Loss and Grief
A little over a week ago, a friend of mine lost her newborn grandson. I don’t know the details and will not ask, but I know up until a few days before he was born, her chatter was about how soon the baby was coming, teasing her daughter about all the things she’d have to give up to be a mom, and just generally how thrilled she was to soon be a grandmother. But the baby did not survive, and there was a funeral instead.
I have, as long as I can remember, had intense reactions to the loss of babies. I have personally never lost a baby, and I don’t count my two early-term miscarriages in the same category as the loss of a full term baby. Yet I grieve deeply when someone I know has gone through this. I don’t even have to know them well. This friend’s daughter is someone I knew in passing, she is the same age as my son (23) and I remember her having a huge crush on my son when they were both 14 or so. Another time, the tenant living in my upstairs apartment lost a baby, and I cried for days. I even attended the funeral and visited the grave several times after that. There are other instances, as well, but I won’t detail them.
I’d like to say that I am grieving for the mother, or the grandmother, or the father, of that lost baby. But I don’t believe that is true. The grief hits me so hard, so deeply, that I feel I can’t breathe, and I cry with an intensity that frightens me. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how I can feel so intensely a loss that is not mine. Every time it happens, I’m stunned by my reaction. I can’t stop it, or lessen it, or ignore it. It happens, without me putting any conscious effort into it.
It makes no sense to me. I express my sympathy and condolences to the family, I pray for them, but I never share with them the intensity of my grief. It feels wrong somehow to be feeling as deeply as I feel, for someone going through something I have never gone through, and can never experience. I cannot in any way understand how that mother feels, as I’ve never been there. I just know I hurt when it happens.
So sad that a life had to be taken away, before it even began. And I ache for his mother.
Sus,
It may not have been in this life, but you have probably suffered this loss before. Don’t feel that it is ‘wrong’ to feel this way – we all have things that touch us deeply and praying for someone you hardly know is never a bad thing.