What would you tell someone about to become a mother?

When you bury your own, you can, indeed, learn to laugh at everything.

When you almost die yourself, life becomes a joke in itself.

But when you are a pregnant woman, just about the last thing you need to hear is anything about death. It's difficult enough, and if it's the first time, scarey enough.

Physically speaking you carry both the possibility of life and the possibility of death - including your own! - inside you. Pregnancy is a time for good news and support, not a reminder of mortality. That is inherent in the process.

Victoria

William,

death, as I had occasion to write just the other day in response to someone's fear of it, does indeed surround us and support us and I have known it to be even what I woud call seductive. I have flirted with it myself and, as part of my work ,actually help people who are resisting it to cross over. I know it well.

Death is most difficult, as you are discovering, for the living. In our society today we have no proper mechanism for grieving. Oh, you might take a week off from work but then you are expected to get on with your life. People are constantly trying to support you by telling you you'll get over it instead of advising you to go somewhere and grieve.
 
If you can write, write. Write as though you were writing to the mother of the child. Write to the child. Write and rewrite, then, when you have said all there is to say, you can burn the letters.  If you can paint, paint what it feels like in your soul. Positive thoughts have a place in grieving but they should be thoughts of love and fond remembered moments.

Forget affirmations. Grief - and it can last years, especially when a child is lost - is not the place to be laying foundations. It is a time for cleaning up and tidying up and treasuring what you have and have had.

In the question we had a few days ago, “When did you feel most supported?” there are two responses from people dealing with grief. One, a woman who lost her husband, (Jackie) and the other a woman who lost her sixteen year old daughter (her name begins with an E, but I cannot recall it in toto - the small photo by her name, though, is of her daughter in the casket). I'd find them and read them, if I were you.

Only time and you being able to feel what you feel and express that feeling in ways that are appropriate will bring healing. But it can come. It can.

Victoria

Dear Victoria,

Just to say that I agree with what you write.
I too saw the photo of the young teenager. It stayed with me because it is very uncommon for Europeans to take a photo and then it even putting on the Net.
But at the mean time it had something positive in a sense ” This is my beautiful daugter”. She wanted to share what she misses and I understood why she did it.