Tertia over at So Close asked about posts on grieving, and I thought I would contribute. Everyone else: Cecily, Billie, Alida,Snickolett, and Vanessa have posted (will try to keep editing if more specific posts appear) has said a lot. (They are all beautiful, but Cecily’s and esp. Snickolett’s have resonated the most with me.)
For people new to my blog: I lost my daughter Emily 4 days after her birth, due to a cord accident and some incompetence. I do think neo-natal loss is different both from miscarriage and from adult grieving, especially in the area I’m going to address here.
I thought I would narrow it a bit and take the God aspect head on.
I cannot tell you how many people talked to Carl and I about God or Jesus wanting Emily with him/them; angel babies; angels in heaven; or now, guardian angels for Noah. The amount of (sorry) angel crap that crossed our threshold was astonishing. We also heard that “God never gives us more than we can handle,†“God has his reasons,†“everything happens for a reason,†and other variations on the theme of:
- God wanted your baby dead
- Satan wanted your baby dead, so you must be special to God
- at least your baby is now a super special being
Just to not pick entirely on the Christians, other comments were made about karma, which, by the way, is a misunderstanding of the concept – kismet handles the big stuff. But the summary of that is: you did something awful in this life or another, so now you’re all even with the universe.
What people really were saying, on the positive side was, of course, “I want you to feel better,†or, in some cases, “well I know I couldn’t handle it, so I will choose to believe God won’t do the same to me.†Most people fell in the former category and of course I still love them and one comment (or a dozen) has not ruined things forever or anything like that.
But let me tell you, unless you are one hundred percent sure that whatever your religious spin on the event is entirely shared by both parents (and even then), please do not make these comments to the bereaved. The reason is pretty simple.
It’s not consoling. I really don’t care if Emily is the next messiah or if she was handpicked by God to be the ruling Goddess of another dimension – the point is, she wasn’t and isn’t alive with me, which is where I, as her mother, kind of naturally want her. Even if I did I would still be pissed with God. In fact there have been many moments where “god†(my concept) has been dead to me over this.
And please do not use the occasion of a loss to reassert your religious beliefs, or to try to get the bereaved to buy in to them. Please. It’s really unfair. I don’t recall Jesus going around preaching to the bereaved, except in the odd case when he had brought the dead to life.
If you think about it, whenever you say something horrible happened for a reason, you are saying that the person deserved something horrible. Even if you have all kinds of faith that it somehow wasn’t horrible, that is still how the person listening is going to hear it. Because that person is experiencing a terrible loss. Honour the loss. Don’t try to gloss it over, whatever you secretly think.
And with neo-natal loss, I have to say that it kind of goes double. 99/100 people take home babies, statistically. It sucks to be 1/100. Don’t add to that feeling.
I know that a lot of this is awkwardness. Here, in this fortunate time and place, we are no longer used to babies dying. We haven’t grown up watching our mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles go through it or support each other. But really: just because a baby dies does not mean that suddenly you get to talk about what God wanted, when under normal circumstances you would not get all religious.
I fear I am primarily speaking to American and other Western fundamentalists (in various stripes) here. And I am trying not to pick on anyone. But seriously, people! All over the world, people die of starvation – mothers watch their children get sick of lack of good water – wars blow up sons and daughters every day. It is dangerous and horribly navel gazing, in my opinion, for those of us who were fortunate enough to be born in prosperity with access to medical care to start blathering on about how God cherry-picks tragedies.
The best book I know on this subject is “When bad things happen to good people,†by Rabbi Kushner, and in it he admits that as a rabbi he had said all sorts of similar things until he had a son who had a fatal condition. If you want the long version I highly recommend reading it; I also recommend it to anyone who is grieving who wants to get into the whole “where is God” question (I don’t go around recommending it, but if it comes up).
Anyways, that’s my rant. So what’s the best thing to say?
I’m so sorry. “I wish I knew what to say” is not bad either, as long as there’s no pressure on the grieving person to fix it.
It’s okay to feel lousy too, just don’t try to make yourself feel better by musing on the greater philosophical implications to the bereaved, okay?
I’m afraid I tend to think, quite ungraciously, that what people are really saying is, “grief and loss and death scare the heck out of me. Please pretend not to be scared with me, won’t you? Giving up your grief for my sake shouldn’t be too much trouble for you, in this time of loss.”
I’ve never read a better book than Growing Up Again (published by the Hazeldon drug-counseling folks) when it comes to analyzing the American tendency to discount other people’s “bad” emotions.
It’s just wrong that Emily isn’t there with you. I’m sorry.
A very dear friend of mine had a loss that was sort of similar to yours in that there was a cord accident involved, and her son died in the womb just days before her due date. She was then faced with the crippling choice of induced labor or a c-section. Then there was the funeral.
Never in my life have I been so at a loss for words. All I could do was stand there and ache for this woman who would have been (and did subsequently become) the most amazing mother. Everything about it was wrong.
I know now I said the right thing, thanks to you. I told her how sorry I was, how much I grieved for her, and how much I wished I could do more.
I think Jody is right; most Westerners don’t like dealing with negative emotions. We want to know that you’re going to be happy! Soon! So we can be happy too! How selfish is that?