I Lost My Daughter To Cancer. 4 Well-Meaning Words Left Me Feeling More Alone In My Grief

"Why is it so easy to find words for joyous occasions ... yet we lose language when seeking words to console the bereaved?"

When we hear about the death of a child or young adult, we are unsettled, unmoored. Such deaths are out of the natural order. And if it could happen to your child, it could happen to mine. Life is never safe once you have children.

When my daughter died of cancer at age 40, some people remained silent, distancing themselves, as if the death of a child might be bad luck, contagious. Other well-intentioned people hesitated, retreated, reaching for a safe landing.

“There are no words.”

“Your loss is unimaginable.”

“I can’t imagine what you are going through.”

Why is it so easy to find words for joyous occasions – births, graduations, weddings – yet we lose language when seeking words to console and comfort the bereaved? Death humbles us, revealing the empty spaces in language.

I understand. I do. My daughter’s death left me without words. It is incomprehensible to lose a child. Grief isn’t one emotion; it is a tsunami of sadness, anger, shock, pain, helplessness and deep yearning. Perhaps reaching for the shorthand, “There are no words,” is an easier way to say: There will never be words large enough to express this sadness.

After Alex died, I fell into many empty spaces in language, especially the space where I had no name for myself, a parent who has lost her child. Names exist for a child who has lost a parent (orphan), or for a woman who loses her partner (widow), but what do we call an orphaned parent?

Recently, though, I stumbled upon vilomah – a Sanskrit word that........

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