Living through the grief of losing a child

I’m staring at a picture of our youngest daughter’s college graduation in May. Our smiling 22-year-old graduate, Alexis, is in the middle holding her flowers and her cap, flanked by her

33-year-old brother, Joe, her 26-year-old sister, Elise, her dad and me. Someone is missing: our 39-year-old daughter, Nicole, and what would most likely be members of her own family. We

lost Nicole 17 years ago when she was 22 to an accidental overdose after a party at the beach. In 17 years, we’ve pushed on, but it hasn’t been easy, and there are times when I, at age 60,

feel like I’ve been swept back in time to that dreadful rainy early October day. BRINGING GRIEF INTO THE OPEN Last year, on National Grief Awareness Day, Aug. 30, the late Lisa Marie Presley

published a heartrending essay in _People_ about her grief after the death of her son Benjamin. I immediately connected with her despair and loneliness. Presley was right, we need to talk

about grief. Especially child loss. We’re all about the mental health crisis until it involves the death of a child. Following the immediate aftermath, once the dust settles, friends and

family will go about their lives and grow distant, as if we’re some maladjusted harbinger of death. It’s only when you discover another parent who has had the misfortune to join this

dystopian club of wounded souls that you feel safe to talk and get real about your emotions after years of being on mute. Left: Jackie Duda, right, with her daughter Nicole at Legoland in

1998. Right: Nicole, center, with her sister Elise. Courtesy Jackie Duda “It can be overwhelming when someone thinks about a person losing their child,” says Margaret Albert, a counselor

with Duke Hospice Bereavement Services in Durham, North Carolina. But the more we talk about it and write about it, she says, the more it becomes a part of the conversation. “People are so

scared of this, of losing a child, and they should be, it’s a natural fear,” Albert says. But we need to be more open about it. AN OVERWHELMING LOSS I’ve experienced a lot of death in my

lifetime: grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. This is different. The loss of a child rips out your heart and stomps on your dreams.