This was a sentence I hoped I would never have to write, but it is a sentence many of you have said in your own hearts.

I am writing this blog to encourage you to acknowledge that there was a loss and that life existed, despite this being a challenging topic to talk about. Whether it was an early miscarriage, a late miscarriage, a stillbirth or even a neonatal death, your experience is not a statistic nor is it second to celebrities who have a national platform to talk about their experience. What you have experienced is precious, life-changing, and maybe traumatic. You are probably still living with the emotional and relational difficulties which are invisible to everyone else but you and your partner. We need to talk about death and dying because it is an unavoidable part of human life. But why is it easier and less taboo to talk about death the older they die? Do the more experiences of life they had weigh against the heaviness of their death, making it more palatable to consume? Or is it because with the death of a baby, there are no platitudes to cover over the morbid and demoralizing blow of death? I don’t pretend to have the answers. But I certainly found talking, listening, and writing about it helps.  Here are some things that I have learnt, which you may be able to relate to, but more importantly it will hopefully give support and encourage discussion around the topic of baby loss. 

As a father

The Quiet Room was the one room that you never want to use, but there was always a curious part of you that wanted to peek inside…

The Quiet Room was the room we were put in whilse the nurses were trying to find someone more senior to explain their abnormal findings during the 20 week scan. It was in these sorts of rooms where we would start to recognise our own grief. Or we would try to stomach the heady blend of hope, anticipation and powerlessness as the numerous consultants gave us their predictions on the future.  Not everyone goes through anticipatory grief, especially if the loss is sudden and unexplained. But parents whose babies are diagnosed with a syndrome, a disability or whose babies are described as “incompatible with life outside the womb” (a phrase a doctor used with us) will experience some form of this grief. Anticipatory grieving is different from grief after the death of a lost one, in a couple of ways; the first being we experience the rehearsal of the death, we imagine the grief to come and allow that to continue over and over in our minds. Secondly, we’re imagining the consequences and the effects it will have on us and our family unit and in some cases starting to even feel it. 

What can help in this situation:   

• Realise that anticipatory grief is normal, and it hurts as much as physical pain. 
• Remember the things and the times where you have felt strengthened in your past and use that knowledge to help your present. 
• Talk to someone, seek out human companionship, and don’t be alone with your grief.

As a man

"If you can keep your head when all around them are losing theirs…you will be a man" - If, Rudyard Kipling

Blokes, fellow fathers – have you ever found it hard to bond with your unborn child? Maybe it’s your first child and you’re not sure what to do; can the baby hear me? Will it respond to me when my partner is the one carrying them? How do I bond with them? It can be scary and frustrating – it can be frustrating because if you’re already feeling like a spare wheel, something that should be fun and exciting can turn daunting. But as a father going through this pregnancy, things were different. Being a scholar at heart, there were a few lines which for me described the situation perfectly. It was the poem If by Rudyard Kipling. The first line wastes no time in setting the tone, "If you can keep your head when all around them are losing theirs…you will be a man" It was on these lines that I pondered, how might someone meet this challenge of that final verse to ‘be a man’ (singleton, husband or father), especially during these hard times?  

However, it was a line later on which struck me,  "(If you can…) watch the things you gave life to, broken, and stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools:" the child we gave life to was broken, my wife was emotionally broken, and I was broken, but as a man, I was going to do my best with the tools I had to comfort, care and protect my wife; I would speak up for her when talked over by doctors, spend time helping the children get to know Eleanor, and finally help process her death and the hole it left in our family.  

As a counsellor

"We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and shall never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else." – Sigmund Freud 

One of the mysteries in grief is that you will never be able to pinpoint that time when you moved from grieving to reliving your lives; did we ever move from that point? Or did we just wake up one day and think, ‘Yep, that’s my grieving over!’ Or is there a vale of fog that covers the passage from grieving to growing? Something which can help you during your grieving is Julia Samuels’ Pillars of Strength. She saw these pillars as "the key structures that support us and enable us to rebuild our lives. It requires work to build these pillars, and none of these pillars can function without the others. It requires our time and attention, but the result of such hard work is that the strength they provide will be increased many times over." These Pillars are: