Reply #17: It is the void in their lives, not the mess.

[Changenow]

For years afterward I would advise a family member, hold my children or even cook a meal and realize that everything would be so different in a wrong way if I had died. They would not have missed me eventually, but the pain that they would have felt for so long was hard for me to imagine.

On edit: I don’t know how he knew, or even that he knew, perhaps with his advancing years he was just cautious but try to remember that the end was peaceful.

That said, I am a practical person, but at one point at the end of my pregnancy I was struck cold by the thought that I would die when the baby was born. This had never happened in previous pregnancies and I didn’t tell anyone because I thought it was a nutty thought, but I haven’t forgotten it.