April 26, 2007 The Impact of Losing a Child Dr. Esther Wender

APRIL 26, 2007 – THE IMPACT OF LOSING A CHILD: DR. ESTHER WENDER. Dr. Esther Wender’s 31-year-old son, Daniel, was killed in a skydiving accident in 1996. Nothing, including her career as a pediatrician, had prepared her for the devastation of that experience. In 200l, Dr. Wender founded the Westchester, New York County Chapter of TCF. Since retiring and moving to Washington State, she has found an added calling – that of teaching doctors and other health care providers about the impact of losing a child and the power of support groups. Dr. Wender has one surviving daughter, Sara, who has taught her a great deal about what it means for one’s sibling to die. Dr. Wender is a nationally-recognized specialist in the field of developmental and behavioral pediatrics and is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Esther Wender: One of the things that those of us who’ve lost a child experience is the change in our life that often includes doing something for other people, particularly trying to get people to be more sensitive to what this loss is all about and that has been in itself a healing thing for me to do.

Esther Wender: I know that it’s a powerful need [to find out about the accident] and I guess if you don’t do that, you fill your imagination full of things that are even worse than what actually happened, and I think some of it is associated with the guilt that we all feel.

Esther Wender: I’m sure that guilt is still there and I think particularly with something like that where the people who were killed were just at the wrong place, there wasn’t anything they did but they just were in harm’s way without ever having done anything to cause that to happen. That makes, I think, the survivor guilt perhaps even stronger because they were lucky and their sibling was not. When it’s senseless like that, I think it’s sometimes even harder to take. I think one is more likely to become very angry.

Esther Wender: It’s something that they need to be reassured about not just now but into the future and the other issues that we know siblings have about survivor guilt, about the loss of the future of their relationship with that sibling, all of those issues are much slower to evolve and develop in a young person and therefore the thing people have to remember is that this incident needs to be revisited with each passing year because the children change with development and what they experience.Â

Esther Wender: One thing that we teach [pediatricians] is to stay in contact. That’s probably one of the biggest things is not to avoid talking about the child who died and not to avoid the parents or the family because you don’t know what to say. That’s the typical thing. I don’t know what to say, the doctor will say, and therefore avoid people. There’s just all sorts of ways that one can make that contact but the important thing, I think, probably an important thing would be for the doctor to make an appointment with that family and have them come in and let them tell the story, tell what happened – now this is assuming that the doctor wasn’t involved. For example, it was an automobile accident like your son, and so that there wasn’t an illness that the doctor was taking care of.

Esther Wender: One of the biggest things for me is being able to tell my story over and over again. Being able to tell my story. Being able to express my feelings of guilt. Being able to – I sometimes refer to myself as I felt like damaged goods in the sense that all around me were intact families and I had lost a child and every parent I think experiences that. People start asking you how many children do you have? People start having weddings, graduations. When they greet each other, they all talk about how their children are doing. Those kind of situations were very difficult for me at first and being able to talk about that in a support group was very helpful.

Esther Wender: One of the things that she has pointed out and I’ve seen it, is that you lose a history with your sibling. Your sibling is someone you grew up with. You have secrets. Things that you did as children together. Things that you did that your parents don’t know about. Things that you talked about. And although you fought and were jealous of each other, you also have an enormously close bond with a sibling and you lose that history. You don’t have that any more. You obviously have what you had in the past but you don’t have that for the future.

Esther Wender: Sara and I became very close after Daniel’s death in a way that – we obviously mother and daughter were close before, but it was a new kind of closeness, and it was partly because more than anybody else in our lives, we could talk about Daniel.

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