Compassion

This is a reblog of an article by Shady –
@shady5 on Substack – “Payin It Forward” on Substack

nomadnebula282 – Freepik

“I was at the funeral of my six-month-old baby, standing at the tiny casket with empty arms and a shattered heart. My husband had left me two weeks earlier, unable to handle the grief, so I was completely alone. The funeral home was nearly empty – just me and a few distant relatives who left immediately after the service. I stood there frozen, unable to leave my baby, knowing once I walked away, it was really over. A woman I’d never seen before approached slowly. She didn’t say anything at first, just stood beside me. After a long silence, she whispered, ‘My son was three months old when he died. That was twelve years ago.’ I turned to look at her, and she continued, ‘I came because I saw the obituary and I remembered standing exactly where you are, feeling like I couldn’t survive another minute.’ She held my hand. ‘You will survive this. Not today, not tomorrow, but eventually. And on the days you can’t get out of bed, that’s surviving too.’ She stayed with me for two hours at that cemetery, this complete stranger, until I was finally ready to leave. She gave me her phone number. ‘Call me at 3 AM if you need to. I mean it. Someone did that for me, and it saved my life.’ For months, I called her in the middle of the night, sobbing, and she always answered. She never made me feel like a burden. She just understood a pain that has no words.”

—Sarah M., Kansas City, MO

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We lost our daughter, Jade, when she was two month old, to SIDS. (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) I can honestly say I know of no other pain like that of losing a child. It’s a wound so deep it never heals, particularly when you don’t know the cause, as in SIDS. She was ‘perfect,’ but she was gone.

We lived for each other, my husband and I, and amazingly, this made us stronger as a family. We helped each other survive and we concentrated on raising our son, who now is, ironically, taking care of us.

People who have lost children seem to recognize each other. I’m not sure what it is – an aura people carry with them, a seriousness in the eyes even when smiling, a fierce determination to keep going for the others in your family. You meet, you recognize, and whether anything is said or not, you share.

I’m so glad the woman in the story had the compassionate stranger to help her when she needed it most. I’m sorry that her bond with her husband couldn’t stand the strain and snapped. Each of us is different, reacting in our own way, finding a way to survive, and amazingly, even thrive.