“Things do not get better by being left alone”

This is a Winston Churchill quote. And, as much as I have no love or respect for this person, the words stand strong.

And never have they meant more to me than now.

My son, my beautiful boy, was stillborn on the 5th August 2024.

I don’t want to go into the raw destruction that something like that causes. Not now.

It’s a pain that nobody really understands or talks about. It’s too much. And not just for the bereaved.

People can imagine the pain of losing a parent. They understand that cancer can kill people. They understand car crashes and house fires and passing peacefully in a hospital bed. These are deaths you’ll find in media and in the lives of the people that surround you.

But baby loss? Baby loss is almost a sin.

We don’t talk about it. We don’t understand it. We don’t want to. It’s too much.

Grief leaves you feeling like a secret, something others are scared to talk about. Grief chokes you and you worry about it infecting the people around you. So you keep yourself away from everybody but, at the same time, you want to feel seen and remembered. Grief is like Bruno, a filthy secret that lives in the walls of your home, always present but only acknowledged as something scary, spoken about in hushed voices or not at all.

So when you’re plunged into it, when it happens and you can hardly breathe, that’s when you understand just how invisible baby loss is.

When I held him the evening he was born, I stroked his cheeks and said, “This isn’t real. This doesn’t happen. This isn’t a real thing. This doesn’t happen, this doesn’t happen to us.”

Jack thought I’d lost my mind. When it was just the two of us in the room, he asked, “when you were saying this isn’t real, what did you mean? You know this is real, right?” I couldn’t stop laughing when he asked that.

It was disbelief but not in the fact that I was holding my cold son, but because this is a type of pain, of loss, that only happens in Eastenders or in an Oscar bait drama. This isn’t something that happens in real life. This isn’t something that happens to us.

But it did.

And you can’t really see at times. Your whole system is completely choked and there’s nothing but how much it hurts.

And then I feel Jack’s warm hand on my back. And it makes my crying harder but it’s because I feel safe to do it. I’m not alone, there’s a warm presence that holds me up. It doesn’t stop it or abate it in any way. But I’m not alone.

There’s somebody else trying to stand up under the weight of grief right next to me.

But we’re not just our grief. I’m not just my grief. I’m still Fiona. There’s just this other thing inside of me now. But I’m still me.

I think that’s the bit that people don’t really understand. That you can still be yourself after something so… disgusting.*

In the midst of it, I don’t just want sympathy and empathy isn’t really something that anybody can give. I primarily want people to remember who I am.

I may not respond but keep sending memes and videos and whatever else you used to send me before the 5th August. It’s a great way of letting me know you’ve not forgotten me! But it’s also a way to interact with me, support me, remind me that I’ve not just disappeared into my grief.

I know its hard. It’s gross. But not finding a way to hold the people going through this can hurt everybody involved. Be that warm hand on their back, you don’t have to say anything. Just let them know that they’re not alone.

We don’t talk about Bruno. But we really should.

*I really struggle to find the word for it. It makes no sense and nothing is big enough. So forgive the many words that I flip between. Nothing is enough but I’ll keep trying.