Waiting? OK. But will a lightness of heart ever come? Does time
really heal all wounds? Mothers who have experienced child death assure
us that "it will get better." Friends and loved ones may tell us that
"it is time to get over it and get on with life." We hear about closure,
but researchers say that a mother never ceases mourning the death of
her child. The truth is that there is no set chronology for mourning
mothers.
In mythology, Father Time is sometimes depicted as helping Truth out
of a cave, symbolizing that in time all things come to light. We cannot
hurry Truth along. Like the ancient alchemists, we must wait for kairos,
the astrologically correct time, or God's time, for allowing things to
turn out right. Our questions about how long it will take to heal may
long remain unanswered.
Changes in One's Sense of Time
The grieving process alters our personal sense of time in several
ways. During the traumatic hours after the death, everything in our
other life comes to a halt, and our time stops. It takes a number of
days before we realize that, although our world has changed forever, the
rest of the world continues its usual operations.
At my brother's funeral, my uncle came up and said to my mother she had to leave because she need to take care of her husband and her children. My mother was amazed when she said this because time had stopped for her.
For the rest of our life, however, the moment of our child's death or the loved ones' death
continues frozen in time. We remember every detail of the event as if it
were yesterday, and we continue to mark the chronology of our
experiences with that dreadful date.
As we continue to mourn, our normal sense of time alters in another
way: we mark time carefully. We count the number of months we have lived
without joy, since the light of our life has been extinguished.
