what one lives for, how one projects oneself into the future, how one may hope to transcend death (indeed, one’s child becomes one’s immortality project). Thus, in professional language, parental loss is “object loss” (the “object” being a figure who has played an instrumental role in the constitution of one’s inner world); whereas child loss is “project loss” (the loss of one’s central organizing life principle, providing not only the why but also the how of life).
