They say a mother’s worst pain is losing a child. But imagine losing one without ever having actually had one. Or worse, having believed you were a mother and that all that life existed… when in truth it only happened inside your head.
That happened to a teenager named Clélia Verdier, who spent three weeks in an induced coma and, upon waking, felt as though entire years had been ripped away from her. While her body remained in a hospital bed, her mind had created another life for her.
In that life, for 7 years she had been the mother of triplets. She had experienced the pregnancy, the birth, held them in her arms, and had even suffered the death of one of them shortly after being born. To anyone, it might sound like a strange dream, but it didn’t feel that way to her.
When she woke up, she had to face a very harsh truth: she had never been pregnant, never given birth, and her daughters did not exist. Even so, the bond she felt with them was real to her mind, and so was the grief.
That is why she needed therapy. Not only to understand what had happened during the coma, but also to process the loss of a family that never existed outside her head, but that she felt was her own for years.