How a person reacts in times of sadness and crisis is quite a journey of self-discovery and a huge reality check. One needs to have patience with grief and mourning. Grief cannot be rushed or controlled. I am going to use the age old analogy of an onion. You start peeling the hard layers apart and slowly build up to the intensity within. Losing a baby is like pulverizing the onion and taking a huge whiff of it all at once! You are completely overwhelmed!
However, you not only need to deal with your own overwhelming reactions, you are also buffeted and blown around by the reactions of others, family, friends, and even complete strangers. And sometimes you find yourself trying to take care of them too.
Let’s start with husbands, who you may turn to be your major emotional support. Husbands seem to need to keep it all together and sometimes the wife can misread this that he is disconnected, distant, seems to not be so upset. The truth is, he is devastated, yet a husband can feel several needs pressing above his own, the need to be there for his partner, the need to protect and survivors’ guilt. He may blame himself for not taking a more active role in the pregnancy or he may feel his wife is overreacting. Minimizing the loss is a coping mechanism. Sometimes this is done to protect the fragile balance that has now become his reality, other times he may not be able to tangibly feel the loss as he never met nor held this baby. The mother on the other hand, grew this baby within and may feel his sense of grief does not match hers.
I urge you sweet mother, to take his pain with understanding. He may not feel safe to grieve, and couples usually take turns, because if both are paralyzed with grief at the same time, life cannot move forward and the family is at risk. A father’s grief typically hits him up to nineteen months after! It is very easy to turn against each other, to start doubting. He does not care, she loved the baby more than me, he didn’t support me enough, she didn’t eat right…….do not go down this road. A high percentage of couples divorce after a stillbirth. When my husband and I first heard the statistics (almost 60 percent), we turned to each other right there and then and decided we would do this together, side by side. I will not lie and tell you it was easy. We had many moments that I wish didn’t happen, but we both tried to keep this statistic in the front of our minds.
Friends and family may surprise and shock you with their reactions. We had every reaction under the sun. Some need a reason. Some give you a reason, this helps them feel better. Some need to hear you are ok. You have to be ok, so they can be ok. I got so good at reassuring others that I was ‘ok’ when I was far from it. These reactions can feel very painful. Every statement that people told me (except a few I will share in a moment) was right in some way. You are not always ready to hear, nor is the time always appropriate. It is very easy to feel isolated and alone, that no one truly understands you, except another mother who has lost a baby. This is and is not true. No one can know how deep your pain is. We become the teacher to our friends. Some days I don’t feel brave enough to be that teacher, then the distance is created. I had to learn to guide my friends. It is easier for me to tell you this now, during those first few months, any insensitive and ignorant statement made me feel the pain of the loss all over again. Take everyone’s comments and put them in a safe in your mind, lock the safe. Only take out the ones that speak to you. Some may speak to you three years later, some only ten.
This is not the case for other people. Grief as I mentioned reveals a person. Death is terrifying to many. We cannot buy life, we cannot make any deals. Death comes whether we are ready for it or not, and it does not discriminate. The mind needs to protect itself from this reality. When you personally have touched death, on one hand the fear goes away on the other hand (I will go into this deeper in another post) the fear gets deeper. I had people cross the street to avoid talking to me, or pretend I was not in the room, or part of conversations I was in. I had people call me and ask why I didn’t have a C-section and save the baby! The most painful of all was when people referred to my baby as ‘just a fetus’. These comments or lack of comments broke my heart all over again. I also felt angry, very angry. I cut off ties emotionally with the people who made these comments.
Anger is part of grief. Each year that goes by, I have a different view on these insensitive people. In the first few years, they were, in my mind, monsters — literally. How could they say such a thing to me!? Did they have any idea how much pain their comments caused me? Well, no they didn’t. And I bless them that they will never know. There were a few reasons why I felt anger, one was because I doubted deep inside myself. Was it just a fetus? Am I overreacting? Should I have done this differently? I can tell you, the self-doubt was excruciating. I will never know why my baby died. Honestly I don’t want to know anymore. At the early point in my grief, that was all I wanted, a reason. Just one reason so I could hold this pain.
There is no one reason. Hindsight may show you a possible one, but hindsight is not real. What do I mean? If you knew then what you knew now, the then would not exist as it did. Nobody wants their baby to die. Nobody. You will ALWAYS find something that you think you could have done to change it. But you can’t and in each moment we did the BEST we could with the information we had. Period. Read that sentence again and again until it sinks in. Even if you do know the reason, the pain in the same. A reason, and searching for a reason, is the mind’s way of trying to find a way out of losing the baby.
Now almost ten years later, I look at those people who said hurtful and insensitive statements to me and I see them differently. I see them as people who were scared, ignorant; and believe it or not, I pity them. Everything about me is different after my loss. It is like my life was put into a completely different track than everyone around me. This truly, this life changing and altering experience was why I felt such disconnect to the others around me. My way to bridge the gap now, many years later, is to be the guide for this experience. We become a teacher of grief.
When one has cancer they begin to teach and explain to others their condition, they are placed in a role of leadership (whether they want to or not). The same is true here. In teaching your friends and family (maybe not at the beginning, but you will find it happens naturally) what this baby meant to you. The path of self-discovery (mind you, I would in a heartbeat take the baby instead of the journey) that one goes upon is ever changing. Every year another part of this experience changes me. The main thing I learned was to have compassion for myself.