Insurmountable grief. No parent can ever prepare for the unthinkable: burying their own child. On the day her daughter would have celebrated her 20th birthday, Sandra suddenly lost her in a tragic car accident. “I have two children. I will always have two, no matter what. Thibaut, who is 28 years old today, and Axelle, who will forever be 20 years old,” breathes the bereaved mother.
Years after this brutal disappearance which made her united and somewhat “care-bearing” family a field of ruins, this 57-year-old woman tries to “overcome the suffering by seeking resources” in spiritual beliefs. On a daily basis, her therapy involves continuing to keep Axelle alive in discussions, but also by cultivating a bond with her daughter, through the afterlife.
When her daughter dies, Sandra falls asleep
Her face marked by emotion, Sandra, whom SHE was able to meet thanks to the site Happyend.life, recounts how her life changed, in the same place where she learned of the death of her daughter: at home, in her nursing home. Landes. “Axelle was going to be 20 years old on October 12, 2019. She was studying urban planning in Périgueux, and she had sent me a message to tell me that she did not want to have a big party on Saturday evening, because she had a match important handball on Sunday morning. » She had decided to celebrate her birthday on Friday evening with a few friends in her apartment, before hitting the road the next morning.
A decision that disrupts the young woman's habits: she normally took the train to return to her parents. “Don’t take my ticket. Finally, I’m going back by car with Laura,” Axelle wrote to her mother two days earlier. Laura was his childhood friend. “I sometimes tell myself that there are things that are immutable, like a sort of destiny,” says Sandra, in a philosophical tone, with a heavy heart. As fate would have it, the next morning, Laura is ill. She is unable to drive… Axelle decides to drive and sends a message to her mother at 11:14 a.m. And then…the accident happened. “It happened very shortly after they entered the highway,” says Sandra, her voice blank.
The car is launched at 120 km/h on the highway, when a pheasant emerges from the landscape. The car in front of her manages to avoid the animal, but Axelle loses control of her vehicle and swerves. “Nature gave it to us, just as it took it from us,” says Sandra. Before adding: “From what we were told, she died instantly. Laura managed to get out of the car. She was seriously injured. Physically, she got through it, but psychologically, it's more complex. »
At the precise moment when her daughter dies, Sandra adopts strange behavior without being able to explain it. She falls into a deep sleep on her husband's lap, as if she were falling into a sort of coma. Ordinarily, this “mother hen” would have been worried about her daughter’s delay, but that day, she was calm. As if she already knew.
Find the other episode of our meeting:
Faced with pain, a brain on autopilot
A phone call breaks the silence. Her husband picks up and leaves without saying anything. “From my window, I saw gendarmes. My husband had his head in his hands, she remembers. I saw him shake his head, as if saying “no”. Yet I felt nothing, no emotion, as if my mind refused to think. » When he returns to Sandra, the words come out suddenly: “Axelle had a car accident, she is dead. »
She never thought she would hear those words. She collapses to the ground, and screams in pain like a wolf who has lost her cub. Looking back, Sandra understands that her husband couldn't have said things any other way. “The loss of Axelle was incredibly violent, which neither the heart nor the brain can immediately accept,” confesses Sandra. The pain is such that his brain goes into autopilot as if in a protective mechanism.
“These are subjects that we don’t think about, particularly for a 20-year-old girl”
Organizing her daughter's funeral was one of the most difficult trials of her life, especially since she had no idea of her final wishes. “These are subjects that we don’t think about, particularly for a 20-year-old girl. » Even though mother and daughters discussed spirituality two years before the accident, “talking about his death never came up, because it seemed inconceivable”, she specifies.
With her husband, she decided not to scatter his ashes to keep “a tangible place” where everyone could gather. This place became “Axelle’s garden”, a space full of memories in the middle of their town’s cemetery.
During the preparations, Sandra has the chance to cross paths with a priest of rare kindness, who will make this ceremony a deeply personal tribute. With emotion, Sandra remembers the clapping organized in the church, a gesture inspired by the tradition of handball matches that Axelle loved so much. This seemingly simple moment left its mark and brought the spirit of this bright and sporty young woman to life for a moment.
A long spiritual process as mourning
The grieving process, for Sandra, did not follow a straight line. It began with a fracture in space and time, because there is a “before” and an “after” the loss of Axelle. “Grief has no temporality,” she says. The word itself, derived from the Latin “dolore,” means “to experience pain,” and that pain is unquantifiable, she says. In trying to best define this “unnatural” loss that is that of a child, Sandra quotes the poet Kahlil Gibran, who said that “death strips you naked, that it strips you of everything”. However, in this feeling of absolute emptiness, Sandra found the impulse to rebuild herself, and this reconstruction went through what she calls “a path of transformation”, a long spiritual journey which gradually guided her towards the light. This hand that takes him towards better is that of his daughter. She is convinced of it.
Spirituality will take a determining place in one’s existence. She recalls the first moments after her death, where her being was “broken into a thousand pieces”. Then, these moments when she finally manages to “pick up the pieces” of her soul, not to return to what was in place before, but to reinvent herself.
She tells how Axelle's death paradoxically reconciled her with life. “Before losing her, I suffered enormously from my difficult childhood. I was even suicidal,” she confides. After 20 years in the same job, she took the risk of leaving everything and resumed her studies to become a gestalt therapist, an American technique which empowers the patient and encourages them to live in the present moment. She even founded an association that helps bereaved parents.
“I knew the light was the only place I could find it”
The departure of his daughter profoundly changes his way of inhabiting the world. “I knew the light was the only place I could find it,” she says. The death of his daughter makes him understand the preciousness of existence: “She shouldn't have died for nothing. » At night, he often joins her in dreams. Her relationship with the spiritual takes this form, but also that of signs, of presences that she feels, which reinforce her in the idea that Axelle accompanies her at every step.
In a particularly striking dream, she will even hear her daughter say to her: “Mom, trust me, you will understand everything, you will know why everything is like this, you will be happy, we will meet again. » These encounters beyond death are part of his healing process, helping him to gradually let go. These phenomena, to which many bereaved people testify, are called VSCD (Subjective Experiences of Contact with a Deceased).
However, Sandra's spiritual path was also strewn with doubts, anger and guilt. She admits that these signs, far from immediately comforting her, also generated a form of internal struggle. One day, an osteopath told her that she was “holding on” to Axelle, as if she was preventing her daughter from leaving. “I felt immense guilt,” she confides, “as if I was holding her back from going where she needed to be.”
And this guilt quickly gave way to immense anger towards her daughter, as if she was angry at him for abandoning her. It was only later that she found a notebook full of quotes that belonged to Axelle. Opening it, she read: “And me, what would I do without you? And what would the universe do without you? » Two sentences that instantly freed her from this weight.
The signs of your presence: The moving testimony of a mother in connection with her daughter in the afterlife (Éditions Leduc)
