The magnitude of pain that parents experience after losing their child is inexpressible. Only those who have undergone it, can empathise with the burden of grief, despair and the emptiness of parents who have had to say a final goodbye to their child, says Aradhika Sekhon

THE death of a child is the worst thing that can ever happen to parents. The soul quivers at the mere thought, for losing a child is the most traumatic, soul-searing event that tests human endurance.

After this experience, the shell-shocked parents themselves want to opt out of life and living. Life, however, does not let go quite so easily. One has to live, come to terms with the loss and bear the cross of outliving one’s offspring. Talking to parents who have lost children is an experience that wrenches one’s heart but also serves as an outlet for the affected parents.

When 15-year-old Ina Raja complained of a stomach ache, her father, Dr Raja, took her for a check-up to a nursing home nearby. There he was told that Ina had an appendix that had to be removed immediately.She was admitted right away and the ‘routine operation’ was scheduled for the following day.After bidding an excited Ina a farewell, her parents returned the next day to a scene of feverish activity in the operation theatre where their daughter was being operated. Something had gone out of control and they could only watch in shock and fear as activity intensified and then ceased.

Eventually, they were told that their daughter was no more...."She reacted to the anaesthesia, you see, and suffered a cardiac arrest...sometimes it happens like this." For the parents, it was unbelievable. Their beautiful, bright, bubbly baby, — so full of life and promise — had ceased to exist just like that.

The immediate feeling was one of numbness and disbelief. It seemed as if the mind had drawn a curtain between reality and acceptance. "So many people came and wept, asked how it happened. Her friends, her teachers — everyone remembered something about her.We didn’t know she had touched so many people in her short life. It all seemed surrealistic — as if it were happening to someone else.Reality crept in later and acceptance much much later than that, "says Ina’s mother as her trauma gets reactivated. "Shafts of pain would pierce the heart when one laid that plate for Ina or got up in the morning to send her to school and realised that she was not there. I would never have to do those things again...."

Ina’s parents’ grief merged with an intense anger against the organisation responsible for her death. They mobilised the help of newspapers and magazines to publicise the case. Other parents who had lost their children in the same hospital were contacted. Dharnas and rallies were organised outside the hospital and a suit of gross negligence slapped on the hospital and the doctors attending on Ina.

The anaesthetist was specifically guilty since he had not bothered to give the child a test dose.

"Now three years after Ina’s death, the grief has become a dull ache which is always with us," says Dr Raja.

The Rajas have instituted the Ina Raja Memorial Trophy. Every year they hold a competition for school children in Delhi. They are collecting funds to open an NGO. "Activity has been our panacea," says Dr Raja.

In the case of Mitali Sharma, it was a different kind of trauma. For six long years, Mitali yearned for a baby.When she finally conceived, she was full of "joyous thanks giving to God." For nine months, she expectantly carried the baby and one day when she just couldn’t feel the baby move, she fearfully rushed to the hospital.After a check-up, Mitali was informed that the baby’s heart had stopped beating. After getting entangled with the umbilical cord, the foetus had died. As if this were not enough, there was no way she could be operated upon and the baby removed. "I was told that I’d have to carry the baby to term...and I did just that. For 10 days, I carried my dead baby within me and then I underwent 18 hours of labour."

For Mitali, it was the saddest, most heart-wrenching time of her life. "I think I went a little crazy. To hear about the death of my long-awaited baby, to know that the body was inside me was terrible. I loved the child, hated my situation and grieved for the baby. I went through labour for nothing. Oh God, I hope this never happens to anyone". The sense of loss was as inexplicable as it was intense.

It took Mitali a long time to counter the depression that threatened to swamp her. Finally, she sought psychiatric help. It helped her to overcome the fear of conception that had almost become a phobia. Then, three years after the death of her baby, Mitali conceived again.

This time she gave birth to a bonny girl. "Now I’m completely cured," says Mitali. "It was tough also because all through my second pregnancy I was so frightened that I kept getting nightmares. The loving support of my husband and family helped me to face life again.

The psychiatric treatment was a great prop," she adds like a traveller who has endured many a hardship before finding an anchor.

The loss of a child invariably forces parents to exclaim: "Why me? What wrong did I do to deserve this?Why was I punished so severely? "In most cases, before the acceptance of the inevitability of death seeps into consciousness, parents question the existence of an omnipresent, just God. For some, faith remains shaken for ever, while others resign themselves to the will of God or fate. Many times hapless parents find solace in meditation and religion. They accept the fact that mere mortals cannot battle against His will.

MK Johal lost his son in an accident. Recounting the incident tearfully, Johal says, "When Rajpal left for a holiday with his family to the Kaziranga National Park, we never dreamt that he would never return. Instead of him coming back, we got the news that his car had collided head-on with a truck.Rajpal was seriously hurt and died within minutes." At first both the parents were deeply shocked. "We remained dazed for days on end. We couldn’t sleep for six to seven nights and wept bitterly, endlessly. The enormity and the suddenness of the grief was too much for the mind to absorb all at once". Initially, many people shared their grief. But it was later that the chasm of loneliness yawned before us" and they realised the extent and magnitude of their loss.

Rajpal’s mother developed psychosomatic problems and his father, full of anger and grief, questioned how this could have happened to an upright, honest man like him. Hadn’t he lived his life without consciously hurting anyone?

Once the intensity of shock had worn out, he came to accept, and then reconcile to the loss of his child. "Ultimately, my wife and I thanked God for having given us a loving and respectful son for 37 years". In snapping out of the depths of dejection, Johal was helped by his friends who, three months after Rajpal’s death, forcibly dragged him out to the golf course. Here, it was for the first time that he could get Rajpal out of his mind. "Since then I’ve been golfing regularly. That and time have helped in healing wounds," says Johal with tears in his eyes.

The most devastating way of losing a child — one which can push parents to the brink of insanity — is when the child commits suicide. Apart from having to deal with the enormity of the loss, they also have to cope with crippling self-doubt and self-blame.What is worse, they can even begin (consciously or unconsciously) to blame the other partner in the marriage. The "only if" aspect is as psychologically debilitating as is the actual loss to the emotions.

In many cases, it is children taking their Board exams who buckle under the pressure to perform, as was the case with Ajay, who after having failed in one subject in his 12th standard, couldn’t face "the shame of it." He locked himself in his room at night and shot himself with his father’s service revolver.

When in the morning his mother went to wake him as usual, "I was surprised to find the door locked. I knocked and knocked and then panic — stricken went to fetch his father." The door was broken open and "...Ajay was on his bed propped up against the pillows...he’d never wake up again....Oh, how could he do this to us — how could he take himself away from us so cruelly?

"Losing Ajay was like someone had reached into my body and torn my heart out...Iwas raw, bitter and sore....Imiss Ajay so terribly and wished and wished that he’d given us a chance — one chance — to explain how much we loved him and just couldn’t do without him" says his mother.

"The guilt of not having been supportive enough or loving enough gnawed my heart for months," says Ajay’s father. "In the end, it was my sister who showed us the way out of the torture we were inflicting on ourselves daily — she made us realise that we’d done our best for Ajay and were assuming too much when we blamed ourselves for losing him.

It was God that gave him to us and He that took him away...the way he chose to do so was immaterial." Both the parents started involving themselves in social work and now while Ajay’s father works with a blind school in Madras, his mother regularly visits a home for destitute children.

"Our work has helped us to surmount the trauma of Ajay’s death considerably. His loss shall be a life-long grief to us but after six years now, life is tolerable....yes, it is tolerable."

The death of a child after prolonged illness brings a different sort of grief in its wake. The parents know that the end is close and the child too is aware that life is ebbing away. Gurinder Singh, working in America, developed hypertension, which compounded with other factors, led to kidney failure. Gurinder went into coma. When his parents were informed of it, his father, Rajinder Singh flew abroad the very same day to be with him.

"He was very brave. He rallied around that time, went to work and drove himself. When, after some months, Gurinder went in for a kidney transplant, his body rejected the kidney and he was put on steroids. He knew he was dying then, but kept it from us," says Rajinder Singh. The parents were in India when they were informed of their son’s death.Rajinder had "an intuition about the inevitability of the loss.For his life, it was a tremendous shock.The question cropped up if we would like to cremate him here or in the USA. Since our son was no more, nothing would be gained from transporting the body to India.

He was cremated in the States but his ashes came back to us in a box. We immersed those in the Sutlej but the box is still with us," says Rajinder Singh reliving the aching sense of loss.

Gurinder’s death left a vacuum in his parent’s life, "We feel an immense loss of affection and support. We, however, never questioned God’s will. In fact, we derived strength from prayer and the scriptures. This, together with the loving support of friends, helped them to pull through the pain of losing Gurinder. Today, they do their household chores, socialise with friends, go to exhibitions and even play cards regularly. The 80-year-old Rajinder Singh spends his morning attending to his factory work. "Our only prayer to God now is to take us from this world while we’re still on our feet. If He wills otherwise, we will bow to Him as we always have," says Rajinder with stoicism.

The magnitude of pain that parents experience after losing their child is inexpressible. Only those who have undergone it, can empathise with the burden of grief, despair and the emptiness of parents who have had to say a final goodbye to their child. The reservoirs of strength needed to come out of the depression are phenomenal. Thankfully, nature itself provides certain safety-valves. Time, to use a well-worn cliche, is the greatest healer.

However, different people devise different ways of coming to terms with their bereavement. Some turn to God, other involve themselves in meaningful activity. Others have friends and relatives to cushion the shock and help them engage with life.

All parents — each one of them — who have had to face this irreparable loss have a common prayer: "Oh God, please don’t let this happen to anyone".

How to cope with the trauma

No other loss ruptures the consciousness as much as the death of child does. Parents essentially view their children not only as an extension of their own selves but also as an "inseparable", physiologically and psychologically. Guilt, remorse, self-flagellation and a string of ifs and buts resurface constantly after the loss of a child because parents find it difficult to go on living after someone whom they brought into the world, nurtured and protected is no longer there. The child has to outlive the parents is the assumption. Anything else seems a deviation, a reversal of natural law.

The loss -- intense and unmanageable -- does vary with the age of the child and the cause and circumstances of the death. Losing a child before it is born is traumatic but as the being had not acquired a distinct identity and association, the time taken to recover might be less than it is for a grown up offspring.

Though each case has its own trauma and there are many ways to cope with it, the impact may be lessened after a period of time if one:

A. Associates with other people who have undergone a similar tragedy. A support group helps because there is a sharing of experience and emotions.

B. Stepping out of one’s own self can help divert attention. Social work or community service, it is said, reduces the time to dwell on that emptiness within.

C. Sometimes a change of place brings relief since the familiar tends to reactivate the trauma of loss through association.

D. If the symptoms are becoming psychosomatic, one should seek counselling or professional advice.

E. Life and death are not in our hands. Believe in God and his ways.