My Baby Was Stillborn. This Is What I’ve Learnt About Grief.

3 months ago, my life was turned upside down when my baby girl was stillborn at 37 weeks. I went into hospital with labour pains and came out with an empty car seat and a bag of unused baby clothes. It has, without a doubt, been the hardest and most traumatic experience of my life so far.

I want to share with you some of the things I have learnt over the past few months, in the hope that it might help those who are grieving and those who want to support someone who is grieving.

Grief is lonely

Before this happened to me, I’d heard it said that grief is lonely and I’d assumed that anyone who felt lonely probably didn’t have good friends and family around to support them. Now I know that grief can be incredibly lonely, even if you do have a loving family and a large circle of friends. I think this is for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, your grief is a totally unique, personal experience that nobody else, however close, can share with you. Nobody else fully understands how you feel. One of the common things people say to you after a loss is “I can’t imagine how you must feel.” I found this very isolating. It felt like people were saying, “I’m over here, in a place where I can’t even imagine what you must be feeling, and you’re over there, in a place where this horror show is your reality.”

Secondly, lots of people withdraw when something terrible happens. I’ve been surprised by the amount of people who have kept their distance, either by not keeping in touch or by ignoring what has happened. I think people assume that I want privacy, or that they shouldn’t say anything for fear of upsetting me, or that I have plenty of other friends and family so their message won’t make a difference. In fact, their distance makes the grief experience much lonelier.

Some people get it, some people don’t

It is often said that, when something bad happens, you learn who your friends are. I would nuance this and say that you learn who can support you in the way you need to be supported.

As I mentioned above, I’ve been hurt by people who have withdrawn. However, I have equally been comforted by the people who have leaned in to support me. Some people just seem to “get it” and naturally know what to do and say to make me feel supported. These people stay in regular contact and send messages without always expecting a response. They openly acknowledge my loss and give me the opportunity to talk about it as much or as little as I want. They treat me normally, but sensitively.

This experience has definitely brought me closer to some people and created distance with others. Of course, friendships are constantly evolving and today’s “status quo” is likely to change again over the months and years. But I do feel that I have learnt who are friends for the happy times, and who I can turn to in the bad times.

Grief is complicated

I used to think grief was synonymous with sadness. Now I know that grief is much, much more complicated than that. Sadness is probably the most simple emotion I’ve felt. The much more difficult emotions to deal with are guilt, anger, disappointment, jealousy, anxiety.

At the beginning, people said to me “allow yourself to feel whatever you’re feeling”. I thought this was a stupid thing to say and made no sense, because how could I do anything else? I then came to understand that what they mean is to allow feelings to come and go without judgment or resistance. For example, I would feel hugely jealous of people with babies, and then tell myself off for feeling jealous, because they have every right to have their baby and I should be grateful for the good things in my life etc etc. I have now learnt to allow myself to feel jealous, because of course I feel jealous, and not to make things harder for myself by trying to stop feeling jealous. Just allow the feelings to come, and then eventually go.

Something else I have struggled with is feelings that don’t “make sense.” At the beginning I felt a tremendous amount of guilt, a terrible knot of panic that I had done something (or not done something) which had caused the baby to die. Rationally, I knew that this wasn’t the case — the baby died because of a freak cord accident — yet I still felt guilty. As a fairly rational personal, I didn’t understand how I could know it wasn’t my fault and yet still feel like it was. A good friend of my husband’s helped me enormously by pointing out that emotions and rational thoughts are two entirely distinct things. Emotions occur as instinctive reactions, and then rational thought kicks in later. My instinctive reaction was that I had failed to protect my baby, and it took my rational mind a long time to overcome those feelings. Understanding this misalignment between feelings and thoughts has really helped me. I try not to make things more complicated for myself by dwelling on whether my feelings make sense.

We all cope in the only way we know how

Someone recently said to me that we all cope in the only way we know how. This has really stuck with me for two reasons.

Firstly, I think it provides great insight into how differently we all cope. Since this happened to me, I have learnt that people deal with stillbirth in very different ways. Many people chose to hold the baby, publicly name him or her, take photos and footprints. My husband and I felt vehemently that this was not for us. We felt that way in the hospital and we still feel that way now. I have found myself having to defend this decision to well-meaning people who have asked our baby’s name or tried to encourage us to create a “memory box.” I think it can be quite difficult to understand why people chose to deal with things in different ways. I don’t understand why someone would want their dead baby’s footprints on their wall, but they probably don’t understand why I wouldn’t! Ultimately, we all need to accept that everyone is coping in the only way they know how.

The second reason this has stuck with me is because I’ve realised that we don’t know how we will cope with any given situation until we are in it. If you’d asked me a year ago how I would cope if my baby was stillborn, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. And when it did happen, I didn’t think about how I should cope, I just did what came naturally to me. We really only learn about ourselves, and about how we handle difficult situations, when we are tested.

You realise your fragility, and your strength

This experience has made me realise that bad things do happen, and they can happen to me. Apparently 1 in 200 births in the UK is a stillbirth. Before this happened to me, I would never have worried about a 0.5% chance. Now I know that I can be that statistic.

I think we all have a secret belief that bad things won’t happen to us — I think we need to believe this to function every day. It can be very difficult when that belief is crushed, because you start thinking of all the other things that could happen. You have experienced how normal life can quickly slip into a living nightmare and you can clearly imagine it happening again. You realise the absolute fragility of life.

The flip side to this is that you also realise your own strength. I think most of us are a lot stronger and more resilient than we think we are. We imagine that if something awful happened we would take to our beds and never get up. In fact, we generally find a way of putting one foot in front of the other. This experience has made me more afraid of bad things happening, but more aware of my own strength to deal with them if they do.

There is no hierarchy of grief

One of the things people tend to do when it comes to bereavement is to try and figure out where to place you in the hierarchy of grief. Human beings like to organise and categorise, and we like to decide which situation is “better” or “worse.” People will say things like “I lost my dad a few years ago, but that’s nothing compared to what you’re going through.”

I think what makes my situation tricky is that people are undecided which category I fall into. Have I lost a child? If so, surely I shoot straight to the top of the hierarchy because nearly everyone would agree that losing a child is the worst loss anyone can endure. Or is my situation more akin to a miscarriage? In that case, I slide way down the hierarchy. Is a stillbirth worse than losing a parent? Is it worse than 10 failed IVF attempts?

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering all this myself. How bad is my situation? Should I be feeling worse than I do, or better? Of course, the answer is simple: I feel the way that I feel. I don’t need to compare my experience to anyone else’s, I don’t need to find a place for myself on the hierarchy of grief. Just because someone else has had it worse, doesn’t mean I can’t feel my own grief. Bereavement is not a competition, it is a single-player game.

We can all do better at helping each other

My experience has made me reflect on how I have supported friends and family who have suffered bereavements, or difficult situations, in the past. I really question whether I was someone who “leaned in” or whether I ignored the situation out of confusion and fear.

We live in a death-denying culture. Most of us are absolutely petrified of death and like to pretend it doesn’t exist. This means that people who suffer a bereavement are often isolated, rather than receiving the comfort and support they need. I think we all need to get much better at acknowledging death and helping bereaved people through the grieving process.

Here are a few of the ways I think we can do this:

1. Acknowledge what has happened. It has been so important to me for people to acknowledge my loss, rather than ignore it. I have so appreciated anyone who has addressed the situation head on and offered me their condolences.

2. Stay in contact. It is common to feel “forgotten” once the initial stage of bereavement has passed and everyone else goes back to normal life. I have been so grateful to those people who have kept in regular contact, even as the weeks and months have passed.

3. Ask the person how they are doing. If you ask, this gives them the opportunity to say as much or as little as they want. If you don’t ask, you’re denying them that opportunity.

4. Don’t assume that a brave face means they’re fine. Most of us are quick to assume that if someone seems fine, then they are fine. Don’t be fooled by a smile and a laugh. Tell them you know this must be hard for them, and they are doing really well.

5. Be flexible with plans. Grief can make it difficult to commit to plans because you don’t know how you will be feeling at any given time. I’ve been very grateful to people who have made it easy for me to change plans without any fuss or guilt.

6. Remember dates. Dates become very important when someone suffers a loss. It is very difficult to reflect on “this time last week/ last month/ last year….” If you know someone who is recently bereaved, make a note of the date and send them a card on the anniversary.

This experience has been the worst thing that’s happened to me. It’s an appalling shame that my little girl’s life was taken from her before she had a chance to live it. It’s a scar I’ll bear forever. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that none of us make it through this life unscarred.

Suffering is an unavoidable part of life. We will all suffer loss at some point. When it does happen, nobody can take the pain away, but they can make it easier to bear. It is in our darkest times that we need a rock to hold on to. Let’s do our best to be that rock for each other.