Heartache of a mother
Motheo Masalila | Tuesday December 1, 2015 18:11
While the whole nation was left in shock and disbelieve, the nation at large empathised with the parents of these children. Every parent hopes for their child to have a purpose in life; children are expected to learn how to value life. Every parent’s dream is to see their child having passion for learning not only academically but also to explore the world.
Education is the only tool that can rescue children from poverty. It is a key to success that no one can take from an individual. Parents send their children to school to acquire knowledge and wisdom that they can use in the future to make better decisions or they can use it to make certain considerations before they act on them.
But when you hear that your child has been involved in a car accident from school. Certain questions arise in your mind. You would ask yourself if sending them to school that particular school term was the best decision you made. You would probably ask yourself where all the wisdom and knowledge you invested in your child is going to? You end up coming up with potential solutions that could have prevented the death or the injury of your child.
All these thoughts can make you feel like you are losing your mind. That is what grief does to a human being. Grief brings all kinds of intense mixed painful feelings and thoughts.
It brings expected emotions like anger, guilt, helplessness and anxiety. The pain that you go through can make an individual go through physical changes.
Your body feels grief almost acutely as your mind. You may become disoriented. You can also feel physically ill, tired and sometimes it can be difficult for one to sleep. When you go through all these emotional and physical changes you are bound to change in behaviour.
It is common for people in grief to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, to be constantly be irritated by anything else around them.
It is also common for them to be forgetful and to be always be extremely tired. Because quite often the society or the people around you do not see the pain you endure, the things they say to a grieving parent can sometimes sound insensitive. People should know how to approach mourning people to avoid hurting them even more. Bad news such as death should not be told to anyone through social media or cellphone text messages, it is not polite to mention such sensitive cases through even cellphone calls.
It is always important to understand the physical state and environment of that individual. The way the society handles the issue could make it far too worse to handle it is important that when we say certain things about death we should firstly consider the mourning parents of the deceased child.
Our job as the society is to console the mourning parents, we are supposed to make them feel better.
Losing a child is an overwhelming experience and grief can sometimes be a permanent state. That is why we the society have to make sure it does not become a permanent state to the mourning parents. Mourning parents along the way have to find their happiness and joy again. They have to build a rich satisfying life with the help of their family, friends and society. May the souls of the deceased children rest in peace, may their families find internal peace. As for the injured children I wish them a speedy recovery.
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