Rebuilding Father Identity After a Child Dies: Laertes, Masculine Grief, and When Life Narrows

REBUILDING – Father Grief After a Child Dies and When Life Narrows

This article, Rebuilding Father Identity After a Child Dies is the second in a four-part series on the grief of fathers after the death of their child. The series is built around the 4R Framework™ for Masculine Grief – Reclaim, Rebuild, Reconnect, and Re-Create – with each stage anchored in a different myth.

In Part 1 – Reclaim, we turned to Daedalus, the father of Icarus, to describe what happens inside a man when a child dies and his sense of identity, competence, and responsibility fractures. That article traced how fathers often harden, disappear into roles, and lose contact with parts of themselves that are still true beneath the shock. Father Grief After Child Loss: Daedalus Myth and Fathers

In this second article – Rebuild – we focus on Laertes, Odysseus’ father, as an example of what happens when a man never rebuilds. Laertes withdraws from everyday life and lets grief shrink his world to sorrow and survival. His story represents one end of the spectrum; from there, we start to explore how fathers might live differently with what has happened, allowing grief to be managed without taking over their entire lives.

The third article deals with the Osiris and Horus myth. In the Continuing Bonds for Fathers After a Child Dies, a clear way is given to understand the crucial role of continuing bonds and what this means for fathers whose child has died. Osiris does not return to ordinary life, yet the relationship remains real and active — held in memory, through protection, and shaped by meaning over time.

The companion piece to this series, which examines the myth of Orpheus and the patterns of male grief, is Understanding Male Grief: The Orpheus Myth and Men’s Grief.

What This Article Maps About Father Grief After a Child Dies

When a child dies, some fathers carry on with their daily lives. Others feel themselves slowing down, withdrawing, and withdrawing from their own lives. Many fluctuate between these two states – outwardly competent one day, barely able to face the world the next.

This article maps the pattern of the father whose life begins to shrink around grief. It names how sorrow can take over a man’s days, body, relationships, and sense of self – and what it looks like to rebuild a life that honours his child without letting grief become the only story he lives inside.

We turn to Laertes in Homer’s Odyssey as a mythic image of collapse: an aging father who spends years wasting away over his missing son. His life narrows to sorrow, self-neglect, and retreat from the world. His story is a warning of what can happen when a man never moves from shock and sorrow into any rebuilding.

Alongside Laertes, we’ll weave lived experience, research on masculine grief and depression, and what I see in mentoring fathers after a child dies. The hard question running underneath is demanding and straightforward:

How do you live with grief without allowing it to take over your entire life?

This is a map, not a diagnosis. It sits in the Rebuild stage of the 4R Framework™ – a stage where the aim is to build a life that can carry what happened without collapsing under it.

This piece is written for fathers living with the death of a child, for men who sense their lives have shrunk around grief and routine, and for the people trying to understand why the man they know has pulled so far back from life since a child died. In Perth and across Western Australia, I see this often: fathers carrying grief privately while life keeps demanding competence, calm, and output.

Masculine grief often takes the form of continuation. The body keeps moving while the depth of his pain stays largely out of sight to everyone around him. For some men, grief pushes in the opposite direction – life collapses, and everything begins to revolve around sorrow.

When a child dies, many fathers experience grief as identity strain, not just emotion.

Life can narrow into survival mode: work becomes armour, connection feels risky, and the inner world goes quiet. This article uses Laertes as a map for how masculine grief contracts a man’s life — and what “rebuilding” looks like when grief stays present.

The Morning After: How a Father’s Grief Takes Hold After His Child Dies

The morning my son Matthew died, my then-wife and I went out for breakfast.

I didn’t go because I felt ready to face the day. I went because it was morning, and breakfast was what people did in the morning. I couldn’t bear the thought of going home, and I didn’t know where else to go. My body followed the choreography of breakfast, while my mind tried to make sense of a world without Matthew.

In the days that followed, I drove, answered questions, and signed forms. I did what fathers do when systems rely on them to be dependable. None of that meant the enormity of Matthew’s death hadn’t hit me. It meant grief was flooding my life while I kept functioning.

Other fathers experience the opposite. They slow down. They sit and stare. They move through the day in fragments. Basic tasks feel impossible. The body feels heavy, the mind foggy. The day becomes something to survive rather than inhabit.

Both patterns are forms of survival.

For a time, continuation can keep a man upright. Routines hold his body together while his inner world changes beyond recognition. At the same time, collapse can be the nervous system’s way of slamming on the brakes so he is not overwhelmed all at once. The danger lies in what happens if either pattern hardens into a way of life.

This article speaks particularly to men who sense themselves drifting toward Laertes: withdrawing, shrinking their world, letting grief take up more and more space until there is not much room for anything else.

When Grief Starts to Take Over a Father’s Life

For some fathers, the death of a child sets off an immediate and visible collapse. For many more, that collapse is gradual. It looks less like a dramatic breakdown and more like life slowly narrowing.

You may notice patterns like these emerging over months and years:

• You stop doing things that once mattered because they feel pointless or hollow. Activities that used to bring energy – meeting friends, going to the gym, spending time in the shed, walking along the coast – drop away. Days become a rotation of work, basic tasks, and numbing in front of a screen. Life carries on, but it no longer feels like your life.
• You pull back from people who care about you. You let calls go to voicemail. You delay replying to messages until it feels too late. You tell yourself you are “busy” or “tired,” but underneath, there is often a fear of being pitied, judged, or told to move on. Distance feels safer than conversations that might expose more than you can handle.
• You measure everything against “before.” Every moment is weighed against the time when your child was alive. Even small pleasures are followed by guilt or a sense of disloyalty. You begin to believe that any movement toward enjoyment would betray your child’s memory, so you stay close to the ache because it seems like the only honest way to love them.

I explore this sense of a life that never had the chance to unfold in “The Grief of an Unlived Life.”

• You let your body carry most of the load. Sleep becomes patchy. Appetite shifts up or down. Exercise drops away. You might drink more or care less about what you eat. You notice new aches, tension, or exhaustion that never quite lifts. Your body becomes the place where grief shows up, while your words stay quiet.

None of this is random. When a child dies, meaning itself takes a hit. It becomes harder to see the point of work, hobbies, or social contact. Retreat can feel like the only position that matches the size of what has happened.

The risk is that grief slowly moves from being something that happened in your life to being the whole identity you live from. That is the core pattern this article names and challenges.

Research shows that bereaved parents face significantly elevated health risks when grief becomes chronic and unaddressed, underscoring the importance of finding pathways to rebuild.

If sorrow becomes the only story you live inside, you do not just grieve your child – you slowly grieve your own life away as well.

Laertes: When Father Grief Narrows a Man’s Life

In Homer’s Odyssey, Laertes is Odysseus’ aging father. While Odysseus is away for twenty years, Laertes lives as if his son has already died.

He abandons the palace and withdraws to a small farm on the edges of his former kingdom. Instead of living as a king, he works the land himself. He wears rough, patched clothing and a goatskin cap. He sleeps poorly and eats little. His body wastes away. By the time Odysseus finds him, he looks more like an exhausted labourer than a former ruler.

When Odysseus – still in disguise – tells him a false story that suggests Odysseus has been gone even longer, Laertes breaks. He groans, throws dust on his head, and is overwhelmed by pain. Later, when he finally recognises Odysseus, he is so overcome that he almost faints. Years of grief sit just beneath the surface, waiting for the slightest touch to split it open.

Laertes is not a weak man. Earlier in life, he was a warrior, a king, and a landholder. Yet in his later years, his life has narrowed to sorrow, isolation, and self-neglect. He lives in anticipatory mourning, as if his son is already dead. His identity, status, and daily existence are all organised around one fact: the absence of Odysseus.

Laertes gives us a mythic picture of what can happen when grief is allowed to dominate everything:

• He withdraws from the community and responsibility. His world narrows to a small patch of land and his own suffering. Roles that once provided structure now sit vacant. The man who once stood in the centre of the household moves to the edges.
• He allows his body to become a site of mourning. Worn-out clothes, poor nutrition, and physical decline all display how grief manifests. His body bears the weight of years of sorrow that his words seldom express. Anyone looking at him can see that something within him has given up on life.
• He steps away from leadership. Instead of ruling, he merely endures. Instead of guiding, he just survives. The choices that once built his kingdom give way to mere survival. His days are more dictated by loss than by any clear sense of purpose.
• He lives as if the story has ended. Even before he knows whether Odysseus is alive or dead, his own life has effectively stopped progressing. The future has no real direction; only the same sorrow repeats, season after season.

Laertes stands as a mirror for any man who has quietly let grief write the script for his entire life.

Reflection

• Where have you stepped back from roles, relationships, or places that once mattered to you – and stayed back longer than you meant to?
• If your life stayed exactly as it is now for the next ten or twenty years, what parts of yourself would you look back on and grieve having let go?

When a Father’s Life Narrows Behind His Competence

Not every grieving father looks like Laertes on the surface. Many keep working, leading, parenting, and contributing. They hold things together for everyone else and seem to be managing well.

Yet functioning can sometimes hide a quieter collapse.

You might still go to work, finish tasks, and meet deadlines. You might continue paying bills, driving the other kids to school, and managing family logistics. To colleagues, extended family, and neighbours, you appear as a man who has faced disaster with remarkable strength.

Beneath the surface, you might feel disconnected from your own life. Conversations drift past, and you can’t recall what was said. You move through family gatherings as if you’re watching yourself from afar. You catch your reflection and feel like you’re looking at someone you used to know.

In that sense, some men become Laertes on the inside while still carrying out their roles on the outside. The farm is internal rather than literal, but the effect is similar: life narrows to duty and endurance, and the man himself fades.

Whether collapse appears as visible withdrawal or a hollowed-out form of competence, the risk remains the same – grief ceases to be a devastating event in your story and becomes the primary way you understand yourself.

“Everyone tells me I’ve been strong and handled this well. Inside, I feel hollow. Why do they keep saying I’m doing well?”

Most people only see your external life. They observe you working, managing, and fulfilling commitments, but they don’t notice the nights you lie awake, the effort needed to get out of bed, or the ways your mind wanders during meetings.

Our culture still judges men more by their performance than by their inner state. When people say you are “doing well,” they often mean your reliability, not how much pain you are in. You are allowed to notice that gap. You don’t have to use it as another reason to judge yourself.

Why a Son’s Death Hits a Father’s Identity So Hard

Studies of masculine grief patterns show that men often face distinct challenges following the death of a child, including pressure to support their partners. In contrast, their own grief receives little social recognition.

Grief for a child reshapes any parent. For many men, the death of a son carries an additional weight because of the unspoken scripts they have lived with for years.

Those scripts often sound like this:

• You are supposed to prepare him for the world. From early childhood through adolescence, fathers are often told their job is to pass on skills, resilience, and strength. When a son dies, it can feel as though this preparation failed, even when the death had nothing to do with preparation at all.
• You are supposed to protect him from harm. Many men hold a deep belief that they should stand between their children and danger. When a son dies through accident, illness, or suicide, this sense of failed protection can cut straight into a father’s core identity, regardless of the facts.
• Your legacy is supposed to continue through him. Sons are often seen – explicitly or quietly – as bearers of the family name, story, or work. When a son dies, that imagined future disappears. The father may feel that his own life has lost its line into the future.
• His life is supposed to reflect your capacity as a father. Even when men know intellectually that this is unfair, many still carry a belief that a son’s outcomes are a kind of verdict on their fathering. When a son dies, that belief can twist into a verdict of failure that is hard to shake.

For Laertes, the loss of Odysseus not only breaks his heart; it breaks his position, his sense of purpose, and his relationship with his own body. Everything contracts around one absence.

When Matthew died, I carried this split for years. I could list all the reasons there was nothing I could have done. Therapists told me it wasn’t my fault, and I believed them in my head. Yet emotionally, I still carried a deep sense that I had failed as a father. The guilt wasn’t logical. It sat in my body and in the part of me that had always believed my job was to keep my son safe.

If you recognise that same gap between what you know and what you feel, it does not mean you are irrational or stubborn. It shows how deeply these father-scripts are wired in. Part of Rebuild is learning to name that guilt without letting it define you.

Depression in Bereaved Fathers: When Grief Becomes a Way of Living

About a year after Matthew died, my GP suggested antidepressants. I hesitated. Part of me felt that, as a capable man with a long history in leadership and care, I should be able to “handle” my own grief. On paper, I looked functional. Inside, life had narrowed.

Long-term research tracking bereaved parents for nearly two decades found persistent elevation in depressive symptoms, with many parents experiencing lasting psychological distress regardless of how much time had passed since the loss.

Depression in a grieving father does not always look like the stereotypes. You may not cry often or stay in bed all day. It can show up in more subtle and persistent ways:

• Heaviness

Ordinary tasks feel much heavier than they used to. Getting dressed, cooking, or replying to a simple email can feel like you’re pushing uphill. You still move, but each step feels weighed down. You might resent how much effort is now needed for things that once came easily, and you could start lowering your expectations for what a day can bring.

• Numbness

Feelings that once came easily now feel dulled or distant. You can sit with loved ones and know in your mind that you care, but feel little connection to that care in your body. Activities that once brought you joy now seem bland or uninteresting. You might quietly worry that the part of you capable of feeling deeply has disappeared and might not return.

• Withdrawal

You focus on what matters and avoid nearly everything else. Calls go unanswered. Social plans are cancelled or not made. You prefer work or solitary tasks over gatherings because structured environments feel easier to handle than open-ended conversations. The fewer people you see, the safer you feel, even as the loneliness increases.

• Irritability

Minor frustrations feel like sandpaper on an already sensitive system. Traffic, noise, small mistakes from others, interruptions – all stir annoyance that seems bigger than the situation in front of you. You might keep most of it inside, or you might see flashes of anger that surprise you. Later, you can feel ashamed or confused by how strong your reactions are.

For some fathers, anger becomes the most visible aspect of grief. It may manifest as clenched jaws, sharp remarks, or a constant feeling that everything and everyone is just slightly in the way. Often, anger is grief trying to find a way to express itself that feels less vulnerable. I explore the role of anger in grief in Anger in Men’s Grief: Causes, Patterns and Practical Steps.

None of this indicates you are failing at grief. It shows your system is overwhelmed and doing what it can to get through each day.

What Happens in the Bereaved Fathers’ Brain and Body When Grief Dominates

When a child dies, the nervous system grapples with an event it was never meant to process neatly. The brain and body adapt in understandable and protective ways, but if these adaptations are never acknowledged, they can keep a person stuck.

Neuroscience research has identified specific changes in brain structure and function that occur during grief, particularly in areas governing emotion regulation and reward processing.

Some of those shifts include:

• Changes in the brain’s reward pathways

Activities that once activated the brain’s reward centres no longer do so as easily. Hobbies, achievements, and even small pleasures might feel muted. This can make life seem dull and colourless. For men who depended on achievement and productivity for energy, this dulling can be especially confusing and may reinforce the idea that nothing is worth the effort.

Brain imaging studies of bereaved people show that intense, ongoing yearning for someone who has died can light up parts of the brain’s reward system in a similar way to craving something you long for or depend on (O’Connor et al., 2008). That helps explain why certain dates, places, or reminders can feel like being pulled back toward the loss, even years on.

• A threat system that stays on high alert

The parts of the brain that respond to danger can become more sensitive. Everyday experiences – passing a hospital, hearing a familiar song, seeing a child your son’s age – can act as triggers. Even ordinary days might feel unsafe or unpredictable. The body reacts as if the worst could happen again at any time, making genuine rest hard to achieve.

• Disrupted links between emotion and thought

The connections between emotional processing areas and higher-level thinking regions can be impacted. You might find it more difficult to put words to what you feel, make decisions, or hold complex ideas. It can feel as if feelings and language are in separate rooms. This makes it hard to explain your experience even when you want to.

• Shifted stress hormone patterns

Prolonged stress can disrupt cortisol rhythms. Sleep becomes lighter or more fragmented. Appetite fluctuates. You wake up feeling just as tired as when you went to bed. The body feels as if it has run a long race without any training. Over time, this exhaustion can start to feel like part of your identity rather than just a reaction to what you’ve been through.

Studies of bereaved individuals have documented dysregulated cortisol patterns, including elevated levels and flatter diurnal slopes, which may persist for months following the loss.

For fathers, all of this unfolds within a cultural script that still expects control, competence, and stability. A man might have a traumatised mind and an exhausted body, but is still judged by how well he performs at work and manages his family’s practical life.

From the outside, you can look dependable. On the inside, everything can feel narrowed down to surviving another day under the same weight.

When Silence Becomes a Cage for Grieving Fathers

Many men carry a lesson from early in life: that talking about deep pain makes it worse, or makes you weak, or makes you a burden. The belief sounds like this:

“I’ll fall apart if I start talking.”
“I won’t be able to function if I let this out.”
“They’ll look at me differently if they see all of it.”

So you stay on the surface. You say “I’m managing” when the truth is far more complicated. You steer conversations back to work or sport. You protect others from the full weight of what you carry.

Silence can feel like protection. Over time, it can become a cage.

When grief stays largely unspoken:

• The body carries more of the message. Headaches, chest tightness, gut issues, unexplained pain, and chronic fatigue can all be ways your system tries to signal that the load is too heavy. Without words, the body becomes the main channel through which grief speaks.
• Relationships thin out. People sense that something is wrong, but they do not understand it. You feel misunderstood yet unable to explain. It becomes easier to avoid contact than to risk questions you do not know how to answer. The distance that began as self-protection can turn into isolation.
• Meaning erodes. When your story is held only inside your own head, it is easy for “What’s the point?” to take over. Work, faith, community, and interests that once mattered can feel empty. The death of your child begins to feel like the end of your own story as well, rather than a devastating chapter in an ongoing life.

Silence may have helped you survive the early months. The same silence can slowly reduce your life to the orchard, the rags, and the goatskin cap.

Reflection

• If your body could speak on your behalf, what would it say about how long you have been carrying this alone?
• Who, if anyone, has heard more than your surface story since your child died – and what was different about that conversation?

When You Feel You Have Disappeared as a Father

There is often a point, sometimes years after a child dies, when a father realises he has become a stranger to himself.

You look at your life and see the structures still standing: work, relationships, maybe community roles or leadership. You can list responsibilities you continue to meet. On the outside, the scaffolding of your life is still there.

Inside, you feel absent.

You go through your days as if you’re watching someone else live them. People describe you as strong, reliable, or admirable, but you feel a disconnect between their perception and your reality. You sense that a vital part of you stepped away when your child died and never fully returned.

This is what happens when collapse stops being a season and becomes a way of living. You might not be in rags on a farm, but you carry a version of Laertes inside you. The part of you that could grow, imagine, or reach out has fallen silent. The part of you that endures is still working hard.

Rebuilding begins when you realise that grief has reduced you to just one story, and that continuing this way would mean spending your whole life grieving not only your child, but also yourself.

Rebuilding Father Identity: When Grief Becomes Part of the Story, Not the Whole Story for Fathers

Rebuilding doesn’t mean returning to the man you were before your child died. That man belonged to a world where this death hadn’t yet occurred. His beliefs about safety, control, and fairness no longer fit.

Rebuilding also does not ask you to choose between loving your child and living the rest of your life. You do not honour your child more by disappearing. You do not honour them less by finding ways to live.

Rebuilding asks different questions:

• Who am I now that this has happened?
• What kind of man, father, partner, worker, and human do I want to be from here?
• What sort of life would reflect both the love I carry for my child and the responsibilities I still have in the world?

Within the 4R Framework™:

• Reclaim is about recognising the patterns grief has carved into you and reclaiming the parts of yourself that remain true, even after a child dies.
• Rebuild is about constructing a life that takes those truths seriously – a life in which grief is real, but no longer in charge of every decision.

Laertes shows us what happens when Rebuilding never begins. Somewhere between his orchard and our own lives, there is room to choose differently.

The Smallest Acts That Shift a Father into Rebuilding

Rebuilding seldom starts with a dramatic breakthrough. It usually begins with small, repeatable acts that interrupt the gravity pulling you toward collapse.

Some of those acts might look like this:

• Naming one true thing each day
  Instead of reflexively saying “I’m fine,” you might allow yourself to say, “Today has been heavy,” “I miss her most in the mornings,” or “I feel numb, and it worries me.” You can say it to a therapist, mentor, friend, partner, or write it down. Each sentence plants a flag in reality.

Over time, these small acts of truth stop your story from freezing at the worst moment and make it possible for others to meet you where you actually are.

• Letting brief stillness exist
  If stopping feels dangerous, you do not need long meditations. Rebuilding might look like sitting in the car for sixty seconds after turning off the engine, hands resting on the wheel, noticing your breath and the weight in your chest before you open the door. These tiny pauses teach your nervous system that stillness will not destroy you and gently expand your capacity to be present.
• Caring for your body in simple ways
  You do not need to overhaul your health overnight. Drinking water regularly, walking around the block, stretching tight muscles, or seeing a GP about ongoing pain are small acts of respect toward yourself.

Each one says, “My life still matters.” These choices push back against the Laertes pattern of gradual self-abandonment and begin to reconnect you with your own physical presence.

• Letting a few people see a little more

You do not have to open up to everyone. Rebuilding can begin by choosing one or two people who can listen without trying to fix. You might say, “I don’t need advice. I just need someone to know this is still hard,” or “I’m trying to stay present and some days I cannot.” That kind of conversation does not erase grief, but it breaks the isolation that keeps collapsing in place.

Rebuild usually begins with one honest sentence, a few extra seconds of stillness, and small acts of care that say your story is not finished yet.

Reflection

• What is one small act of care – physical, relational, or practical – that you could repeat this week without overwhelming yourself?
• If you were to name one sentence that is true each day for the next seven days, what might the first three be?

What Strength Looks Like When You Are Rebuilding a Father Identity

Many men grow up with a narrow picture of strength. In that picture, a strong man absorbs pain, keeps performing, and never shows the cost.

In the world of father grief, that version of strength can be deadly. It leaves a man with two options: disappear like Laertes, or act his way through life while slowly hollowing out inside.

Rebuilding points toward a different kind of strength:

• Strength involves bearing weight while staying connected to the truth. You keep showing up for work and family, even as part of your life reveals the full cost of what you’re going through. You might say to someone you trust, “I can do this, and it takes almost everything I have.” That kind of message keeps you grounded in reality.
• Strength involves accepting support when your own resources are stretched thin. Saying yes to mentoring, therapy, a men’s group, spiritual direction, or medical help is not giving up your role as a father. It’s a way of protecting the parts of you that are still trying to keep everything together.
• Strength involves letting your child’s life transform you without allowing their death to erase you. You might become more honest, more compassionate, and less inclined to be swayed by superficial success. Embracing these changes is a way of honouring the depth of your relationship, rather than living as if your world ended on the day they died.

Laertes shows what happens when strength is reduced to endurance – when a man survives his own story. Rebuilding strength is quieter. It allows you to stay engaged with your life while refusing to let grief take everything.

Studies of bereaved parents show that meaning-making—finding ways to make sense of the loss through legacy, advocacy, or a renewed life purpose —and quietly rebuilding strength are among the strongest predictors of adaptation. However, this process unfolds gradually and cannot be rushed.

Why This Stage Is Called Rebuilding in the 4R Framework™ for Masculine Grief

Within the 4R Framework™ for Masculine Grief and Identity, the four movements are:

• Reclaim
  Recognising the hidden grief patterns you have been living with and reclaiming the parts of yourself that remain true, even after a child dies. This includes seeing where you have become harder, more withdrawn, or more driven than you realise, and beginning to say, “That is not the whole of who I am.”
• Rebuild
  Constructing a life that acknowledges what has happened and still makes room for growth, responsibility, and connection. Rebuild accepts that the foundation has shifted and asks what kind of structure can stand on this new ground without pretending the crack is not there.
• Reconnect
  Finding your way back toward relationship, purpose, and soul. This means gently turning toward partners, children, friends, community, and your own inner life in ways that allow grief and connection to sit side by side, rather than forcing you to choose one or the other.
• Re-Create
  Shaping a way of living, leading, and loving that grows from what you have endured instead of being frozen by it. Re-Create asks how you want your child’s life and death to influence the kind of man you become and the kind of presence you bring to the world.

Rebuild is the stage where you recognise that the old map has gone and decide that collapse will not have the final say. From here, the work is slow and practical: brick by brick, conversation by conversation, day by day.

Key Takeaways

• Laertes is a mythic picture of the collapsed father.
  He withdraws from his roles, lets his body carry grief through self-neglect, and lives as if his story ended when his son vanished. Many men live a quieter version of this after a child dies. Naming Laertes gives language and image to a pattern that often goes unspoken and invites you to ask whether grief has taken a larger share of your life than you intended.
• Collapse can be visible or hidden behind competence.
  Some fathers retreat from work and community; others keep delivering in every role while feeling absent inside. Both patterns are understandable attempts to survive. Either can turn into a cage if they become the only way you know how to live. Seeing your own version of collapse is often the first step toward any shift.
• Depression in grieving fathers often shows up as heaviness, numbness, withdrawal, and irritability.
  These experiences flow from fundamental changes in the brain and body under sustained strain, combined with pressure to stay in control. Understanding this can move you from self-criticism toward a more accurate view: your system is under load and needs support. That shift in understanding often makes it easier to reach out.
• Silence that protects you early on can later shrink your life.
  Holding everything inside may have helped you function in the early stages. Over time, it loads your body with unspoken pain, thins your relationships, and erodes meaning. Finding even small ways to speak – a sentence a day, one honest conversation, a mentoring space – helps stop your story from freezing at the point of loss.
• Rebuild begins with small, repeatable acts.
  One true sentence each day, brief moments of stillness, basic care for your body, and letting a few people see a little more – none of these are dramatic. Yet they are exactly the kind of movements that gradually shift you from collapse toward a life where grief is carried rather than in command.
• Strength in this terrain is the ability to carry weight without letting grief erase you.
  Strength is not measured by how untouched you seem. It is calculated by how honestly you can name your reality while staying engaged with your life. Rebuilding is the long work of becoming a man who can hold both love for his child and commitment to his ongoing life in the same pair of hands.

Recommended Reading

If you would like to read further, here are some suggestions

• Male Grief in Australia: How Men Reclaim Themselves
• Post-Traumatic Growth in Men: How Sudden Loss Changes
• Fathers and Grief: The Silent Sorrows of Love
• Understanding Male Grief: The Orpheus Myth and Mens Grief
• Father Grief After Child Loss: Daedalus Myth and Fathers

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Where can grieving fathers get support in Perth or Western Australia?

If you’re in Perth or elsewhere in Western Australia, start with one practical step: choose one point of support and make contact, even if you only have a few words. Some men begin with a GP or a trusted counsellor; others want a non-clinical, structured mentoring approach that focuses on rebuilding identity and day-to-day function while grief stays present.

Through Mentoring Through the Maze, I work with men across Perth/WA who are trying to carry what happened without letting life narrow into survival alone. If you want to take a first step, talk it through — one conversation can help restore a sense of balance.

2. How long will I feel like this after my child dies?

There is no single timeline. Research on bereaved parents suggests that the most intense disruption often eases slowly over eighteen to twenty-four months, but the bond with your child – and the grief linked to that bond – continues for life. Rather than waiting for grief to end, it can be more helpful to ask, “How can I build a life that can carry this grief honestly while still allowing me to live?” That question keeps you focused on what can grow, instead of chasing a finish line that may never arrive.

3. Is it normal that I have pulled away from people since my child died?

Yes. Withdrawal is a very common response. You may be conserving energy, avoiding shallow responses, or protecting yourself from exposure. The difficulty comes when retreat becomes your only position. Rebuilding does not require you to socialise widely. It often starts with allowing one or two people to see more of your reality and letting that contact interrupt complete isolation.

4. If my doctor suggests antidepressants, does that mean I am grieving “wrong”?

No. Medication does not cancel grief or erase love. For some men, antidepressants reduce enough of the overload to allow sleep, focus, and participation in rebuilding. Others prefer support based on their needs, mentoring, groups, spiritual practices, or a mix of supports. The key question is, “Does this help me stay engaged with my life and grief in a way that I can sustain?” If the answer is yes, it is worth considering.

5. How do I explain to others that I am still grieving, even years later?

You do not have to justify the length of your grief. You might say, “I’ve learned to live around this, and it is still part of my everyday life,” or “I function better now, and I still carry him with me.” Simple sentences like these tell the truth without inviting debate. The people who can walk with you will usually recognise themselves in how they respond.

6. When should I worry about my own safety or mental health?

Pay attention if you notice ongoing thoughts about wanting to die, making plans to harm yourself, relying on alcohol or other substances most days to get through, or being unable to complete basic tasks for long periods. These are signs that the load has become too heavy to carry alone. Reaching out – to a GP, a crisis line, a mental health service, or someone you trust – is an act of responsibility toward yourself and the people who still need you here.

7. Is it a betrayal of my child if I start to enjoy life again?

Many fathers wrestle with this. It can feel as though any enjoyment dishonours the depth of your loss. Over time, many parents find that their love is not threatened by moments of joy. Living in a way that reflects what your child meant to you – through the kind of person you become and the way you treat others – can itself be a way of honouring them. Rebuild allows love for your child and moments of aliveness to sit together.

Research on continuing bonds shows that bereaved parents often maintain meaningful connections with their deceased child through memories, internal conversations, and sensing their presence—connections that can provide comfort and support ongoing adaptation to loss.  This is explored further in Continuing Bonds for Fathers After a Child Dies.

8. I work with grieving men. How can I better support fathers who seem collapsed or shut down?

Assume there is more happening than you can see. Ask about load, cost, and identity, not only about feelings. Questions such as, “What has grief taken over in your life?” or “What parts of you went quiet when your child died?” often open more space than “How do you feel?” Offer structure – regular contact, clear time frames, simple practices – rather than vague encouragement. Most importantly, stay consistent. Rebuilding is slow work. Your steady presence and respect for his pace often matter more than any particular technique.

About the Author

David Kernohan is the founder of Mentoring Through the Maze, a mentoring practice for men in Perth, Fremantle, Rockingham, and across Western Australia. He brings more than three decades of leadership in mental health, community, and legal services, along with his own experience of a child’s death, divorce, and rebuilding life as a gay man after leaving fundamentalist religion.

Through one-to-one mentoring, groups, and reflective writing, David walks beside men who are carrying grief, identity strain, and unspoken load, helping them reclaim who they are, rebuild their centre, and reconnect with the life they still have.

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