Grief is no hoax

It's a special pain, when someone denies your grief. When they assume - like the assholes they are - that they know how you feel, that they went through it along with you so they must be included in your circle.

Unless you have lost a child - unless there is an urn or a headstone or an obituary or a death certificate - you don't know shit. And that's the truth. Your loss - a parent, a spouse, a dog - is not comparable. Until you put a child in the ground - and I so sincerely hope you never do - you are not in this circle. Pretending you are is disrespectful to me and to my child. It is dismissive of my grief and the lifelong journey I will take going through my grief.

End of story.

Denying my children's lives - their personhood, their existence, their importance - is an even greater grievance. They lived. They have names and they have souls and I feel their spirits. They are my children and they are a part of me.

So when I read this article in the Washington Post about a professor who made it his personal mission to deny the lives  and deaths of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, my heart skipped a beat. I cannot imagine my reaction - and it would be physical and immediate and hell would rain down, I promise you - if someone came to me and questioned my children in this manner.

It makes me sick - truly sick - because it is proof that we are living in the worst part of the history of our humanity. To deny these parents the right to grieve, publicly, privately, extensively - to mourn their children without political consequences - is unimaginable to me. It is unforgivable.

I know that when I can't cling to my children, I cling to their memory. I cling to my grief. It keeps me on this earth. It keeps my heart right.

Damn any person who would take that small comfort from a grieving parent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/01/13/the-father-of-a-boy-killed-at-sandy-hook-gets-death-threats-from-people-who-say-the-shooting-was-a-hoax/