Time: How Long Will It Take?

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.