Death of a child the ultimate test for families

One left turn was the difference between normal and "new normal" for Patricia Loder.

She was almost home in the Milford area of Michigan on the first day of spring 1991, turning left on a road like any other, when a speeding motorcyclist sideswiped her car and killed her two children.

They were Stephanie, 8, and Stephen, 5.

"I was one of those people who would wake up screaming because that videotape went off in my head all the time, playing over and over again," Loder said. "That's a horrid weight you carry around all the time because no matter what, whether you're right there or a thousand miles away, you're always supposed to protect your children. Always."

When her grief threatened to overpower her, Loder reluctantly attended a bereavement support group with her husband, Wayne.

"There were people there who had lost their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents," she said. "They all had grief and I respected that but no one there had lost a child."

The pain, she said, is like no other. It eats at marriages. It eats at siblings through its relentless guilt and hopelessness. The weight of it, as Loder and other parents describe, sometimes tears families apart, but it more often draws them closer together, researchers said.

Buried in the news of Jaycee Dugard's release after 18 years in captivity was her mother's divorce, but the Loders — like many families — found their way through with help from other survivors who know what it feels like to get up each morning and attempt to live their lives after a child's murder, accident or illness.

While reports of startlingly high divorce rates under the circumstances stretch back more than 30 years and once ranged from 70 to 90 percent, a 2006 survey for the bereaved families organization that helped the Loders showed a significantly lower incidence, far lower than the national average of roughly 50 percent.

The 2006 survey for The Compassionate Friends, of which Loder is now executive director, showed 306 of 400 respondents were married at the time of a child's death. Of those, there was a divorce rate of 16 percent, less than half of whom cited the death's impact as a contributing factor.

In a study by two Montana researchers in 1999, only 9 percent of 253 respondents said they divorced following their child's death, with 24 percent of the remainder saying they had considered divorce but didn't follow through.