this conversation, I reflect on my own experience after the death of my son, Michael, and how I came to understand mourning as the immediate reality of living inside the absence, while grief became the longer relationship with love, memory, longing, and identity.

This episode is an invitation to consider how love continues, how grief may change shape, and how our children may still be present in the life we are living now.

I also offer a gentle practice for the week: noticing one quiet way your child still belongs in your life. It may be a photograph, a song, a phrase, a place, a ritual, a memory, or even a quality within yourself that has been shaped by your child.

The presence of grief does not mean we have failed to live.
And the presence of life does not mean we have left our child behind.

If you are grieving the loss of a child, supporting a bereaved parent, or walking alongside grieving families, I hope this episode brings comfort, validation, and a deeper sense of understanding.

*In this episode, I talk about:*

• The difference between grief and mourning after child loss
• Why early grief can feel like survival
• How grief may become part of a continuing relationship with your child
• Why integrated grief does not mean closure or moving on
• How love remains present even when your child is no longer physically here
• Why joy can still belong in a life shaped by loss
• How culture, family history, and personal experience influence grief
• A simple practice for noticing how your child still belongs in your life

*Connect with me:*

Website: https://sharonspano.com
Podcast: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/podcast-beyond-the-loss/
YouTube: youtube.com/@SharonSpano-BeyondtheLoss-Host
Substack: substack.com/@drsharon

*Interested in Being a Guest on Beyond the Loss?*

Apply here to share your story:
https://sharonspano.com/podcast-guest-beyond-the-loss/

Transcript: Here

*About Beyond the Loss*

*Beyond the Loss: Life and Identity After a Child Dies* is a podcast dedicated to helping grieving parents, bereaved families, and professionals navigate the emotional, relational, and identity shifts that follow the death of a child. Through compassionate conversations and clinical insight, I create space for healing, understanding, and honest reflection after profound grief.

Transcript

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. Today begins a new series of conversations that I'm calling life after child loss. In earlier episodes, I've spoken about identity after the death of a child, belonging, disruption of the family systems, and what it means to begin integrating an experience that can never be undone. Over the next several episodes, however, I want to take that conversation a little bit further. I want to go a bit deeper into what I've been calling the long after, how grief changes but still remains the same, how our love doesn't end in the absence, how the relationship to our son or daughter may take on a different form, but is still deeply present in how we live out our day-to-day lives. And I want to begin with two words that we often use when speaking about loss. And those two words are grief and mourning. In the Greek literature, these words are generally understood in a very specific way. Grief is usually defined as the inner experience of loss, the sorrow, the longing, the emotions, the many memories that we bring to mind, and the meaning that we carry internally in the context of such a loss. Mourning, however, is often understood as the outward expression of that grief. Our tears, our prayers, any rituals that we engage in, the storytelling, journaling, which is one that I did a lot after my son Michael first passed away, visiting a grave site, perhaps, or any one of the many ways that we to really acknowledge and honor the person we love who has passed away. In my own life, I see grief as abstract and mourning as more concrete, and that it is often about the things that we do. And I want to respect these distinctions because they are very crucial to how we go about life after loss of this nature. But I also want to share that in my own experience, I came to use these words a bit differently because I really had never really thought about what they meant. I just, in my own way, in my own effort to create meaning out of my experience, I began to think of them in a very specific but yet different way. Not because I was trying to create a theory or anything like that, but because I needed language that would somehow help me understand what I was living. So in the early years after my son died, I came to think of mourning as the period when I was simply doing what I needed to do, to breathe, to function, to get through the daily routines of my life, a life that no longer made any sense to me at all without him. I was basically trying to survive. And I know many of you out there understand what that feels like and what it's like to be in that very uh survival mode in the early stages of grief. So mourning for me then was immediate. It was the experience of trying to live inside the unbearable reality that my son was no longer physically present. But over time, I began to distinguish between my perceived experience of mourning and grief itself. And I told myself that grief, what would be for me the long-term relationship with Michael and the fact that he was no longer with us, but the relationship that would still continue and how it might be different, knowing that I would always miss him and that there would always be moments where I longed for him, and that I would never again be exactly the same person that I was before he died. But more importantly, what I came to realize was that I didn't need to be that same person. In fact, it was impossible to even imagine that I ever could be that same person again. Now I'm not offering my own semantic differentiations here as truth. This is just my experience. Hopefully, it'll be useful to some of you out there. But I offer these distinctions because they helped me in that time make a very important decision. And the decision that I made was this. I innately knew, as I said a moment ago, that I would always grieve the loss of Michael. But I also made a decision that I didn't have to mourn for the rest of my life. I didn't have to be stuck or defined by the loss or the rituals. So, in retrospect, I think that the desire for these distinctions was born out of the reality that I grew up in a household where grief was very loudly and often continuously expressed. Some of you know what I mean if you come from a Mediterranean culture as I do. I've spoken about my amazing grandmother Isabel, who I lived with for all my life. And I remember her and her wailing counterparts, and I've talked about it on other shows, but you know, they would come together. I remember as a kid, we would get on the train and we would go to New Mexico where my grandmother's uh relatives and my grandmother herself was from. She was born in a little village called Ceboyata, and we would go there, and in those days, very foreign to me, not something we did in California where I lived at the time, but they would bring the casket into the house, and all these elderly women would come together with black veils over their faces and all dressed in black and candles burning, and they would literally wail and pray for hours on end in this room around the casket. And the casket would be left there overnight. And I remember as a kid sleeping in the room next to that living room, being like creeped out all night over these rituals. So it was never something that I wanted to bring into my own life. And certainly when my son died, by then we were at a place where we're now doing more celebratory memorial type services, which is what we did for our son. But I remember my grandmother also had candles. She had this long credenza in the dining room, and there were candles and pictures of my uncle Roy, who was lost in World War II. And the candles were always going and a multitude of photographs displayed across this whole dining room experience where she was constantly honoring and mourning the loss of her son. Not a right or wrong kind of thing, just a different experience. So I grew up in a house where mourning or mourning rituals were fairly dramatic. And I guess I wanted to, when my own son died, I was trying to find a way to honor those family rituals that I grew up with, those traditions, but at the same time wanting to do it a little bit differently, wanting to let some of that go. What's important to note, and what I really want you to get from this story is that I never put a timeline on how or when this transition from mourning to grief, if there is a transition at all for us, should actually occur. Because there's a difference, I believe, between being completely overtaken by the immediacy of loss and learning slowly and often unevenly how to live in relationship with what remains, what is left behind. I can't stress enough, and as I always do, that it's different for each of us. So in retrospect, I think this transition, for me anyway, was also very much related to my own son's hopeful words after 9-11. They just kept ringing through me in these early years of grief and still do. And I remember after 9-11, my son and I would sit at the kitchen table. And back then, of course, we still had newspapers and we were still reading them. And my son would look through the litany of names of firemen and other first responders that had passed. And usually we'd sit at the table and have breakfast, and I'd find myself teary-eyed and really pretty torn up, as we all were in those first weeks and months. And then one day, my son, in all his innocence and his beauty and his love for life, he gently said, You know, mom, I think it's time for us to be happy again. And those words never left me. And that was his way of saying that we can hold space for the grief, but we need to somehow find a way to live on. And I kept that premise in my mind throughout these years of transition. Whenever I get down or whenever I feel like I it's just really too hard to imagine that I'll never see him again, I'm reminded of his words. And I know in my heart of hearts that he would want me to live the fullest possible life, even in his absence. So the thing I want to stress there is that even in the dire situation of 9-11, we did not forget those who were lost in the terrible tragedy, but we didn't let it define us either as a nation, as a people, as individuals. And again, I've hung on to those words, and I somehow feel that what I've come to recognize over time was that the loss of Michael has not become less important. It's just that I carry the loss quite differently. And I offer that to those of you in the early stages of grief, no timeline, but just to give you some hope beyond the platitude of time heals all, that there is a process that you're in the middle of, and there is some relief on the other side of this process. So if we look at the professional literature on grief and mourning, there's language that comes closer to describing what I just spoke to and what I experienced. Researchers sometimes speak about acute grief and then integrated grief, which I've been speaking a lot about over the past few weeks. But acute grief, again, just to redefine it, is that early, often overwhelming experience of loss. The type of loss where you wake up the next morning or many mornings after and you hope and imagine that it was a dream, that it didn't really happen. Acute grief is when the longing, the disbelief, the pain, and the disruption really dominate our lives and our thoughts. I remember the first time I realized that I was at a place where I wasn't thinking about every single second that led up to Michael's actual transition on the actual day. For many years, I knew it's 601, it's 602, this happened, this happened. Then eventually those things start to fade away and you start to forget the trauma and the tragedy, or at least I was able to, and then I was able to start to remember the happy memories again. So let me stress that integration of grief does not mean the grief is gone. It does not mean closure. And it does not mean, and this is so important, that we've moved on or left our child behind. It means that over time grief becomes integrated into the larger reality of who we are and how we live, but it is still there. It just looks differently. It can show up in our dreams. I know that's very real for me. Anniversaries, holidays, we've spoken about, family events, even the quiet moments when you're alone, all of a sudden, a recognition of everything our child is not here to experience. And that is particularly true for those of you that lost parents during a pregnancy or right after the baby was delivered, or in those first early years, as I know is quite obvious, really a very, very tragic event because you didn't even get to experience this child at all. But the love is still there. That is so important that we remember that bond, that thread of love is still there. So allow me to expand on this distinction because to be clear, integration, again, is not about forgetting or letting your child behind. It's just so important because I think parents really struggle with that, feeling that if I move into happiness again, I'm betraying my child. It is not about denying the pain or the suffering or detaching yourself from your child. As a parent, we never stop loving our child because they are no longer physically present. Think about it. If you have had the experience of a son or daughter going off to college and they're not with you, and you barely see them, and you're lucky if they answer your phone calls, you don't love them any less. They're still a big part of your life. So integration is definitely not about arriving at any place where the loss no longer matters. It is the growing capacity to live a life that includes your child, the love of that child, and the loss. I've often talked about this as non-dual thinking, without requiring that any of these realities disappear. It's also what you often heard me talk about again, where we're holding that space in our hearts and minds for all of this. That's what integration is. We're holding all of the experience together and it can all simultaneously exist. Now, I want to say that I think often we take, we get this very wrong in our culture. And it's partly why I want to have these conversations, because I think parents feel this very keenly. Society kind of puts this upon us because people assume that if we're still talking about our child, if we're still going to a gravesite, if we're still writing letters to our child or honoring birthdays, if we still feel grief rise up and unexpected moments, that perhaps we have not, quote, moved on, and that we are still processing our grief. I did a whole show on this a few weeks ago. And I want to be clear, I am and will always be, as will probably most of you, still processing our grief because the grief changes as we change, as we age, mature, whatever that change looks like, the grief itself starts to change. What I'd love for us to be able to consider is that when we accept that grief is now a part of who we are in this integration that I've been talking about, and who we become as a result of the loss, that we are positioned, this is so important, we are positioned now for something new, bigger, perhaps even better to emerge in our lives and who we are. There is a potential then for our grief and any expression thereof to be an even more powerful expression of our love for our son or daughter. That to me is just a huge way, and it's going to again look different for each of us, a huge way for us to honor who they were in their lives. When my son Michael died, my relationship with him changed, as I said. Obviously, I had a lot more time because he required a lot of care being physically disabled. So I could no longer physically care for him in the way I had throughout his life. I could no longer hear his voice, his laughter, his humor, which was such a big part of who he was, his amazing smile, none of that was available to me. And I think what many of us start to worry about is that we're going to forget those things. And that's why it's important, I think, for many of us. I know for me, I want to keep him alive. I want to tell stories about him. I want to talk about him with friends and family. One thing I knew for sure, though, even though I talk about this and I did so this past year on Mother's Day, that it's just another day for me. But I know in my heart of hearts that relationship is still there. I am still his mother. He is still my son. And so I am still in relationship with that being. For part of me, continuing that relationship has been remembering what Michael taught me about joy, because he was so much about joy and happiness. And I sometimes remind myself that when I allow myself to experience joy, which isn't always easy, then I'm not leaving him behind. I'm actually bringing him to life again. And I'm honoring something essential about who he was. That doesn't mean that every joyful moment comes easily. And it doesn't mean that it is absent of grief. Again, it's about holding them both together. It means that my relationship with him continues to shape how I live. Every parent out there listening will experience grief and mourning in different ways. And for one parent, it may be tending a gravesite, as my husband, Ralph, so often does. For another, it may be sharing stories about your child as I love to do. For another one of you, it may be carrying forward something your child loved, or keeping some kind of private ritual, or noticing the way your child continues to shape the values, choices, or the relationships of your family. This is often more common than we recognize because families and the reorganization of their systems often do that quite naturally in honor of the memory of the person no longer there. Again, there's no prescribed form for the relationship and how it should look. And there's no right way to carry the love forward. What's important is that you do, and I want to be careful here to say that grief can become integrated is not to say that every parent should be in a particular place by a certain time. I reiterate this often. There is no standard timeline for grief. There is no moment when someone else gets to decide that your grief should now look a certain way, that you should be doing a certain thing, because there are so many factors that play into our journey. The circumstances of your child's death, as I've talked about before, the age at the time of the death, and even to include if your child was lost in the earlier years or later stages of a pregnancy. The overall family system matters, and the resources and supports available to you are equally relevant to how you move through the process. And another thing that we often don't really think about is our own unique history, how it determines our process. And I talked a little bit about my early ancestors and the way that grief was experienced in my household as a child. That was a big factor in terms of how we handled my own son's memorial service. Not trying to dishonor the history, but knowing that I didn't want that level of drama simply because I didn't have the bandwidth for it. So, in my own experience, another example I can offer you is that Michael was born with a very rare metabolic disorder. And I experienced tremendous shock and grief upon his arrival that was in many ways far more intense than even his departure, because again, it was unexpected. And I often have written about it as the loss of the dream child. So there were doctors in our world at that time that predicted that Michael would only live to the age of two. And that somehow, as odd as this sounds, uh, going back into history and background, prepared me for his transition some 27 years later. Again, there's no prescription for any of this, but part of that was because he was critical for four years. Any of you that have been caregivers through a critical illness know what I mean when I say, even though we mourn the loss and the grief continues, there's a part of us that if our loved one has suffered, we are relieved that that suffering is somehow over. That was very real for me at the end of Michael's life. So all of this, an invitation to notice again that grief may change shape over time, even while love remains entirely present. And perhaps it this is the deeper truth that is underneath this new series that I want to just do through the month of June before we move into other topics altogether. After the loss of a child, the question I put before you is not whether we stop loving them, because we do not. The question becomes: how does that love continue to live in us? How does the relationship continue to shape us? How does that experience continue to expand us? And what does it mean in terms of how we live out the rest of our lives? How can we, each in our own way, carry our child forward? Not as a loss we are expected to overcome, but as a part of the life and identity we are living out now. So that was a mouthful. I want you to think about it, maybe listen to it a second time. And every week, as I promised, I want to give you a pattern to practice. And this week's is noticing what continues and maybe even what emerges as a result of that. Over the next few days, I invite you to notice one quiet way that your relationship with your child is already present in your life. And as I'm looking out my window of my office right now, I'm looking at this beautiful crystal glow with a life tree in the middle of it that someone gave us. It was handmade at a shop here and outside of Asheville, where I live. And we hang it in the front of our yard. And every time I walk by it, I think of Michael. And it's just a beautiful way to call attention to him. So think of those kind of things. How is your child present in your life? It doesn't have to be something that concrete. But it may be something that you do, or something you even avoid, something you remember, a phrase you hear, a song, maybe a movie. Every time I see planes, trains, and automobiles, and I watch it whenever it's out because that was one of my son's favorite movies. I can almost hear him laughing beside me. A photograph, a place that you may visit, a way that you care for someone else. Maybe the empathy that you now have that you didn't have before as a result of this loss. Or maybe it's even a quality in yourself that was somehow shaped by your child. I'm not asking you to do anything other than notice. You don't have to make it meaningful. You don't have to turn it into a life lesson or a healing experience. And you don't have to decide whether it means you are grieving well or healing or moving on or what. Just notice. Bring awareness to it. That's enough. And then perhaps ask yourself very gently, what continues here? Is it love? Is it longing? Is it tenderness? Is it joy? Maybe it's even fear, maybe it's even anger. Whatever it is, acknowledge it, name it, and let it be. The question is, what is a way that my child still belongs in the life I'm living? And whatever arises for you, that's enough. Because the presence of grief does not mean you have to fail to live. And the presence of life does not mean you have left your child behind. So to recap for today, grief changes, sometimes gradually, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes in ways that surprise us even years later. But the love for our child remains forever. And for many of us, the relationship remains too, not in the form that we once knew, not in the form we ever would have chosen, certainly not, but in the quiet, enduring ways that our son or daughter continue to shape who we are. 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.