In most cases, parents who have lost a child say the pain was the worst they’ve ever known. You may question if you’ll be able to bear it and survive or if you’ll ever be able to feel that life has meaning again.

In the first few weeks following the death of your child, you may feel as if you are operating in a fog. When it comes to their children’s burial, some parents say they felt more like observers than participants.

As one grieving mother put it, “After the funeral and everyone has gone back to their homes, you have to get back to some type of normal. It is possible, however, to spend several nights alone in sorrow, believing that you cannot keep disturbing other people repeatedly because you are angry.”

“Following the funeral, part of me felt that I couldn’t carry on,” wrote one father to The Melodia care after his son’s funeral. Other than the agony, I was looking for a sense of normalcy by engaging in mindless activities and attempting to avoid thinking about what had occurred. A week after returning to work, I found myself unable to focus; I couldn’t see the point.

Grieving people may experience times of severe grief and suffering on the anniversary of their loved one’s death. There’s nothing abnormal about any of these reactions. If you and your partner are grieving in different ways, it may be difficult to express your feelings to one another. You may feel alone despite being in a relationship. It’s possible that one of you is eager to talk about your child all the time, while the other is reluctant to hear the name of their child spoken.

“He didn’t want to talk, that was his way of dealing with it, whereas I wanted to talk about our kid all the time, to keep his name on people’s lips,” one mother told The Melodia care. During the night, I’d lie awake and see him sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the world around him. In the end, the loss of our kid brought us closer together as a family, despite the pressure it imposed on our relationship. In order to break us apart now, we would need an atomic bomb.

“We reacted in various ways—she grieved, I didn’t”, remarked one father. The strain of supporting my wife and children, while also coping with my own sentiments, became too much for me to bear.

After the death of a child, friends and family members tend to treat parents differently. A lot of people ask fathers, “How is your wife?” and not “How are you?”.

Fathers may believe it is their responsibility to discourage their children from dwelling on the past and instead encourage them to focus on the future. Men are more likely than women to decline assistance or to not seek for it when it’s needed.

If you find comfort in physical contact but the other parent does not, your relationship may continue to deteriorate. It’s possible that you’ll have a different outlook on sex or the idea of having a baby.

Open communication is essential, as it is possible to misunderstand each other’s responses (often one partner believes the other’s expression of grief means that they loved their child less strongly). Accepting that each person’s experience is valid and is important.

Relationships that can accept each other’s different mourning processes frequently discover that they may begin to open up and share more freely.