Discussing loss by with Seetal Savla
As part of Plum & Ashby’s 2024 Wave of Light campaign to honour all the babies lost too soon, I therefore decided to write an informal guide for anyone looking to support people living with loss. This is by no means a comprehensive list because the words and gestures that soothe one person’s grief-stricken soul might have the opposite effect on another.
For this reason, I asked my fellow members of the online loss community to describe what family, friends and colleagues did to help them see slivers of light and hope during their darkest post-loss days. I hope our suggestions lead to more open and empathetic conversations about grief and loss.
Our babies existed, even if only for a few months. Failing to acknowledge this reality is one of the most painful reactions for us because we want to talk about them, hear you mention their names and show you the only photos we will ever have of them. The best starting point is usually the simplest, i.e. a text message or card saying, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Six little words that recognise a seismic event in our lives. (I personally also appreciated reading something along the lines of, “This is very sh*t” as it directly acknowledged the unfairness of the situation without any attempts to resolve it.)
You could build on this by asking how we’re coping. Our answers might make you feel uncomfortable because they’re full of anger, sadness and frustration, but please resist the urge to ‘fix’ us with short-term solutions. This is a natural response when you see someone hurting, but our pain can’t be reversed. For example, any sentence starting with ‘at least’, such as “At least it happened early,” or “At least you already have a child,” minimise our loss and invalidate our feelings. Instead of reassuring us, they make us feel even lonelier in our grief because we can’t express the true extent of our pain. All we truly need is to be heard and hugged.
Many of us are familiar with the ‘Five Stages of Grief’ model by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlining the five emotions we experience following a loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Those who have suffered loss, however, know that the grieving process is far from linear. Three years after my last miscarriage, I still relieve the fear, confusion and numbness I felt whenever I pass the places where the worst happened.
Grief is messy and emotional. It hurts so much because we loved so hard. We repeatedly unravel and have to rebuild ourselves. It’s physically, mentally and emotionally gruelling work, and if we feel like we need to put on a façade around you, that extra effort adds to our exhaustion.
One way of helping us on our grief journey is to meet us where we are: remove all expectations of what grief should look like and actively listen to how we’re actually living it. Contrary to popular belief, losing a loved one isn’t something you ‘get over’ in a month, a year or even several years. While the rawness of our emotions subsides over time, we’ll always carry our grief with us. Part of us will always feel like it’s missing. Although we slowly learn to allow grief and joy to co-exist in our lives, our loss reshaped who we are and how we see the world now.
Depending on the nature of your relationship with the bereaved parent(s), a thoughtful gift might be more appropriate than a standalone card or message. A box containing our favourite sweet or savoury treats, like doughnuts or chocolates, can bring us a bit of joy among the bleakness. Others might prefer to receive a book on living with loss, e.g. ‘Beyond Grief’ by Pippa Vosper, ‘Life, Almost’ by Jennie Agg or ‘Saying Goodbye’ by Zoe Clark-Coates, accompanied by a Wave of Light candle to be lit on the last day of Baby Loss Awareness Week. Alternatively, you could send a selection of healthy readymade meals so that lunches and dinners are one less thing we have to worry about for a while.
A non-conventional option worth considering is a rage room voucher. It may sound extreme, but it’s a healthy and safe way to release our post-loss anger rather than suppressing it for whatever reason, including to avoid the judgment of others. Another idea along these lines is a day trip to the coast to shout at the sea. I haven’t tried either of these, but I found shedding angry tears while swimming on holiday to be very cathartic in the months after my miscarriage.
When a couple loses their baby, the focus tends to be on the pregnant person. Partners are often overlooked, but it’s important to remember that they also experienced a loss, albeit in a different way. If you know them, ask them how they are, because they’ll also need support. Being someone’s ‘rock’ and absorbing the intensity of their emotions takes its toll eventually. If you can hold space for them to unburden themselves, they’ll have more capacity to keep their partner afloat.
Although this post is about pregnancy/baby loss, I wanted to briefly include IVF unsuccessful IVF cycles and disenfranchised grief. By the time you learn you’re not pregnant, you’ll have injected, inserted and ingested multiple medications for a month, undergone invasive scans then worked hard to keep hope alive during the unbearably long two-week wait between the embryo transfer and test day. It’s an emotional rollercoaster. When you receive the devastating news, you experience a huge sense of loss: time, money, energy, hope. Yet when you share the outcome, there’s no acknowledgement of this emptiness.