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Community Corner

The Sewickley Mom: Reeling from a Child's Death

How can you help a friend heal from the most tragic of losses?

One of my former co-workers lost a child this week.

Out of respect for the family I won't go into details of what happened. But the death of this teenager seems to have been a tragic accident. This is the second co-worker at my job who has lost a child; another former colleague lost a grown son.

Another co-worker at a previous position lost a very young child. His mother’s strength is evident in the way she has carried on, works with children and has a smile on her face every time I run into her.

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Losing a child seems to go against the natural order of things. Whether our children are young or we’ve raised them to be adults, we expect them to outlive us.

In the news, we see children dying in all sorts of ways: through car accidents, unexpected disasters such as house fires, and sometimes at the hands of their parents. Recently, we learned that the body of missing 11-year-old Celina Cass was found near a hydroelectric dam in her home state of New Hampshire. The girl's death has been called "suspicious" by local authorities.

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When it’s in the news and happening to people we don’t know, we’re sad about it, but it usually doesn’t hit us so hard.

It’s totally different when it’s someone we know.

In addition to my co-workers who have lost children, I have a sorority sister who lost her infant son to SIDS. When I heard the news, I could not stop crying for the better part of an hour. I sobbed when I spoke to her, and I cried off and on again for the rest of the day. I’m tearing up now even as I write this.

Losing a child, regardless of age, seems incredibly unfair. Life isn’t fair, yeah, yeah, I know. But that seems to be about the worst thing I can think of to happen to a person.

What might my friend's baby have become? And what about the older children who passed away? They were just getting started on the journey to adulthood.

We express all kinds of sympathy when someone we know experiences a loss: “I’m sorry for your loss," or “He’s in a better place," etc. Of course you’re sorry for the loss of a child. But what can you do? And is a child really in a better place than with his family? 

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