Baby Loss Awareness

Grief has no timescale. If you are blessed enough to have gone through life without being affected by the loss of a loved one then hold onto that dearly.

However the reality is that most of us have experienced the loss of a loved one. This November it is 6 years since my mum passed away. I have learnt to carry on living my life without her but not a day goes by when I don’t feel an almighty absence.

I often find myself suddenly overwhelmed with grief at moments that I want to share with her and even random times when she just creeps into my thoughts.

I understand the statements by others when they express the length of time that their loved one has passed. The length of time is somehow looked upon as the time past that the person left behind should have adapted by now.

I’d like to get people to look at it differently. I never got to tell my mum I was pregnant for the first time. I never got to introduce her to the love of my life. I never got to show her the house that I have made a home and I never got to cry in her arms when I cremated my children.

The time that has past hasn’t made any of this easier. It has not healed me. I have learnt to cope with the other loved ones in my life. I have learnt to carry on without my mum who died young.

I have often spoke about this grief and how it is more widely accepted, a mother passing before her child. It is also a grief that many can understand as they too may have lost their mother or father.

This week October 9th-15th is Baby Loss Awareness. You might not be that aware of this. If you see a house lit up with pink and blue during this time scale then know that they have been affected by pregnancy loss or neonatal death or are supporting someone they know who has been.

Maybe you are more aware of the wave of light. I know some of my friends are as on the 15th of October I often get a few texts saying they have lit a candle for Kora and Ava and all the babies lost or born sleeping.

Mental Health Awareness day also falls into the same time period. Many people who have lost a baby also suffer with mental health. Mental health affects 1 in 4 people statistically. It has rightfully become more talked about and focused on by the media.

Pregnancy loss affects 1 in 4 people. The same statistic. I suspect you can probably know easily how many friends or acquaintances in your life are affected by mental health. I wonder if you are as aware of how many have been affected by pregnancy loss.

I believe we should talk about mental health and that we have a long way to go to beat the stigma around it. I also believe that we are so much further away from talking openly about pregnancy loss.

I have not kept my current pregnancy a secret. I have written about it from the start of IVF. I have said many a times that there is no safe point in a pregnancy. We often wait for 12 weeks to announce a pregnancy as it is believed that at 12 weeks we have less chance of miscarriage or pregnancy loss.

Statistically this is accurate. However Neil and I have experienced pregnancy loss in the first trimester and the second (past the 12 weeks). If we don’t announce a pregnancy before 12 weeks how do we then announce or talk about the loss?

If most people don’t announce their pregnancy before 12 weeks it is clear why early miscarriage is often a private grief. It also then impacts the taboo subject and is another reason we don’t talk about it.

1 in 250 pregnancies result in sleeping babies and 1 in 13 babies are born prematurely. So why don’t we talk more about baby loss?

I believe there are many factors that prevent us talking about pregnancy loss some of which include fear, medical terminology, differing attachments to the unborn or even born sleeping babies and so on.

What I do know is the heartache and all encompassing grief that a pregnancy loss brings. Neil and I know the pain of holding our babies but leaving the hospital without them. We know the pain of attending a funeral service with the smallest coffin you will ever see.

We know the pain of creating a nursery for the cot to remain bare. We know the pain of only imagining who they would have looked like or what colour eyes or hair they would have. We know the pain of those words “I’m sorry there are no heartbeat(s)”.

We know the pain of the memory box with the photos of our babies. We know the pain of holding that photographic paper or the scan image instead of our babies. We know what it is like to have both an empty heart and empty arms.

I hope now, you know why it is so important to break this taboo, this silence. Let’s help mothers and fathers dealing with pregnancy loss to grieve in the way we allow for other losses. Let’s start that difficult conversation as it’s the right thing to do.