An
excerpt from
Chapter 4:
Grief and Grieving
Grief is very private and often very lonely. Only the grieving person fully understands what they have lost and what this means to them, and it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, for them to describe their feelings of loss to others. Even those who are very close to them may not be able to understand or share in their grief.
Because grief is so isolating, most of us know little about what profound grief is like until we experience it ourselves. As a result, the experience can be bewildering and sometimes frightening. Most bereaved parents, at some time, wonder whether their thoughts and feelings are `normal', and whether their sadness will ever become bearable. This chapter describes what grief is like for parents who have lost a baby. We look at ways of grieving, of finding support when it is needed and, eventually, of easing the pain.
Feelings of grief
| 'I just want things to be normal again, I want the hole inside me to fill up, I want to sleep at night without sobbing my heart out, most of all I want my baby. I scream inside for her. I want a lot, don't I? Some I can have, one I never will.' |
After their baby's death, parents grieve for the baby they have lost, and for all that their baby meant to them. They also grieve for a lost future - their baby's future, their own future as their baby's parents, and the future they would have shared as a family. They grieve because they have lost an expected happiness. Many feel that they have also lost hope.
Grief is, for everyone, this acute, overwhelming sense of loss, a feeling of emptiness and a great longing for what has been taken away. Parents long for their baby to hold, to cuddle, to feed, to care for, and, most of all, to love. It can be difficult to believe that such intense longing will never be fulfilled and that what is wanted and needed so much can never be had. Coming to grasp the permanence of loss is very hard, and once grasped, it is very painful.
Along with the pain and sadness, grief brings other feelings which may come and go, change and change again, over a long period of time. There is often guilt, anger, bitterness or resentment; feelings of helplessness, loneliness, or the futility of living; great anxiety, fear and sometimes panic. There are almost always physical effects too. Not surprisingly, bereaved people often feel physically exhausted - yet they may be unable to rest or sleep. Many feel listless and without energy. Some find they become short of breath, suffer tightness in the throat or chest, or feel they are suffocating. There can be unexplained headaches or other aches and pains, stomach upsets or diarrhoea. Some parents say that their arms ache for the baby they cannot hold.
Many parents who lose a baby have never been bereaved before and have
never had to grieve. Many are shocked by the intensity of what they feel
and may continue to feel over months and maybe years. Initially, their
shock may be all the greater because of the suddenness with which they
are cut off from the future they had imagined and looked forward to:
| 'Last year I became the happiest person an earth when I found out I was pregnant. But today I feel lost, I don't feel worthy of living, I feel a failure and I don't know where I'm heading any more.' |
Many bereaved parents feel that nothing is important any more, that life - their own life in particular - has lost its meaning and purpose. After his son, Jonathon, was stillborn, Tim felt there was only one thing which he wanted and which mattered - yet he could not have it:
| 'My boss wanted to know why I wasn't giving work 100 per cent. His view was that the job should always come first. I felt nothing came first any more. There was no longer any point running for buses or queuing in shops - everything became unimportant in comparison to the desire to have our baby back.' |
Many parents also suffer a complete loss of confidence in themselves. They felt helpless in the face of their baby's death because they were unable to prevent it, and the feelings of helplessness continue afterwards and become feelings of worthlessness and failure. Some parents feel very strongly that they should have been able, as so many other parents are able, to have a live, healthy baby, and they feel that their baby's death is, if not their fault, certainly their failure. Many parents punish themselves with these feelings:
| 'Like many others, I lost all sense of worth, felt useless and had no confidence in anything I did. Most of all, I now know, I never felt worthy of giving myself any praise. I felt a failure, and I tried to carry an as normal to compensate for failing everyone else.' |
Many parents feel that they have not just failed their baby and themselves, but they have also let down their partner, perhaps other children, and the rest of their family. Often they feel that they add to these failures by showing their misery, crying, by being unable to put an a calm or cheerful face or being what they see as `weak' or not coping. Unfortunately, this can mean that they hold in and hide their grief, and this in turn can make it harder to bear.
For Jane, feelings of failure were acute. Her daughter, Jemma, died in her womb when she was thirty-eight weeks pregnant. No reason was ever found. Jane was 31 years old, and until this tragedy happened, neither she nor her husband had experienced any kind of catastrophe or anything that felt like failure. She had been successful at school as a child, had done well in exams, qualified as a teacher and started a career. She was thrilled to conceive in the month that she had planned, went an teaching until she was six months pregnant, moved house at eight months, and felt an top of the world. There had been no problems at all. So, two months after Jemma's death, Jane found herself 'mentally on a precipice':
| 'Miraculously, I have a teaching job on a term's
basis. I start next week. But the prospect terrifies me. I am afraid
of most things now. I have no desire to sort out the house, can only
force myself to cook and don't really eat anything. The mornings are
the worst. This morning my nerves were so bad I was violently sick
several times. `I am so desperate to try and resume a happy life for my husband's sake, and so afraid I can't ever recover, as I truly do often feel I would prefer to die. I never knew there was such suffering in the world before. I have always been so lucky and happy, and now I just cannot see a way ahead without my daughter. I have no faith whatsoever in a God now, nor does my husband. I truly don't see how anyone can have when they've held their own dead baby. There is no meaning whatsoever in such pain.' |
For a long time, Jane saw what had happened to her, and her misery, as some kind of wrongdoing on her part, and her feelings of failure, and of responsibility for what had happened, made it hard for her to grieve:
| 'I still see it as my "crime" within the family. I don't talk to them about it because I feel I mustn't bring up all the pain for them again. I did so much damage at the time. Having a grave is just my permanent punishment for what I did. (I feel guilty saying this because Jemma wouldn't want to have caused such pain.)' |
Feelings of guilt cause a lot of pain and sometimes take years to resolve. But six years after Jemma's death, Jane was able to write:
| 'For the days around the anniversary of Jemma's death, and her birth ten days later, all the pain comes flooding back, and I know it will always be that way. But day to day, she is now peaceful and safe inside. I carry her always. She is wholly mine, my private sadness but also my perfect, secret joy.' |
Parents often feel to blame for their baby's death, particularly, perhaps, when no satisfactory medical explanation is given or can be found. Since it is natural to feel that there must be a reason for a baby's death, the absence of any medical explanation often leaves parents with the feeling that they themselves were in some way responsible:
| 'I am furious that no one has asked me questions to prove to them and me that I didn't do anything. I badly want answers to how these things happen. I feel a totally unresolved confusion about how a perfect baby, at the end of a perfect (or so they told me) placenta, in a perfectly healthy mother, can possibly be lost. I feel I did it.' |
Some parents do not blame themselves but still feel angry or bitter because there seems to have been no reason for their baby to die. Many feel, simply and strongly, that what has happened should not have happened. Many feel that it should not have happened to them. Kim's son was born prematurely after Kim caught a kidney and bladder infection:
| 'There are mothers who drink, smoke and take drugs in their pregnancies but they still have healthy babies that survive. Then there are women like me. I didn't smoke, drink or take drugs in my pregnancy, I watched my diet and I took care of myself, and look what happened. Life's just so unfair.' |
In one way or another, almost all parents compare themselves with others, and inevitably feel jealous of those who have successful pregnancies and live, healthy babies. Many find it hard to admit their jealousy, although it is natural and understandable, and this adds to their sense of isolation. Their experience of tragedy seems to cut them off from friends and acquaintances whose experiences are so much happier. Pat describes her feelings of jealousy after she lost her twins:
| 'I feel terribly jealous of two women, and sometimes the feelings are very strong. The first gave birth to baby twin girls a week before our twins were born. Every time I see her with her double pushchair I feel very upset, then very jealous of her, which I suppose is understandable really. The other woman had a baby boy two months premature. He was not expected to live. I felt sorry for the family, whom I know quite well, but at the same time I was strangely pleased that we would have something in common. However, against all the odds, the baby has recovered and now I feel terribly jealous of her and I feel so guilty about it. It seems so unfair that my perfectly-formed babies died, and hers lived.' |
Jealousy is a part of the wanting which all parents feel after their baby's death. This wanting can continue for a long time, often for years, for the simple reason that it can never be fulfilled. The baby who has died can never be brought back, can never be replaced. Sallie's first baby, James, died when he was ten days old. Ten years later, Sallie still misses him and has come to realise that she will always do so:
| 'Friends forget, of course they do. Only a few remember with you. But you yourself need to go on remembering. I still miss James and I know that it will always be like this. I still feel envy, plain and simple, when other women become pregnant. When it's friends, I'm genuinely glad, but I can't help the envy. It's worse with people I don't know.' |
Feelings of grief do not necessarily disappear as the years go by. Time may change them and almost always makes them more bearable: most parents say, years after their baby's death, that the passing of time has helped. They also say that the memory of their baby never fades, and that there are at least some feelings which they know will remain with them always. It is, as one father describes it, 'a necessary sadness'.
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