Supporting a Loved One After Pregnancy Loss
Nobody wants to be reading this post. I get it. Watching someone you love go through a heart-breaking pregnancy loss, at any stage, can make you feel powerless and uncertain. You don’t want to say or do the wrong thing that’s going to make their suffering any worse, but you also want to show up for them so they know they don’t have to go through it alone. This post will cover some helpful to-dos (and don’ts!) that can guide you in your support of a loved one experiencing loss. That said, there are a couple of important caveats:
1. Whatever I say doesn’t matter if the person you are supporting asks for something different or tells you something isn’t helpful for them. What is helpful for one person might not be helpful for another person. It’s okay to ask your person if the way you’d like to support them would be okay before you implement an idea.
2. Self awareness is important. It’s important to be mindful of your own limits and capacities. As much as we’d like to give people unlimited support, trying to offer support that’s beyond what we can give right now isn’t sustainable for us long term and, ultimately, won’t be good for the person we are trying to support. We want to offer sustainable support because grief and healing don’t have linear timelines. You may have to be honest with yourself and your loved one about what kind of support you can realistically offer. Show up in ways that are going to work for everyone involved.
With those caveats in mind, let’s first explore some things not to do when offering support to a loved one after pregnancy loss.
To-Don’ts!
1. Don’t “at least” someone else’s pain – when someone we love is hurting, its hard for us not to want to say or do whatever we can to make it better. But the hard truth about pregnancy loss is that nothing you say or do is going to bring their baby back. Sometimes, people say things that they hope will provide comfort like, “at least you weren’t far along when the miscarriage happened, so you didn’t have a chance to bond with the baby” or “at least you know you can get pregnant” or “at least you’re young and can have more children.” While statements like these come from a good place – you want the person to feel better – they can feel very invalidating for someone who is experiencing the pain of loss. Statements like these often make people feel like you don’t understand how important their baby was to them, that their baby is not replaceable, and like you want them to get over their pain and move past it. It’s okay to say, “I’m so sorry this is happening, and I know nothing I say is going to make it better.” It’s okay to say, “I don’t know what to say. This is really hard.” And if you catch yourself saying something like this, apologize. It’s better to say you’re sorry and you acknowledge that what you said isn’t helpful than to pretend you didn’t make a mistake.
2. Don’t avoid talking about the loss at all costs or pretend that nothing has happened. It’s not unusual for people to not want to talk about the loss someone is going through because they’re afraid to bring up something painful and cause the person they love to feel sad. Unfortunately, many people experiencing loss feel like they can’t talk about what they’re going through because other people around them will be uncomfortable. Many people would like to talk about how they’re feeling and what they’ve been thinking about, but don’t feel safe to do so. This doesn’t mean you need to bring up someone’s loss all the time – indeed, some people may prefer not to talk about it and it’s important to respect their boundaries if this is the case. Instead, if you have the capacity to support someone in this way, it’s important to let them know that you’re open to talking about their baby and their experience of loss whenever they need an ear. It can be helpful, on birthdays, holidays, or other important dates, to acknowledge that your loved one might be holding a little extra grief during these times and, if they are, they don’t have to sit with those feelings alone.
3. Don’t judge someone else’s response to grief. The truth is that grief is highly individual, and everyone experiences and expresses feelings of grief in different ways. People may feel sad, angry, anxious, exhausted. People may show their grief in ways that we expect but also in ways that we don’t expect. People may also appear on the outside not to be grieving at all and act in ways that don’t make sense to us based on how we understand grief. Grief doesn’t have a timeline – it’s not something that starts out being hard but gets easier in a linear and predictable way. Grief is complex. Most of us cannot truly predict how we will feel and react when a loss happens. For people who are supporting someone going through a loss, its important to remember that what you see on the outside is only part of what someone is going through and it’s not for you to judge – or even understand – a person’s process. If you catch yourself thinking that someone else’s response to their loss is ‘wrong,’ its important to take a step back and ask yourself where those ideas about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to grieve come from and if they are helpful to the person going through it.
Okay, so admittedly that is a lot. Let’s also talk about what you can do so that you feel like you have tools in your pocket to provide support.
To-Dos!
1. Offer postpartum support. Though losses at different stages of pregnancy will have different recovery times, a pregnancy loss is still a birth, which means that the pregnant person’s body will need time to heal and recover. This may mean that they are experiencing bleeding and tenderness; depending on how far along they were, they may also experience their milk coming in. These sensations can be intense for any postpartum person but can be especially painful without the presence of their baby to nurture. Offering postpartum support to someone who has experienced a pregnancy loss can include helping with household tasks (dishes, laundry, etc.) so they can rest, dropping off nourishing and warming foods so they can fuel their body’s recovery without the stress of cooking, offering to pick up groceries or other household items if they’re not ready to venture out of the home, or watching other children if they need a break. The body needs time to heal, and the heart and mind need time to process, so whatever you can do to facilitate those things for the birthing person is worth while, but also respect their need for space as needed.
2. Remember the partner and other members of the intimate family. While the birthing person undoubtedly requires a lot of love and support in their grief and healing, partners, siblings of the baby who died, grandparents, and other members of the family often get forgotten even though they, too, are experiencing the loss. Check in with partners. Ask them about how they are feeling and what they need. Give them some space to process their own emotions during a time where they might feel like they need to hold it together for the birthing person. Things you do to support postpartum recovery – helping with household tasks, dropping off meals – are often helpful for the whole family as well.
3. Remember important dates and use the baby’s name. If a baby was named by the parents, and as long as they are comfortable, it’s important to use the baby’s name when you talk about them. Though of course there are times when a family wishes to put the loss behind them, many people think of their babies who died at every holiday and birthday and cannot help but think about what their child would be like now had they lived. When we acknowledge that we wish their baby was here too, we can be with someone in their grief and their memories. Just because a child is no longer physically present does not mean that their energy and the love their parents have for them is no longer present. Including the baby’s memory during special times is a way of acknowledging their emotional presence in the family’s life.
4. Do ask for feedback and be willing to adjust course. Do ask the person you are supporting if you’re showing up for them in ways that are helpful and do be willing to self-reflect and adjust course if they tell you that something isn’t working for them. It can be easy to feel defensive when someone tells us that what we’re doing to help isn’t helpful. Nobody wants to feel like they’ve messed up. But if we want to truly be supportive, we have to be willing to be teachable and to switch up how we do things to be more supportive if something we’ve been trying just isn’t helping.
5. Explore your own relationship to grief and loss! There’s something about supporting someone through an important loss in their lives that can bring up a lot of stuff for us personally. When we don’t take the time to explore our own feelings and our own relationship to loss, things can show up in our relationship with someone who is grieving that we won’t expect and aren’t necessarily helpful. The work we do to work through our own “stuff” is genuinely helpful in the work we do with others.
For those of you who have made it this far, thank you for taking the time to learn more about how you can support someone who is experiencing a pregnancy loss. I know it isn’t easy to hold space for all the complex and intense feelings that can come up during these heartbreaking times. I want you to know that how you show up for someone can make a significant difference in how they feel about themselves and the world as they grieve and heal. Showing up is hard, but it’s work worth doing.