Monday, May 3, 2010

The Silent Love, Adrienne Ryan

Excerpts from the book which I found online. If only the book is available in Malaysia.

To those who don't know what to say but want to show that they care

"The greateast gift anyone can give grieving parents is the gift of understanding. But there is another great gift, the gift of acknowledgement - the acknowledgement that we had a child who died and that we have lost the potention of a life that, for us, held the promise of something quite extraordinary, the acknowledgement that our lives will never be the same again"

And this... explains exactly why it hurts.

"To move through the devastation of miscarriage was to mourn someone I had never actually known. The grief, in this case, involved the loss of the future, not of the past. Normally, when a person we are close to dies, our memories of that person help reconcile us to the loss. “But when a baby dies, no memories exist to help us reach such an acceptance. We are not able to look back and remember things about our own child that might make us smile, and it is this fact that is fundamental to the explanation of our grief and that makes it a grief unlike any other. It felt like a strange limbo, because even though I had lost a piece of the future, the future still beckoned with promise. This is the inherent paradox of miscarriage: Making one simultaneously open to both the possibility of death and the possibility of birth allows one to see just how closely intertwined the two actually are.”

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