Despair & Unbearable pain

Anyone who has ever experienced the painfulness of losing someone or something so essential to your physical or emotional well-being will immediately identify with the title here. "White hot searing pain" is how I describe the brutal and immediate reaction to tragic loss, even terrifying loss which is so incomprehensible that in addition to the abyss of pain it brings, one can hardly breathe or comprehend it. Thankfully, these occurrences in our lives are few compared to other times, but in a few moments, the extreme losses seem to make up for all the other times. When a child dies, in the first moments when a parent struggles to comprehend and realizes the extent of all it could mean and the heartbreak it brings, the severe severing pain which seems at the time unconquerable, occurs.

Grief when a child dies, though is never easy at its least painful moment, but the gut-wrenching pain which confronts a parent when they first hear of the death of a child, followed by the ebb and flow of early grief, in which that overwhelming pain rises unexpectedly and frequently with the intial pain, is the pain so intense that many are lead to madness or self-destructive feelings. The mind attempts to compensate for the pain and so does the body: that much pain can only be handled for a brief time, at which point some defensive process takes over to allay the suffering and protect the mourner. It is not unlike a sudden and traumatic physical wound: for example in war, when a serious wound is inflicted or a limb lost: the body and consciousness takes it for a short time, and if unattended quickly, the person often passes out. The experience for both is a combination of factors: 1)the intense emotional 'hurt' of the severing of love, or attachment (with the wound, say, the loss of a limb, the horror of the event is coupled with pain, and with the loss of a child it is more: the loss of mothering, the loss of the loved child, the physical loss of the child, the reversal of expectations from joy to trauma and mourning and many individually determined aspects of loss.) 2) The inability of the mind to adapt to what has happened: except for a small percentage, no one expects the baby to be stillborn, even if there are warning signs. 3)the loss of expectation, hope and the future: the mind and heart during the months preceding the birth and death have been forward-thinking and planning. Parents have chosen a name, set up a nursery, invested love and time into prenatal care of the infant and envisioning time and love for that infant: what they will look like, who they will be, what their interests, strong and weak points will be or who they will favor. In addition to the solitary trauma of the event, this future is lost in a few moments: they will not parent this child in the future, they will not find the child's physical place in the home and heart: this loss occurs simultaneously, although the full realization of it comes later. The loss of the future is integrated with the loss and mourning of the loved child. 4) A sense of horror also overwhelms the