Grief and the passage of time
Time. Some say it’s a great healer. Others seem to think people should ‘get over it’ after a certain amount of it has passed.
But does time cure things or just allow our perspective on them to be altered?
Today is the third anniversary of one of the hardest days of my life – the day we learned that we had lost our much-loved and much-longed-for first baby before he’d even had the chance to be born.
I don’t know how it’s been three years. Time just seems to pass so quickly. And it’s definitely true that our little Lentil doesn’t occupy my thoughts with the same degree of dominance that he did three years ago.
Does that mean time has healed our grief? No. Does that mean we don’t love him and miss him like we did then? No. Does that mean that the loss of an unborn baby is lessened by the subsequent arrival of a living child? No.
The pain of losing a child cannot be cured by a simple, “Oh well, at least you’ve got another one.” Each human life is precious and no sibling can make up for the loss of a brother or sister.
However many children we might have, however many reasons God might give us to celebrate and rejoice, they will not replace the baby we will never meet on Earth, nor prompt us to ‘get over’ his loss.
Life moves forward. We move forward. But we do not ‘move on’.
As human beings we are the products, in great part, of our experiences. They shape our lives and the people we grow into – and that process is an ongoing one.
Loss and grief, like all other experiences, will always have an impact on our lives. It may not be as dominant and looming as in those early days but it is always there, in the background.
And the thing about things being always there, in the background, is that you never quite know when they might move to the fore.
In the early months after losing Lentil, there were times when I knew I would feel it particularly keenly. The Christmas when we’d expected to share news of our impending arrival. My first Mother’s Day as a mother, tinged with the sadness of knowing I could never in this life hold the child who made me one. The date Lentil would have been due to be born. The anniversary of learning that he never would be.
The year after losing Lentil, Baby Loss Awareness Week was a big focus for me. The following year, coming just weeks after we’d welcomed our rainbow baby, it was also at the forefront of my mind. This year was different. This year I didn’t write a new blog post for BLAW. I didn’t join in the Wave of Light. I didn’t do anything to acknowledge the week.
But that wasn’t because I was ‘over it’. It wasn’t because I didn’t care. It was simply because things change, we change, and we don’t always need and do the same.
It’s fair to say that my life now is pretty much dominated by parenting our beautiful daughter, and when I look at Charlotte and see her developing, I don’t automatically think of her older brother, of what he’d have been like at her age or what he would have been like now. But I never forget that she’s our rainbow baby, never forget the one who went before. And when I do think of them together, it never escapes me that, were it not for losing Lentil, we would probably never have had Charlotte.
Grief changes. Grief develops. Grief is individual. How one person experiences loss and grief will never exactly match the experiences of the next person. One thing I’ve learned in the last three years, and from the varied experiences of the many people I’ve come across who have had their own experiences of baby loss, is that everyone needs to be allowed to experience their grief in their way. There’s not a one size fits all approach. We might not understand another person’s way of coping with loss but that doesn’t mean we should question it.
We can help by validating each other’s grief and ways of coping. We can help by supporting in whatever way is right for the person who is grieving. But we will never help by questioning why they’re not over it yet or suggesting that they should be.
I’ll admit that, until last week, this anniversary hadn’t registered in my consciousness. It was only when I saw a Facebook memory of a walk on the beach which I remembered taking place the weekend before our world collapsed that it came into my mind. This photo from that day always brings a lump to my throat. The memory of that beach walk is poignant to me because I can remember how happy we felt that day, sharing a ‘family’ day out with two foster children. We were imagining what life was going to be like when we had our own family days out with the child we knew was in my womb, not imaging for a second that the child in my womb was no longer growing there, that his tiny heart had already stopped fluttering.
We were so full of joy and expectation for family life in that picture. Today, with Charlotte in our lives, we are again full of joy and expectation for family life. But the fact that we can once again feel the emotions we felt then does not wipe out the emotions we have felt or the experiences we have lived over the last three years, or the emotions we still feel for the child who will never run ahead of us on the beach.
Times change, needs change, grief develops and grieving changes. But none of it goes away. It doesn’t leave. It just changes. Sometimes it needs an outlet. Sometimes it needs to stay quiet. So sometimes I might blog about Lentil and loss and sometimes, even when to do so would fit neatly in with society’s calendar of how grief should work, I might not.
Whether I’m keenly feeling his loss and the intense pain that accompanied it in those early days, or whether I’m moving forward with life without him at the forefront of my mind, Lentil’s life and loss will always have an impact on shaping the person I am and the life I lead.
Lentil will always be the one who made me a mum and Charlotte will always be the one who enabled me to fulfil all the motherly tasks that a mother expects to be able to do for her children.
So much has happened in three years and I will never forget a bit of it until the day I finally get to hold my first precious baby, my darling Lentil, in my arms.
For anyone who missed them, or anyone who wants another read, here are my blog entries from the past two November 17s:
Sarah Moore is the author of For the Love of Lentil, A journey of longing, loss and abundant grace, which tells the story of her experience of pregnancy and miscarriage. Copies of the book are available here.