Index

Introduction

1: Opening Our Eyes

2: Lasting Pain

• Grief Over Time
• Lasting Effects
• Sibling Grief
• References

3: Clergy, in the Mirror

4: About Grief

5: What Families Need

6: What Congregations Can Do

7: Professional Help

8: Lessons Learned

Why do we care? The pain can last a lifetime:
What the research tells us

"Yet if I speak, my pain is not relieved; and if I refrain, it does not go away." Job 16:6 NIV "For I am about to fall, and my pain is ever with me." Psalm 38:17

The loss of a child or a pregnancy has an impact on parents beyond the initial days and weeks following the loss. Although all losses are painful, the unexpected nature of losing a child and all that is tied up in a family’s hopes and dreams for that child intensify the impact.