Losing Maddie Also Meant Losing Myself. Nobody Warned Me About That Part.
Grief Takes the Person You Were, and It Doesn't Tell You What It's Building Instead
Struggling with the loss of Maddie also meant struggling with the loss of myself.
I didn't know that at the time. I'm not sure you can know it at the time. You're occupied with the obvious loss, the one everybody can see and nobody knows what to say about. The other one happens underneath, quietly, without asking permission.
I didn't know who I was back then. And I had no idea I wasn't supposed to get back.
Nobody hands you a map for this part.
You don't recognize who you've become. You forget who you were. And the whole time you're trying to answer two questions at once. Who am I now? And where am I trying to get to?
There is no answer to the second one. It took me years to accept that. I was walking toward a destination that had already stopped existing, and I kept measuring my progress against it.
The part I could never explain to anyone was the doubling.
You try to describe it once or twice and people look at you like you have two heads. Some days you think maybe you do. One for who you were. One for whoever you are now. They don't agree on anything. They want different things. They remember the same daughter differently.
So you stop bringing it up. You hand people the version of the answer they can hold. “Fine.” “Getting there.” “One day at a time”. And then the two of you go home and keep arguing in private.
I tried explaining this to a close friend and they thought I was crazy. Some days I thought I was too. Throw into the mix, the conversations you have going on in your head, and a big part of me was wondering if I should just walk directly into a mental ward and check myself in.
Forward or backward?
That was the question sitting underneath every single day for nine years. Moving forward felt like leaving her behind, and I was not going to do that. Moving backward was the only direction that still had her in it.
So I kept going backward and calling it recovery, and wondering why none of it was getting easier.
That's the road to nowhere. Not despair exactly. Motion without a direction. You're doing the work, going to the appointments, saying the acceptable things, and you never arrive, because the place you're aiming at is gone.
Is this heaven, hell or somewhere in between?
Some days you want to stop entirely. Just put it all down where you're standing and not pick it up again.
I'm not saying that for effect. I'm saying it because if you're in that stretch right now, it isn't a flaw in your character. It's what happens to anyone walking hard toward a place that no longer exists.
Here's what I couldn't see while it was happening.
Every one of those days was doing something. I realized it wasn’t healing. That's a word I've never trusted, because it suggests you end up whole in the same shape you started. Closer to construction. Every day was a transformation into something yet to be determined, and I had no say in the plans and no way to see them. There certainly wasn’t any completion date.
You can't feel that from the inside. From the inside it feels like nothing is happening and you're getting worse at being a person.
Except sometimes something does happen, and it's a stranger doing it.
Three months after Maddie died, I was at a summer hockey tournament with Zac's team. I was the trainer. Raw, and far too protective of my boys, which is a normal instinct running at a volume that was not normal.
Zac got boarded from behind. A dirty hit, unnecessary, and he went down holding his head. While my kid was on the ice writhing, a father on the other side was celebrating it.
The other coaches had to restrain me. Physically hold me back from going after that man in front of a rink full of families.
I still don't know who that guy was in that moment. Eleven years later I have no idea who was operating my body in that arena. And he came back on occasion. Not often. But any time one of my kids looked threatened, he was available.
But something was being built. I know that now, because I can see what came out of it and none of it belongs to the man I spent nine years chasing. He couldn't have done any of this. He didn't know what he was looking at.
If you're somewhere in the middle of this, I'm not going to tell you it resolves.
I'll tell you what I know. The two heads eventually stop arguing. And it’s not because one of them wins. You just stop asking the old one for directions.
And you won't notice the day it happens. You'll notice months later, when a memory turns up and something warm shows up where the weight used to be, and you'll sit there wondering how long that's been going on.
That's what I have. It took eleven years before I could say it out loud.
Chris Coulter is the founder of The MentorWell, a parent support and youth mentorship ecosystem built in memory of his daughter Maddie Coulter, June 28, 2000 to April 11, 2015.
If you're carrying something you haven't been able to put down, When Something Feels Off is a private group of parents who understand exactly where you are.
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I Spent Nine Years Trying to Get Back to the Person I Was Before I Lost Maddie. Last Year I Finally Stopped.
The post this one grew out of. Written in the week before Maddie's eleventh anniversary, about the moment the chasing stopped and what showed up in its place.
Grief Doesn't Get Smaller. You Get Larger Around It
The questions nobody asks a bereaved parent out loud, and the ones they ask themselves at three in the morning.
I Wrote About Turning Grief Into Purpose Five Years Ago. Here's What It Actually Built.
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Questions Parents Ask
Is it normal to feel like you've lost yourself after losing a child?
It's one of the most common experiences bereaved parents describe and one of the least discussed. The second loss happens underneath the first, and because nobody names it for you, most people assume something has gone wrong with them.
How long does it take to feel like yourself again after a loss?
That question contains an assumption worth examining. Most bereaved parents are not waiting to feel like their old selves. They are slowly becoming someone else, and the waiting is what makes the years feel wasted.
Why can't I talk to friends and family about my grief?
Because the parts that are hardest to carry are the parts that sound alarming out loud. People who love you respond with worry, and worry is exhausting to manage on top of everything else. So most people edit themselves down to a version their friends can hold.
Should I be worried if I don't recognize how I'm behaving?
Grief changes reaction times, temper, and tolerance, sometimes for years. Noticing it is worth taking seriously, and worth saying out loud to a professional rather than deciding on your own what it means.
Does this happen with losses other than a child?
The doubling shows up after divorce, a death, a diagnosis, and after a child's crisis that everyone survived. Any loss large enough to reorganize your daily life can take the person you were with it.
