There are no winners in baby loss
Who wins the gold medal in grief from baby loss? Is it worse for a baby to die in the later stages of pregnancy? What about one or recurrent miscarriages? How about needing life-saving treatment due to an ectopic or molar pregnancy? The death of a twin or multiple? What about stillbirth or the death of a newborn? The cyclical loss of infertility or the death of embryos? Termination for medical or deeply personal reasons? Having living children, or having none? Which is worse?
The answer is: none are better or worse. They are all devastating. There are no winners in loss.
How we feel and hold our grief is different for everyone. There is no way to compare one person's loss to another. There is no value or validity in creating a hierarchy. We are all in this together.
Our babies, no matter how small, hold our hopes and dreams. We shape our imagined futures around their growing lives. We love them both as unique individuals and as parts of ourselves. They are our lifeblood, and we protect them ferociously. So it is understandable that we grieve their deaths ferociously, too.
Yet our Western culture doesn't hold the space for grief that it deserves. Grief is treated as a punctuation in our productivity, and grieving our fierce connection to another human contradicts the individualistic values we are often expected to uphold. Surely we can simply work through the stages of grief and move on?
But there is nothing simple about this grief.
It is disenfranchised by our society. We are expected to resume life as "normal" as soon as the flowers wilt. But life is now anything but normal.
It is ambiguous. We haven't had the chance to collect a lifetime of memories with our baby. We may lose them before we have even had the chance to hold them in our arms.
It is invisible. Our grief may not be obvious to others, especially if we choose not to tell them about our fertility challenges or losses. Our loss may not share the common rituals of death, such as a funeral, that make our grief clearer for others to see.
It is compounded. We grieve the death of our deeply loved baby, and we grieve for the child and adult they could have become. We also grieve for our parenthood, our imagined future, our children's siblinghood, and the part of ourselves that died alongside them.
It is enduring. There are no sequential stages, and we don't simply move on. This grief doesn't ever fully disappear. It may soften as our lives expand and contract around it, but it is something we will carry with us always.
I can't say which type of loss is worse than another, as I have not experienced them all. Even if I had, the order in which they touched my life, and the million other things that combine to form my identity, would still make it impossible to compare.
So, while the specifics of our losses may all be different, we also share parts of this pain that are familiar. Why split hairs by comparing our grief? We are suffering enough. Let's choose to support each other instead.
Tommy's Mum x
