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Page 1 of 2 Family MattersRaising Cadence: A mother and daughter journey through griefBy Sylvia Johnson When my 3-year-old daughter, Jillian, died of neuroblastoma, I did everything in my power to work through my tremendous grief. I went to therapy sessions, attended support groups, did meditation and yoga, read, wrote, cried, and screamed. As a psychologist, I knew there was no way around the grief, only through it, but I secretly thought I could wade through it faster than most. I'd met people whose child had died as many as 10 years earlier who seemed to be stuck in time, as though their child had just passed away. I vowed not to become one of those people. My intention to heal deepened when my husband, Tom, and I decided to have another child. I'd witnessed parents' reactions to their surviving children. The siblings who remained never seemed to live up to the reputation of the one who'd died; there was a vacancy in their parents that couldn't be filled by the living. Some enshrined their dead child's possessions and couldn't think of anything else, while others avoided the mere mention of the child. Even though I'd been thrust into the Dead Child Club, I wasn't signing up for the Living Dead Society. We discovered I was pregnant on the first anniversary of Jillian's death. Our second daughter, Cadence, brought us back into a land of hope and joy. Despite my efforts, I recognized early on that there was a space in my heart, bound and sealed, reserved for Jillian. The hole was most obvious around holidays and anniversaries—her birthday, the day she was diagnosed, the day she relapsed, the day she died. When Cadence approached 23 months, the age when Jillian was first hospitalized, irrational fears abounded. What if Cadence died? What if I died? What if Tom died? When she reached the age when Jillian died, I swirled in a torrent of what-ifs. Once, while Cadence and I were playing with Play-Doh, she looked straight at me and said, "Where are you, Mama?" Tears spilled onto my face; I'd become one of those vacant people, and she saw it. My unconscious attempt to protect myself from further devastation wasn't worth the cost. When Cadence turned 4, my worries subsided a little. Now that she was older than her sister ever was, I relaxed; maybe she wouldn't get cancer after all.
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