The disappointment of throwing bottles overboard, repeatedly, with no feedback. In these bottles, I have the impression of depositing nuggets of gold, snippets of the miraculous but tragic story of my son, who died on January 3, in love. My first child, my golden baby.
Posted yesterday at 2:00 p.m.
The mourning of a child, of a very small baby, is a subject that generates discomfort, which is confronting for everyone, even for our closest friends, our parents. But it is an event that has been happening… for decades, centuries…
The silence that accompanies such an ordeal sends shivers down the spine and hurts, but it is a reality for many bereaved parents who lose their child.
People kill themselves to “leave us alone”, stop writing to us, distance themselves. Time moves on, and as bereaved parents, we come to terms with this reality that we assimilate to a form of well-intentioned, but clumsy benevolence. It’s human, clumsiness, blind spots…
What is less human is when a parent cannot have the space to live with the loss of their child. It’s when parental leave is drastically withdrawn, because we are no longer considered parents in the eyes of society.
Hope in the face of blind spots
I was lucky to find, after the loss of my child, an environment at work where I could talk about my son, deconstruct my mourning radioactivity around me. That’s what a bereaved parent loves, to be reminded of their child. I was lucky, privileged. I was able to correct in some way the blind spots of mourning in my environment.
Luckily, I hadn’t seen the mountain rising on the horizon, the one that can crush you, make you lose your way with its harsh and merciless realities. The mountain, well it was our government and its sterile policies. Yes, yes, the one who is supposed to take care of the most vulnerable.
QPIP blind spots
Back to the gold nuggets sent to the sea.
The policies of the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP) are functional, but do not take exceptional situations into account. They are also not consistent with expert opinion and research on perinatal bereavement. What do you do with parental leave benefits when you lose your child? Well… we just cut them off for you.
The first bottles in the sea were those sent directly to the offices of the QPIP. The bottle breaks, is taken out of the sea, literally.
You are answered with coldness and a lack of humanity… “We are going to study your file… you are not eligible, because you are no longer parents. »
The other bottles are emails, attempts to reach public figures who might raise their voices. In my naivety, I tried to write to certain public figures, to party candidates in the middle of the campaign and chanting a message of change. No answer. The silence.
It’s strange, this silence resonates with the same silence surrounding the loss of my child, it echoes.
Unfortunately, I have the impression that these bottles in the sea are lost in the great oceans as we speak. Unfortunately for the oceans, I’m not one to get discouraged.
As a mother, I have witnessed the strength of a child who wants to live, a strength that I would describe as larger than life. We parents, those who are unlikely to remain, are forever scarred. Paradoxically, through the path of mourning, there can emerge an energy to live, to fight to make sense of this loss. My current fight is for all those bereaved parents who will have to go through the same storm as us.
The most precious thing in our life as human beings is hope. Hope, that never dies.
The system needs to change, we need to rethink these policies for bereaved parents. It’s urgent.
The 2020 reform of the Minister of Labor and Social Solidarity which added two weeks is a buffer measure, arbitrary, not based on any consultation of experts or scientific evidence. Experts (and any human being) will all agree that two weeks to grieve is not enough.
What remains as a solution is disability insurance. This is the medicalization of bereavement. It’s going to see your doctor to obtain a work stoppage… and what diagnosis? Grief ? Adaptation trouble ?
Being sensitized by my profession as a doctor, it hurts my heart to see the bereavement of a child being medicalized so quickly, to compensate for a blind spot of the government.
I would love to tell you that it’s going well…