I’ve always found it strange that there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. Why do widows, widowers, and orphans get to have all the fun? I think it’s time for someone to right this wrong.

Bear with me for a moment as I reaffirm what you already know: Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. That’s just not the way life should work. We give birth to children or adopt them, we love and nurture them, we raise them, they grow up, we grow old, and then we die. The circle of life, sunrise, sunset, rinse and repeat, choose your own metaphor. That’s what every parent expects, and by and large, it’s also the way things play out.

Losing a child—no matter the circumstances—goes against the natural order of things. It’s not part of the ordinary experience. It is something entirely different, and we become something entirely different.

When your child is taken from you, you are no longer ordinary parents. Ordinary parents don’t visit their child in a cemetery.........

© Psychology Today