A brief YouTube segment in which grief expert David Kessler explains common emotions experienced by parents after the death of a child: intense sadness, anger, a sense of injustice and unnaturalness, and feelings of failed protection or responsibility. He emphasizes that these reactions are common and rooted in the parental role to protect.
What are common emotions after losing a child? When a child dies, you will feel all the emotions that people feel in grief, enormous sadness, enormous anger. You also there's nothing that feels more unjust in the world than losing a child. And it feels very unnatural for a child to die before their parents. We also, as parents, have feelings of protection that it's our job to protect our child. And maybe we should have been able to save them from their illness, or maybe we should have been able to save them from the accident or whatever took their life. Just know those feelings are common. And as much as we want to be there and protect our child from everything in the world, sometimes in life we cannot protect them from death.
