After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years

by Ann Finkbeiner

Named one of the 25 top-rated autobiographies in mental health by Independent Practitioner Magazine After a child dies, the parent's world changes entirely. Years later, this new world has changed the parents. The exact nature of this change―the long-term effects of the death―illuminates the nature of the bond between parents and children. Ann Finkbeiner lost her son in a train accident when he was 18. Several years later, she noticed she was feeling better and wondered whether this feeling was what was meant by "recovery." As a science writer, she read the psychological, sociological, and psychiatric research into parental bereavement. And as a bereaved parent, she asked hard questions of thirty parents whose child had died at least five years before, of all causes and at all ages. In this book, Finkbeiner combines the research and the parents' answers into a description of the parents' new lives. The parents talk about their changed marriages and their changed relationships with their other children, with their friends and relatives. They talk about their attempts to make sense of the death and about their drastically changed priorities. And most important, they talk about how they still love their children, how the child seems to see through their eyes and live through their actions. They move on through their grief, they get on with their lives, but they never let go of their children. Their wisdom is here presented to any in need of it.

Genres: Grief

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1996

Reviews

[Michelle Ackland · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really an insightful book into the grieving process of parents. I'm surprised at some of the low reviews and have to wonder if it's the topic. Death is uncomfortable and the death of a child is about as bad as it gets. The author nicely balanced clinical research with the words and stories of the parents. This is appropriate for anyone wanting to understand more about what it's like to lose a child and the author appropriately avoids cliches and feel good filler. I would not recommend this book to someone who is recently grieving the loss of their child. The target audience is more likely clinicians, medical professionals or others who work with grieving parents.

[Bernadette López McCollom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find this book to be very accurate. The loss of a child (mine by suicide at age 25) makes other things seem less important, and there is less importance of having personal goals in life. You just get by, and think of your lost child all of the time, every day. It’s like living one foot with them (wherever they are), and the other foot planted in this life. Friends and family just go away, because they fear death and don’t want to talk about it with you. It’s very surreal. My faith in God helps significantly.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author lost her only child, an 18 year old son via a train wreck. She wanted to know what happens to parents in the years after losing their child - what are the long term effects. Bottom line - while the pain of losing the child may recede over time, parents never, ever get over the loss. They only learn to live with it. Always there. Has become a part of who they are. This makes sense to me.

[Justin Lillard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moving chronicle of various parents' grief journeys. I think this would be helpful to those who have lost children to gain self-awareness. You may recognize yourself in the various responses -- good and bad -- of the parents Finkbeiner records.

If you're looking for guidance on how to grieve better, I can't say I'd recommend this book. That's not a knock against it. It simply isn't that type of book. Finkbeiner doesn't claim to have the answers to how to "get better." At a certain point in your grief journey, that sort of humility is exactly what you need.

You must first feel what you're really feeling and discern the ground you're really standing on before you can know if any activity amounts to actual "progress."

[Alex K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long time to get through this book. Not because it was too long, or because it wasn't well written. Not because I didn't like it - but how can you really say you "like" a book like this? I could only take "After the Death of a Child" in chunks, sometimes going for several days without reading it and even pausing to read other books and stories in between.
I started reading "After the Death of a Child" not because I lost a child myself, but because I lost the person who was to me what the bereaved parents of the book described their children as: "my best friend" "everything." For me, this was my mother. I lost her to cancer in early 2015, after a painful two-year battle, and I am still wandering through my life in a daze. The world does not stop to acknowledge your pain; as one parent in the book put it, "I'm thinking, 'Where are these people going? Don't they know that my son just died?'" Because, as Ann Finkbeiner describes it, you feel like you're in two worlds at once, one that is new and surreal and that only you can see, and the old one, the one that you still share with everyone else but feel disconnected from because IT'S NOT THE SAME.
Ann Finkbeiner wrote this book several years after losing her own son, and developing an interest in the recovery process. In other words, she gets it, and that makes the writing and her analysis more powerful, although I will admit that at times the latter was a bit trite. Most of the parents that she interviews for this book, and most of those from the research that she cites, lost their children several years ago, 4, 6, 15, 20. All of them remain changed, "scarred," some more than others. All experienced an upheaval in their worldview, with some seeming to recede (relatively) from their former lives, other finding a mission in helping others the way they believe their child would have, and others making it their life's work to fight to prevent more children from dying the way their children did. One father described his son's death as "the zero point": "Everything started over...did a thing mean more or less [than my child's death]?" Many parents seemed to also have this feeling, and because nothing could mean more for them than their child's life/death, they seemed to lose enthusiasm for life in general, even as they say they have "recovered." One woman described it in a way that touched me especially deeply: "If you could say one expression that describes me, it would be that Leslie's death broke my spirit. I still cope, I go to work, I go to church. I hate to say it, but my heart isn't in it anymore. I just don't think I have the heart for it anymore." I think she means "life" when she says "it," because I still feel that way too.
"After the Death of a Child" is full of quotes like that, statements of grief that I think could be understood and felt by anyone who has experienced a devastating loss, and not just for the loss of one's child. Every relationship is different, everyone's way of grieving is unique to them. A few parents, including the author herself, acknowledged going through a grieving period when they lost their parents, but they accepted those deaths much more calmly because that was "the natural order of things." This was maybe the one aspect of the book that bothered me, and maybe it's because of the nature of my relationship with my mom, but I won't dwell on that here. Obviously there are some parts of the book that are less relateable if your loss was not in fact that of your child; how it affected the marriage between the parents, how it affected the relationships of the parents with their other children, how the parents mourned the loss of their never-to-exist grandchildren. But the pain, "the wrenching feeling" the guilt, "But yet I feel there are things I should have done," the change to how one relates to others, "when I go to a party or in a room with people I know, I just feel disconnected" - anyone in the depths of grief can relate to those things.
I was drawn to read "After the Death of a Child" in part by the description: "And most important, they talk about how they still love their children, how the child seems to see through their eyes and live through their actions. They move on through their grief, they get on with their lives, but they never let go of their children. " I have really struggled with a lot of the sorts of feelings described in this book, and while it hasn't been very long for me, I guess I wanted to know what it would feel like, how long it would take, what it would be like, to get out of this auto-pilot way of life that I've been in for the past 22 months. I didn't really get answers in the way I was hoping/expecting, but the book did give me hope, and reading it was cathartic. It's a book I expect to reread, at least in parts, a lot over the next few years...

[Joe Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book after my son died and it took me a long time to finish it. Looking back, I see that this book is for people who have been living with grief for a few years already. When I finished it last night, the book ended with a description of the ongoing bond between parent and child after death and it really spoke to my current situation. Revelation, is the word that more closely describes how I felt as she described some of these happenings as happening without the parents(being interviewed) even being aware. I was not aware of the specific nature of my continuing bond with my son and how it has come to impact every aspect of my current perspective on life. But now, as I look back on the turns I have made since his death, I see that we made them together.

[Judith Praag · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the books that brought solace during period of grief and mourning after my baby had died at birth in 1993 and the following four miscarriages. There's nothing like recognition of what you've gone through/ are going through yourself...

[Susan Averitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helped our grief support group by giving us perspective and discussion material. It's really good for people in their grief journey especially after several years.