3 Things to NEVER Say to Someone Who's Just Lost a Pregnancy - and 3 Things to Not Forget

I just got an email from a business colleague en route to being a friend.  She’s lost several pregnancies and has to bid that dream of her life farewell permanently – two losses, both the present and the future.  Shattering. 

I lost my only child before she could be born.  People who have experienced other losses think they understand, but they can't.  Even a fellow of the child-loss fraternity can't, because every one of us is unique.  Losing your child is a deeper form of grief than anything else, because at the core of our souls we want to put ourselves between our children and all danger.  I would cheerfully have died to save my daughter-to-be, and when I couldn’t, I crawled into the grave with her, emotionally if not physically, for a very long time.  When we do all that is humanly possible, and it's just not enough, we slide into an unknown country.  We feel such desperate failure.  The very definition of “parent” has been violated and we blame ourselves.  We always blame ourselves. 

My friend experienced this loss six months ago, and is finally able to email about it.  She knew what she needed : some "doing" when she needed distraction, while she grieved and cried and lit incense and prayed, created memorials and memory books and every other healthy thing we do when we know better than it bottle it up and “just carry on.”

This kind of loss really is too devastating for you to say anything except I love you. 

Reach out and enfold them in love and then exert every fiber of strength in your being to just shut up – because 99% of us want to offer advice, and all of it is hurtful, in result if not in intention.  The thing you need to understand about your “helpful” advice is that it is, at its base, a very powerful need of YOURS.  The emotions of child-loss and indeed any loss awaken our own fears for our loved ones because we do understand emotionally how fragile human life is.  We want the grieving person to shut up, stop crying, talk and act “bravely,” because that’s what WE need to quiet our own fears.  We can’t just let ourselves feel pain and grief and fear and shame and everything else, and your raw, expressed emotion makes us so all-fired frightened we quite literally can’t stand it. 

And I understand.  So tell the person you love them and then leave the room.  Drop off the rum cake or the casserole, kiss them and get the heck out of there.

You want to share your words of wisdom because you want the bereaved to stop feeling.  You want so desperately to talk about God, about trying again or about adoption.  As for this latter, I natter on about the joys of adoption all the time.  After all, I’m adopted and I’m wonderful.  If someone is having trouble, and flinches from any thought of adopting, then I know that it’s the ego trip of reproduction and pseudo-immortality that they are desperate about, not the glorious adventure of nurturing, but that is a truth I rarely state out loud, unless someone gets really offensive about it.  I am not technically a mother, but I’ve nurtured children, for a decade in one case.  Love has nothing whatever to do with biology.  But I never, ever, talk about adoption to someone who has just lost a child.

Grieving is healthy.  Grieving actually gets you to a new path faster than “getting over it” quickly.  Some personalities, and some cultures (like New Zealand) value quiet grief to overt actions like my friend and I would take.  But the process is the same.  Don’t offer advice.  Just offer love and then shut up until it’s time to offer love again.  Hug IF the person values it and back off if they don’t, knowing that needs will shift over time and even in the space of 5 minutes.  I couldn’t bear to be touched, for years.  Others need hugs, hugs and more hugs.

Understand that the overwhelming need to advise is also born of ego – I know how you should think, and you don’t, so let me tell you.  When you understand that you don’t. it gives you the strength you need to shut up.  Hey, I’m a professional mental health practitioner, and what do I, in my brilliant wisdom, do in situations of loss?  I tell people I love them and then I shut up.  If they want to talk, I listen.  You know, that thing where your mouth is closed?  That one.  Except for empathetic “hmms” and echoing their feelings back (without launching into your “I can top your story,” another ego-driven urge), companionship without content I call it.

I so much wish I could hug my friend, but she’s 3000 miles away.  I wish I could tell her it will be a new path but one worth living, eventually, but it’s not time for that, and besides, I’m not God – how do I know, really? 

I tell her I love her, I send her Reiki and prayers, and I hope that her life will be joyful again someday.  It’s all that we can really do for each other.  And all we can do is always enough.

Grief support when you want it.  www.soaringdragon.biz/webinars-events.