15/10/2025
🍂The loss of a child is immeasurable, indescribable and unnamable. You can’t even get a denomination for these parents. Children who lose parents are orphans, spouses become widowed, but for the extent of this loss there is no name. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
🍂Bereaved parents belong to mutilating discontinuity, frustrated projections, to finite dreams, belong to the anguish of loss that is eternalized and generated in the long march of the days.
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🍂Referring to the words of Alexandre Coimbra Amaral: “The days of a bereaved mother and father interweave a new story that needs to happen like a bud. One day, another day, and another day. There are no guarantees, there is no linearity. Life becomes an unpredictable flow of homesickness and reconstruction. There are days when it is possible to put new bricks in the story that still appears as a sketch. In others, it is urgent to go back to nostalgia, to photos, to tears. Dancing between one moment and another is the possible path for parents who have lost their child”
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🍂This loss is like an always visible scar that, over time, may bleed less, but will always be sensitive and painful.
Grief is unique, singular and individual, everyone experiences it in their own way. Respect, welcoming gestures and sensitivity becomes necessary and belongs to parents who have lost their children.
Finding meaning for the loss is critical to surviving it.
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🍂The social stigma of not talking about influences this grieving process. It is necessary to respect the time of withdrawal of bereaved parents and welcome their pain, but they also need closeness, authorization to suffer, loving listen and talk to exhaustion about their children. ⠀⠀⠀⠀
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🍂“There is no greater agony than enduring an untold story inside you“ Maya Angelou
🍂Bereaved parents belong where possible. Sometimes in the lap of a hug, in a welcoming outburst, perhaps in tears or in silence, until it becomes possible for new chapters to be written! 🍂⠀⠀⠀
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Caroene Santos Murray
Clinical Psychologist - Children and adults 🌿
Perinatal and Parental Psychologist 🌿