A Book of Advice
For Those Who Want to
Help a Bereaved Parent
When a child is born, the parents celebrate, and all their family and friends celebrate with them. But if that child dies--before birth, or as a baby, teenager, or adult--it sometimes feels as if the parents grieve alone. Surely only a bereaved parent can know the excruciating pain, stark terror, and devastating upheaval experienced by a person whose child has died. But the non-bereaved, those people close to a bereaved parent, also have pain, fear, and discomfort--and the frustration of not knowing what they can do to help.
Bonnie Hunt Conrad is a first-hand authority on child-death grief. Her experience is the kind of tragedy all parents fear most: here nineteen-year-old daughter Laurie was shot to death at a fairgrounds in 1983. The police and medical examiner ruled the death a suicide--a ruling that made no sense to those who knew the young woman. Bonnie launched an investigation of her daughter's death, eventually uncovering evidence that had been kept secret by the police for eleven years. For those closest to Laurie Conrad, the mystery remains unsolved; they are searching for her killer. Bonnie has written a book about her experience, Who Will Sing to Me Now? (to be released by Books Unlimited in late 1995), and is presently organizing a newsletter for the parents of slain children.
In the meantime, Bonnie has had to deal with the nearly unbearable suffering of child-death grief, an entire "wash cycle of emotions," including shock, terror, denial, built, anger, helplessness, and perhaps worst of all, the feeling that she was insane.
One of the meaningful insights Bonnie Conrad acquired from her experience, including her association with the organization The Compassionate Friends, is that parents usually need help to overcome the ruinous and debilitating effect their child's death has had on them. This help is most often given by family and friends, but it can also be given by others, including professionals, at any time and in any place. People want to help bereaved parents, and those parents need help. But Bonnie learned painfully that most non-bereaved do not know where to start.
For this reason, she wrote her first book, When a Child Has Died--Ways You Can Help a Bereaved Parent. Short and to the point, this guidebook provides an easy-to-read reference for anyone struggling to understand the feelings and behaviors of a parent in grief. Keeping in mind that parental reactions to the death of a child are as diverse as bereaved parents themselves, and that parents never forget their deceased child or fully get over the death of that child, the book describes a wide variety of easy-to-accomplish ways anyone can help a bereaved parent--immediately after the death, during the first year of grief, and for the remainder of the parent's life.
"When a Child Has Died was written for everyone," says Bonnie. "For family, neighbors, and friends, supervisors, co-workers, physicians, funeral directors, police medical examiners, medical and mental health professionals, lawyers and the staffs of hospices, hospitals, and other organizations.... Children die every day. And although no one can ease or take away a parent's grief, anyone can learn ways to help bereaved parents cope with their heavy and long-lasting burden of pain."
 About the Author: Bonnie Hunt Conrad has worked as a personnel manager and a human interest reporter, and has contributed a series of essays to The Compassionate Friends newsletter. She also founded a chapter of The Compassionate Friends in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where she lives and writes.
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