THE loud PAUSE

“I know that I know nothing”

— socrates

There is a phrase often used when we talk about life: You don’t know what you don’t know.

It sounds almost obvious. Until life introduces you to something you never imagined you would have to know. Acute grief after the death of a child is one of those places.

Before it happens, you may understand grief intellectually. You know people lose parents, spouses, friends. You may have attended funerals, sent sympathy cards, brought food, offered hugs, and maybe even sat with people in grief. You thought you understood what grief feels like.

Then real tragedy strikes your life, when a phone call changes everything.  You are told that your child is no longer a part of this planet,and instantly you discover there was an entire degree of grief and trauma you never knew existed.

You didn't know that waking up could hurt or that sleeping would be near impossible. You didn't know silence could be so loud. You had no idea that a photograph could feel like both a gift and a knife gashing into a wound. You didn't know that ordinary places—a bedroom, a driveway, a favorite restaurant, a song in the car, a grocery store, the beach, the high school —could become emotional land mines. You didn't know that your mind could understand something your heart refused to accept.

And perhaps most painfully, you didn't know that the world would keep moving while you seemingly stood still. People go to work and carry on with their lives. Traffic continues to zip by as the seasons change one from another. Sports are played, yet the games seem meaningless. They’re just games, and there’s always another. You overhear someone complaining about something trivial, and you wonder how the universe can possibly care about any of it when your child is gone.

That is the cruelty of acute grief: you are experiencing something you never knew was possible while everyone around you is living inside a world that still feels familiar to them. And because you don't know what you don't know, you cannot prepare for it.

You cannot prepare for the physical exhaustion. Or the amount of anger and rage against your circumstances. Or the guilt and bargaining that consumes you. The irrational thoughts that ricochet inside your damaged brain or the moments of laughter that can suddenly be followed by guilt for having laughed. You cannot prepare for how desperately you will want to hear your child's voice one more time or hug him or her one final time.

Most importantly, you cannot know in advance who you will become. Acute grief doesn't simply take someone from your life. It also takes the version of yourself you knew before the loss.

Eventually, you begin learning a new language—not because you wanted to, but because you had no choice. You learn that grief isn't something you conquer. It may feel like a mountain, but you soon realize that even if you ascend to the peak, you awake each day at the bottom and are asked to do it all over, again and again.

You learn that love doesn't disappear when a life ends, instead it intensifies. There is no healing from this, it’s a life sentence. In time, you learn that you can carry something unimaginably heavy and still take another step or breath.

You don't know what you don't know. None of us do. But sometimes the deepest wisdom we ever acquire comes from surviving the thing we never believed we could.