She questions who she is in this world. Is there a place for the broken? Wherever they go, they either stick out like a sore thumb or fade into the background. So, who is she?
It becomes hard to explain the pain as the years pass. She is no longer the woman who just lost a child. The milestones of commemoration are passing, and yet, she is sad. The tears come, and she howls into the night for the baby. But she cries alone.
Read MoreTwo years after my son’s death, and the birth of my living daughter, I have emerged from two places: my own heart’s cloister, grieving like a monk; and society’s own caverns of exile. Instead of being pushed into the corner, a wounded animal that none knew how to tend, I am treated like a human again. Now I am considered a real life mother, with a real life child.
Read MoreThe shock of this trick is something I have not been able to overcome in six years. That I fell for the trap. I have heard from babyloss parents how the loss of their baby in an otherwise uneventful life, at the end of an uncomplicated pregnancy was like being hit in the face by a bolt of lightning. I get that shock that jolts you out of the naivete. I understand how ridiculous it must be, when you don’t know the “other,” and suddenly the “other” becomes you.
Read MoreThis week two readers of the book I wrote about life after loss got in touch to say what amounted to the same thing. One with an offhand comment, and the other with a handwritten two-page letter: You may not know where your baby has gone, but I do. Here’s the secret. God will save you from grief. Am I the caged animal, or are they? Which one of us eats better—the one who forages, or the one who is fed?
Read MoreAfter my son died, as the cold grip of shock receded, the magnitude of this loss began to make itself understood. Ah, this right here is the what the poets and artists of the ages have been speaking of all this time. I wanted a quest, a battle to return order to my world. Where to go now, with this unbounded and hungry grief?
Read MoreYou share toys, baby gear, DNA, a bedroom. She uses your hand-me-downs, less worn than we expected. When she reached the equivalent weeks as you were when you were born, I delicately placed her on your blankets and photographed her at the only age you two have had in common. And she is the only person who has lived inside the same home you did: Me.
Read MoreBereaved parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion, and the other side of getting through this mess called grief.
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Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.
Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.
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: parenting after loss
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