Sharing your journey with Trisomy 18 and your child’s story can provide an opportunity to help you process your experiences and heal the pain of this experience. It can also connect you with others and provide a roadmap of the journey for those who will come after you. And although your child’s time with you was all too short, it matters. Every child’s story matters. Telling their story creates a legacy of your child’s impact on the world.
Here are three ways that sharing your story can help you heal.
Exploring Your Journey Through Writing
Writing has long been a therapeutic method that allows people to write down and explore their feelings and emotions so they see them more clearly. Exploring your journey with Trisomy 18 and sharing your child’s story can help you process those experiences. You do not have to be a professional writer. There is no wrong or right way to impart your child’s story and whatever events, emotions or experiences feel right to you. The most important thing is that you feel comfortable with what you choose to share.
Connecting With Others in the Trisomy 18 Community
Sharing your child’s story is a powerful way to explore your Trisomy 18 journey and connect to new parents in the Trisomy 18 community. Like you, they are most likely facing an unfamiliar diagnosis with no idea of what to expect or what will happen in the future.
Your child’s story can help. By sharing about your child, you help others understand that each child’s story is unique, meaningful and deserving of respect. For parents of children living with Trisomy 18, it can give parents of newly diagnosed children an understanding of the joys and challenges of living with a Trisomy 18 diagnosis for children and their families.
Creating a Legacy of Healing
For parents who have lost their child to Trisomy 18, honoring your child’s memory by sharing their story can help you and others heal. Finding common ground between your own grief experience and the experiences of others can help you navigate both the shared experience of loss and the uniqueness of your own grief journey and creates a powerful legacy of love and connection for your child.
Sharing your child’s story will also inspire others to share theirs too. In doing so, you will help them—and you—feel less alone.