Episode 13 The Body Remembers: Navigating the Hidden Aftermath of Child Loss

What if grief doesn’t begin as a thought? What if it stays in our body? What happens when our body remembers what loss has asked us to carry?

The Hidden Aftermath. In this special bridge episode, I step into the deeply invisible, unspoken layers of life after the death of a child - starting with our physical bodies.

For many grieving parents, the world assumes that once the funeral is over, the
medical equipment is gone, and the phone stops ringing, the crisis has concluded.

But inside the parent, the body doesn't know how to simply turn off years of hyper-vigilance, anticipation, and fight-or-flight response. Whether you navigated
prolonged medical caregiving, addiction battles, mental health crises, or the
instantaneous shock of a sudden loss, your body physically stores the trauma of
what it endured.

Drawing from my own decades-long experience monitoring my medically fragile
son, Michael, I break down how somatic triggers—like tightening in the chest,
unexplainable fatigue, or panic when entering a medical building—are not signs of
regression or overreaction. They are the language of a body that remembers. This
episode shifts the paradigm from self-judgment to somatic curiosity, providing a
compassionate roadmap for the season ahead.

In this episode, we discuss:

● Somatic Awareness After Loss: Defining the physical connection between
subconscious grief and physiological symptoms like fatigue, anxiety, and sleep
changes.
● The Caregiver's Fight-or-Flight Trap: How years of tracking breathing,
watching facial expressions, and anticipating emergencies physically wires
the nervous system to remain on high alert.
● The Body’s Shock Absorption: How sudden loss locks the trauma of the
initial "bad news" phone call or knock on the door deep within our tissue.
● The Illusion of High Functioning: Why managing daily schedules, returning
to work, and answering emails can mask a profoundly exhausted, braced
physical state.
● The History of Devotion: Re-framing physical tension not as a psychological
failure, but as an embodied map of your deep love, care, and historical
devotion to your child.

Connect with me:
● Website: https://sharonspano.com
● Podcast: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/
● YouTube: https://www.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/

About the Show
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, we create space for healing,
understanding, and honest reflection after profound grief.

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. What if grief doesn't begin as a thought? What if it stays in our body? And what happens when our body remembers what loss has asked us to carry. Now, over the past season, we've been looking at some of the ways that grief reaches us beyond the early days. We've talked about the way loss changes over time, how parents may carry a continuing relationship with their child and most often do, how joy can feel complicated, and how grief can rise around the life that never had the chance to happen. Those conversations mattered because they helped us name experiences that often remain beneath the surface. And to the parents who've reached out and shared how these episodes have given you language and understanding for your own experience, I want to thank you so much for supporting the podcast and for trusting me with even a very small piece of your story. But as I thought about where to go next, I found myself wondering about the parts of life after loss that are even less visible. The parts that may not look like grief to other people, the parts that may not even look like grief to ourselves at first. And sometimes that's confusing. And the body is one of those places. In my field, we often refer to this as somatic awareness. And you've probably heard me talk about it quite a bit. And that simply means becoming more aware of the connection between the mind and the physical sensations of the body. And those sensations are often very subtle. We kind of train ourselves to ignore them, if you will, until we start to experience real pain. What I want you to get, though, is that the body can hold parts of what we've lived through. And it can speak in ways that we may subconsciously ignore. It may arrive as a tension in the chest before our child's birthday. It can show up as sudden fatigue when everyone else thinks that it's just an ordinary day. It can come through as something as simple as a sound, a smell, a place, maybe a season of the year, or a room that somehow takes you back before you even know what has happened. And when that happens, again, it can be confusing. So I want to name this as well, because nothing may appear to be happening in the present moment. And yet something in you is responding as if it is. And that is what I want to explore today: the way the body remembers and why this matters as we begin this next series on what I'm calling the hidden aftermath of child loss. Because after a child dies, grief is not only something we think about or speak about, it is something we live inside of us physically. Some of you know what I'm talking about. And sometimes the body carries pieces of the story that the mind cannot hold all at once. It actually gives us a lot of information. And if we're not tuned into those subtle nuances, we may miss what it's trying to tell us. And sometimes our grief can show up as exhaustion, tension, anxiety, changes in sleep patterns, or other physical symptoms that often deserve care and support. So in this next series, The Hidden Aftermath, we'll explore some of these less talked-about places, including what happens when caregiving ends, something I've experienced myself, when anger has nowhere to go, when regret keeps replaying, and when relief feels impossible to admit. Even when memories begin to fade, I know that's a big one for parents. And when we begin to feel even fragile in the later aftermath, and when faith, perhaps, for those of you that have a faith tradition, and there's no longer any certainty within that tradition for you, or at least not in quite the same way. But for this episode, I want to begin with the body, because the body, again, is often where we notice the truth before we can explain it. I just recently had a parent respond to me on YouTube that her daughter had a baby, and when she'd held the baby, she was surprised at the emotions around this new child and how it made her feel, and how her grief of losing her first child 38 years ago, which is quite a while, that grief resurfaced for her. And she felt badly about it. And she didn't want her daughter to know that she was feeling those things. But I tried to encourage her briefly to just notice the feelings and notice what rose up and to give it its place in that grief journey, to know that she doesn't have to feel ashamed or wronged by those feelings or sensations. Again, it's the body, the emotions, all of it working together, just trying to alert us to the fact that even so many years later, we may still need maybe a different level of care and that we don't want to ignore those moments. We want to honor and respect them. So for parents who have cared for a child through illness, disability as I did, or even addiction, mental health struggles, or prolonged uncertainty in whatever form it took, the body may have spent years on alert. And we want to acknowledge that. I know I was always watching Michael's body to see for any signs if he was fatigued or getting sick or just not handling whatever situation we were in, if it was too much for him. So you also might have learned to read a change in breathing if you had a child that was ill, a tone of voice, maybe a phone call that sounded a bit unusual. Maybe it was at a weird hour and it alerted you to something that you had experienced before, a look on someone's face or a shift that was so subtle, no one else would have noticed it, but you as a parent most certainly did. This kind of attention becomes part of who we are. And it's not just mental, it's physical because the body learns to brace, it learns to scan, it learns to prepare for what might happen next. In that sense, prolonged caregiving or prolonged crises can catapult us into the fight or flight response. We are on high alert and the body becomes accustomed to watching for danger to protect even when danger is not visible to anyone else. And when our son or daughter dies, the outside world may see that the crises has ended over time. The appointments are over, the medical equipment is gone, the phone call no longer comes in the middle of the night, and the daily routines are no longer required. But inside the parent, the body may not yet know how to end this fight or flight response. It may go on for a while and may still be waiting for the next emergency, waiting for that next shift. I can remember coming home months and months and months after my son died, and I was feeling a panic on I-4 because of the traffic. And I called my husband to just apologize that I was running late and worrying about getting dinner. And my husband, who is a wonderful cook and fully capable of getting dinner on the table, reminded me that there was no urgency. You see, I was so used to responding to Michael's needs, and we've got to get dinner or he's gonna get too tired or, you know, maybe even ill if I don't do it exactly on time. And my husband reminded me, Sharon, it's just us. We can eat at any time. Take your time, get off and out of the traffic if you want, go to the mall, walk around, and then get back on, and we'll have dinner when you get here. And I remember feeling so shocked that that was our new reality, that I didn't have to rush home in order to prepare a meal for my son. So here we are, you know, we may still be organizing our lives around the care, even when there's no longer anything practical to do. But this can be one of the more disorienting parts of loss, especially after years of caregiving, worry, or crises. The mind may understand that life has changed, but the body may still be living according to the old assignment, if you will. And for any of you who may have experienced a sudden loss, it is no different. The body may still be holding the shock of that first phone call, that knock on the door, that message, that moment when you learned something had happened. And in that moment, your life was forever changed. We have a tendency to know that we live these things in our mind, but remember that our body is also holding all of that. Whatever the circumstances of your loss, then the body's response is real. And it can serve us well to acknowledge that some of us may need additional support to help the body recover from what it has carried. I'll give you another example of Michael because so much of my life with him involved paying close attention. I was listening for changes, watching for signals, noticing what his body or even his own voice could not always tell me. This was particularly true in the last years of his life when he was unable to communicate what was going on with his own body. I had to be greatly in tune and aware to his comfort or his discomfort, his breathing, his patterns, and the small indicators that something was off so that we could respond accordingly. And when you live that way for years and years and years, as my husband and I did, you don't simply turn it off because the role has ended. I've given you a simple example of just the structure and the routine of our meals. We'll add to that the complexity of him getting increasingly ill in the last years of his life. So there's a kind of physical memory that we carry, and that remains. And it may show up in ways that don't often make sense to any of us, or more particularly to the people around you. You may walk into a medical building, for example, and feel your stomach tighten before you've even had a single thought. You might hear a sound that reminds you of a hospital room. Maybe it's a monitor, a wheelchair sound, a phone ringing at the wrong time, and your body reacts before you even begin to understand why. You might pass a date on a calendar and feel heavy or restless. I know for years and years my son died on September the 17th. When September 1st hit, I would always feel myself go into a sense of sadness because I would start reliving the last 17 days of his life. He went in for the last time to the hospital on September 1st, only later realizing what my body was trying to tell me. You might even see someone who resembles your child in a small way, not even fully, but just a posture or a movement, as I talked about a few weeks ago, uh, when I ran into a young woman in a wheelchair in a store. There might be an expression, something in you that responds immediately at a gut level. And again, if your child died suddenly, the body may carry something different, but it's just as real. The circumstances can be different, but the body was there. The body received the news, the body carried the shock, the body kept breathing when the world no longer felt like your own. And sometimes years later, the body speaks again. And this is one reason why parents may be so hard on themselves, even years later, is the example I gave you of the woman who reached out to me. When grief shows up physically, we're not sure what to do with that. We often expect ourselves to be fully able to explain what is happening. And we want to know why we're suddenly feeling anxious, why we're exhausted, why we want to leave a room suddenly, and why we can't settle, why we feel heavy on a day that appears to have no obvious meaning and for no obvious reason. But remember what I keep saying that grief is not orderly. It just is. It doesn't always arrive with the clear reason attached to it. Sometimes it arrives as a sensation in the body first. So we want to train ourselves to listen to the body. And if we listen, if we pay attention to what the body is telling us, we may be able to respond with more care. If we continually push it down or move past it, ignore what we're feeling, that disconnection may create more strain over time. Eventually it will surface again. So what I'm talking about here is not analyzing every sensation or turning the body into some major project. I'm talking about learning to listen, but without judgment, I'll always say that to you. Without judgment, we've got to be kind to ourselves and respond with intentional care, not only to what we think, but to what the body may be asking. So body-based support, or what we call in my field, somatic relief, can look like many things. And I'll point you to more resources on this next week. But for now, let's leave it here. Try listening to the body without judgment. You are not overreacting, and you don't need to rush past this moment, and there's no need to question why. Just simply listen. Allow the body to remember, honor your body. And there's value in pausing long enough to ask, what might my body be responding to? That question is very different from what's wrong with me and slipping into guilt and shame because you're not yet, quote, quite over it. Let me remind you that you will never be over this loss. It will just change and evolve over time. And for many parents, that shift alone can create a little more space for self-care. There's also something important here for those of us who have learned to function well. And I'm one of those. Many grieving parents become very good at functioning. We get through the day, we manage responsibilities, we return to work, we care for other people, we keep ourselves busy, busy, answering emails and appointments, and whatever it is that we have to do, we do it. And over time, I caution you with this because I lived this as well. Other people may see us as going about this daily busyness of life, and they assume that we are doing fine, that we have, quote, gotten over it or moved on. But the body may be telling us a more complicated story. That's why I'm emphasizing this so much on this particular episode. Because the body may be carrying tension we have learned to ignore, and maybe asking for quiet when we're still pushing, and maybe showing us that certain places, conversations, seasons, or demands take more from us than they used to. Let me give you another example. Some months after my son passed away, and I may have talked about this in other interviews or episodes because it was very real for me. I was asked by my church, we had a disability ministry, and they asked me if I would be interested in doing seminars for some of the parents. And I was very eager to do that because I know I've talked before about identity and being in those two places of, you know, here I'd been in the disability arena as an advocate for so many years, and now all of a sudden I don't fit there because I no longer have a child with a disability, and not really quite knowing what world I did fit in because I didn't fit in with the typical parent or family who had not lost a child. So there I was kind of in between these worlds. So I eagerly responded, yeah, I would love to do these seminars. So I created these seminars and they ranged from anything on how to maneuver the system if you had a child with a disability to spiritual issues around having a child with a disability. And I think I only did four or five of them and I enjoyed putting them together. I enjoyed being with the parents. But my husband noticed that when I came home on those Saturday afternoons, I was exhausted and I would go straight to bed. Something that is not typical for me. I'm seasoned at doing trainings and speaking and doing all those kinds of related activities. And he just finally brought it to my attention and said, Sharon, I want you to notice, not right or wrong, but when you come home from doing these seminars, you go right to bed and you are exhausted really pretty much for the rest of the weekend. Well, that was kind of news to me, even though I was in the middle of it. I hadn't thought about it. But what my body was telling me was being with those parents in that way was too much for me. I was actually reliving their drama and trauma because they were fighting for many of the same things that I had had to fight for with my son. And I realized in kind of examining the whole scenario that I was taking on a lot of their stress and strain. So I had to make some shifts in terms of how I would be supportive from families in the future. And some of you may be aware that later down the road, we started a foundation in my son's name. Not necessarily something for everyone, but we were able to do that. And we do now host a yearly annual memorial tournament in Michael's name where we raise money for persons with disability. In fact, we're going into our 20th year now, and I'm very proud of that. But that came out of a realization that my body could not physically be in service to these families in the real way, in their presence. It was too much for me. I didn't have the bandwidth for it at the time. And I do better still being involved as an advocate, but more in an indirect way, if you will. So that's kind of a lengthy example. I'm not saying that every one of you should run out there and start a foundation. I'm saying to pay attention to where your body tells you it needs something different. This is too much or this is just enough, whatever it might be. So recognizing then what our mind and our body needs, I really want you to get this, doesn't mean that we're fragile, that we're weak, or that we're diminished in any way. It means that we're being invited to listen more honestly to what this loss has required of us. And in the example I just gave you, it wasn't just the loss of my son's physical body. It was all the years ahead of stress, of fighting in the systems, the multiple systems, education, medical, insurance, all of them. There had been years and years of being in that fight or flight response while Michael was still alive, that my body was responding to. And thank God for my husband's wisdom in suggesting that I needed to maybe take a look at the toll that it was causing me or costing me in being in these seminars with these parents. So the body, what I want you to remember, it does not only carry pain, that's an important part to also understand. It carries the history of our love and devotion. It carries, in the example I just gave you, the years of care and advocacy and whatever form it is that we engage in on behalf of our children, just as parents in general, it carries the weight of waiting, watching, holding, hoping, praying, deciding, driving, sitting beside, staying awake, enduring. The body is part of the love and all the worry and concerns that each of us as parents carry. So doesn't it make sense then that the body would also be part of our grief? Now I want to be careful here not to turn this into a clinical discussion, although clinical support may be very important for some of you. For some parents, the physical aftermath of grief can become overwhelming. And there may be panic, flashbacks, chronic sleeplessness. I know for myself I had trouble holding thoughts together in the first months after my son's passing. For some of you, it may be intense anxiety or physical symptoms that are interfering with your daily life. So if that's true, support from someone trained in somatic relief or trauma informed care or nervous system work can be deeply helpful. So you might need something beyond just. The traditional talk therapy. So again, I'll talk more about this next week in terms of some of the differentiations out there and the resources available. But mainly I find that people know very, very little about the somatic aspects of the body. So I just wanted to call attention to that. And there is no shame in needing help with what the body has carried. Very important. Even when the response is less intense, it still deserves attention. Because sometimes the hidden aftermath is not as dramatic as it might be for others. It may simply be a quiet way that your shoulders tighten when you enter a certain room, or the way your energy changes near a particular date, or the way your body responds to a smell or a sound, as I alluded to earlier, a form that asks, how many children you have? We struggle sometimes. We go into a doctor's office and they ask, you know, how many children do you have? What do you put down? When I put down zero, do I put down one? If I'm lucky, it asks deceased or living, that gives me a little more clarity. But it's that question that just always seems to gnaw at me somewhere in my gut. Or maybe it's a place, as I alluded to also, that holds a part of your story. Again, what I want you to get, and what I think is really important about this conversation is that this hidden aftermath stuff is what happens internally for us as parents. And very rarely does anyone around us have awareness that it's even happening. It's invisible to them, but that doesn't make it any less real. My girlfriend Jane was here over the past four days visiting me. And I can't tell you how beautiful it was for us to just sit and reminisce and talk about beautiful stories and memories of our children. You've heard me say that she lost her daughter, Rachel, at the age of five. But we were sharing not only the beautiful stories, but some of these very nuances that I'm talking to you about today that we don't talk to with anyone else. We don't share this information with anyone else because we feel kind of foolish, which is why I want to open the conversation because these are real moments. And these are moments that may be telling you something about what you've lived through. And as we move into this next series, this is where I want to begin. Not with answers, not with a framework to impose on your experience, but with the possibility that some of what you may be carrying may be held below the level of words. Your body remembers your child. It remembers the caregiving. It may remember the shock or the years of vigilance. It may remember the love in its most practical embodied form. And perhaps part of living after loss is learning not to dismiss those signals too quickly, but to honor them. Because part of the hidden aftermath I want to suggest to you is realizing that the body needs care too. So as always, when I do the solo cast and we have more guests lined up that I know you're going to enjoy over the next few weeks, but I want to offer you a pattern to practice. And again, I say that these are simple, they're just noticing aspects of what I'm asking you to think about. So over the next few days, pay attention to moments when your body seems to respond before you fully understand why. Maybe you feel tension, heaviness, restlessness, fatigue, or a sudden need to pull away. And it may or may not be related to the loss of your son or daughter. Just notice. Maybe your breathing changes in a certain situation, or maybe you feel alert when there is no obvious danger. I had this happen just last week. I was on the golf course with a couple that we didn't know, and she was much younger with very young children. And she asked the question, Do you have any children? And I felt my entire body tense up because here we are on the course. I don't want to get into my story. I just met her literally five minutes ago. And so I just answered no to end the conversation. And there was a moment of awkwardness. I think she could probably sense the tension in my voice. She didn't ask any more questions. And it was just weird. And so I let it pass. There'll be another moment, another time, where I can explain perhaps a little more of my story. And it was an innocent question. So I had to just notice within myself, you know, it bugged me. Like, why is this bugging me? Well, the why is obvious. But I just took a deep breath and smiled and let it go. So again, maybe something ordinary affects you as it did for me in that moment, more so than you expected. It's okay. Just be kind to yourself. And when that happens, see if you can pause gently and ask, what might my body be remembering in this moment? And you don't need to have an answer and you don't need to explain it to yourself or others, and you don't need to have it make meaning right away. You just simply acknowledge something in me is responding. And if it feels right, offer your body a little care in that moment, just as I did. Just a deep breath to kind of relax the tension. Maybe a hand on your chest if you feel it in your heart, maybe slowing your pace a bit or a moment away from the noise that may be around you. A quiet recognition, just acknowledging that this response may be connected to something your body has had to carry. And that may be enough. Remember when I talk about systems, whatever we acknowledge in that system, when we acknowledge it, then has a chance to settle and regroup so that something new and powerful can emerge. So as we close this last series and begin the next one, I want to hold this transition gently for each of you. We've been looking at the ways a child's life and absence remain part of a parent's world over time. And that in itself is so vitally important that we don't have to forget them or move on. We just carry them and we carry them differently. And now we're turning toward the less visible aftermath, the body, perhaps some conversations around the caregiving role that may apply to some of you, difficult emotions, fragile places in memory and maybe even our faith, which we haven't touched on yet. And the question of what life asks of us after everything has changed. We'll take these one at a time, not as lessons to master, but as places to notice with more honesty and care. And today, perhaps, the place to begin is simply here. If your body remembers it's not a failure, it may be telling the truth in the only language it has. Until next time, 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.