The evolution of grief

Photo by mike labrum

When someone else's loss takes you back.

There was a time when hearing that someone had lost their baby would have completely undone me.

After my daughter died, every story of another baby lost felt like someone reaching into my chest and touching a wound that had barely begun to close.

I would find myself back there. Back in that room. Back in that terrible space between knowing something was wrong and understanding that my life would never be the same again.

I remember thinking that grief would always feel that way.

That every reminder would be a fresh devastation. That I would spend the rest of my life bracing myself against a world that continued to take babies from their mothers.

But grief evolves.

Not neatly. Not predictably. And certainly not in the way people who haven't experienced it sometimes imagine.

It doesn't disappear. It doesn't become smaller simply because the years grow longer.

It changes its relationship with you.

In the beginning, my grief was everything. It was the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes and the last thing I carried into sleep. It lived in the empty spaces of my home, in conversations I couldn't bear to have, in the unbearable ordinariness of a world that continued as though nothing extraordinary had happened.

People went shopping. They complained about the weather. They announced pregnancies and brought babies home.

And my daughter was dead.

I couldn't understand how those two realities could exist in the same world.

Years later, I can.

Or perhaps I've simply learned to live with the contradiction.

I have days when I am happy without having to remind myself that I'm allowed to be.

There was a time when I believed that the intensity of my suffering was somehow connected to the depth of my love. That if the pain ever became less consuming, it might mean I was leaving my daughter behind.

I know differently now.

My love for her has never depended on how much I hurt.

And yet, every so often, something happens that reminds me how close grief still lives beneath the surface.

Someone loses a baby.

A mother writes that she went to an appointment expecting to hear a heartbeat and instead heard words no parent should ever have to hear.

Someone shares a photograph of tiny hands, a blanket, a name.

And suddenly, the years between my loss and theirs seem to collapse.

I am no longer simply reading about another mother's tragedy.

I am remembering mine.

Not always in vivid detail. Sometimes it's just a feeling. A heaviness that settles somewhere behind my ribs. An inexplicable restlessness. The sudden urge to put my phone down and sit quietly for a while.

Other times, it is the anger.

The same anger I thought I had made peace with.

That this still happens. That somewhere, right now, another woman is discovering that the future she imagined has vanished. That she will have to learn an entirely new language of existence, one in which she is a mother but cannot mother her child in all the ways she had expected.

And I hate that I know something about what lies ahead for her.

I hate knowing about the silence after everyone goes home.

About the well-meaning words that wound.

About the strange guilt of laughing for the first time.

About the birthdays that belong to someone who will never grow older.

I hate knowing that she may one day become very good at carrying something she never should have had to carry at all.

But there is something else I feel now, something I couldn't have recognised in those early years.

A desire to reach across the distance between us.

Not to tell her that it gets better.

I don't know what better means in the context of a dead child.

Not to promise that time heals.

Time has done many things for me, but it has never brought my daughter back.

I want to tell her that she doesn't have to make sense of any of this.

That she doesn't have to find a reason, a lesson, or a greater purpose in what has happened.

That she can be angry. Bitter. Numb. Devastated. That she can feel all those things in a single afternoon and none of them the following morning.

That there is no correct way to grieve a baby.

I want to tell her that she doesn't owe anyone a version of grief they find easier to witness.

And sometimes, I want to tell her nothing at all but simply let her know that I know.

Because that's another thing grief has taught me.

When I first lost my daughter, I desperately wanted someone to understand.

Not sympathise.

Understand.

I wanted someone who wouldn't flinch when I spoke about her. Someone who wouldn't search for something reassuring to say. Someone who understood that mentioning my daughter's name wasn't reminding me she had died.

I had never forgotten.

Now, when I hear about another loss, I understand that my experience doesn't give me ownership of someone else's pain.

Her grief is not my grief.

Her baby is not my baby.

Our stories may share a terrible thread, but they are not interchangeable.

We grieve differently.

Some of us speak. Some retreat. Some hold tightly to the memories. Others cannot bear to look at them for years.

Some find comfort in faith. Others lose theirs.

Some want to be surrounded by people. Others need the world to leave them alone.

And some of us move between all those places, sometimes in the space of a day.

There is no hierarchy of suffering here. No competition over whose loss was greater, whose grief lasted longer, or who has learned to carry it more gracefully.

We are simply parents who loved children we did not get to keep.

Perhaps the greatest change in my grief is that I no longer need someone else's experience to mirror mine in order to recognise their pain.

I can sit with the discomfort of knowing that there is nothing I can do to fix it.

I can acknowledge that their loss has stirred something in me without making their loss about me.

I can step away when the stories become too much, and return when I have the emotional space to listen.

That, too, is part of the evolution.

Learning that compassion doesn't require us to reopen every wound until we bleed.

That protecting our own hearts doesn't mean we've stopped caring about someone else's.

Sometimes I still cry when I hear about another baby who has died.

Sometimes I don't.

There was a time when I might have questioned what that said about me.

Now I understand that neither response measures the depth of my empathy or the permanence of my love for my daughter.

Grief has changed me in ways I never asked for.

It has made me more aware of the invisible things people carry. More cautious with my words. Less inclined to offer reassurance where none exists.

But I refuse to say it has made me a better person.

I would give back every insight, every ounce of understanding, every carefully acquired piece of wisdom to have my daughter here.

I didn't need her to die to learn compassion.

I needed her to live.

And perhaps that is what remains unchanged beneath all this evolution.

I still wish she were here.

I still wonder who she would have become.

I still love her with the same fierce, helpless love I felt when I first knew she existed.

The difference is that I can carry those truths now without being consumed by them every waking moment.

And when I hear about another mother standing at the beginning of this terrible journey, I feel the familiar ache.

For her.

For her baby.

For the woman I once was.

For the daughter I will always miss.

I cannot tell that mother how her grief will unfold.

I cannot promise her peace, or healing, or that one day she will feel the way I do.

But I can tell her this:

You are not alone.

We grieve differently.

But we grieve.

And every one of our babies mattered.

After a long hiatus, we are grateful to Jo-Anne for this new post. To Jo-Anne, whose baby mattered and to all of you, whose babies matter.