The Room You Were Building

Content note: this letter talks about miscarriage, stillbirth and the death of a baby. If you're pregnant and feeling anxious, or you're acutely navigating loss, this one might be better saved for another day.

Can you imagine the dreaming that starts the moment the second line appears?

Will they have your nose, or your partner's? What will their laugh sound like? What will you do when they take their first step? Don't forget to sign them up for T-ball, and dance, and karate. Maybe they'll be an astronaut. Maybe a tattoo artist or a baker. You pick up a onesie that says "Little League's newest member" and a tiny baseball mitt, and you surprise your partner, and you both cry, and they kiss your belly. The doctor calls with the blood test and it's official: you're having a baby. You start making lists. Which car seat. Which bottles. The name you keep going back and forth on. The tedious task of choosing between sunset yellow and sunrise yellow for their room.

Or maybe it took years, and needles, and a fertility clinic to get to that second line. Maybe you were doing this on your own. Maybe it was your wife's belly you were talking to every night. But the dreaming is the same. You were building a whole life for someone, one tiny decision at a time.

And then the baby is gone.

Sometimes it's early. You wake up one morning and your body tells you the truth before your brain has a moment to really understand it. You sit alone on the bathroom floor, going from silent weeping to not being able to breathe, begging for it not to be true. Your eyes tell your partner before your mouth can.

Sometimes it's later. The kicks you had memorized go quiet. The ultrasound room goes silent in a way you will never forget. You give birth to a baby who doesn't cry, and you go home with a memory box instead of a car seat.

And sometimes your baby is born and gets to stay for a little while. Hours, days, weeks, months. You learn their smell and the way they like to be held. You learn what each cry means and how to warm the bottle up in the exact way that they love. You have a routine of early mornings, and you've memorized the dimples and the tiny creases on their tiny hands.

And then you are planning a funeral for a child who is so loved and never got to have their own dreams.

However it happens, you end up sitting in the room you were building, and the dream ends right there. The ball games, the parks, camping under the stars as a family, laughing together in the car, watching them grow up. All of it now exists in a world you're no longer in.

Grief wraps itself around you. And because the people around you are so uncomfortable with loss, you tell no one. Or you tell people, and they go quiet, and you learn very quickly not to bring it up again.

It makes me want to scream, because you are so far from alone. Somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But in one large survey, more than half of people believed it happens in 5 percent of pregnancies or fewer, and four in ten people who'd had a miscarriage said they felt alone. We think it's rare because no one talks about it.

We even have a rule that keeps it quiet: wait until 12 weeks to tell anyone, just in case. It isn't in any medical guideline. It's just what people say. And when I really look at it, I don't think the rule protects the parent at all. Waiting doesn't make a loss hurt less. It makes sure that if it happens, you go through it alone, while the people who would have shown up for you have no idea anything is wrong.

If you waited, you did nothing wrong. You did what you were told was right. The rule failed you, not the other way around. And you get to tell people whenever you want. If you want to celebrate at six weeks, celebrate at six weeks. Your joy was real the day you found out. If you want privacy, take it. But there's a difference between waiting because you want to, and waiting because you've learned your grief would be an inconvenience to everyone else.

I know how hard it is to say it out loud. Right before you say "I lost the baby," there's a rush of fear. Your brain is still trying to reconcile two truths: you were pregnant, and now you're not. Saying it makes it real. And then you brace for whatever comes back.

I'm a therapist, and I sit with this kind of loss often. Again and again, I hear how much it hurts when someone tries to make the loss smaller. "At least you know you can get pregnant." What person wants to hear that, in that moment or any moment? Parents whose baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) have been told, "At least you don't have a lifetime of memories to mourn." I honestly don't have polite words for how wrong that is. If that's happened to you, it wasn't because your grief was too much. It's because they didn't know how to stand inside it with you.

Why do we do this? I think it's discomfort. There's so much pressure to be over something quickly so no one else has to feel uncomfortable, and it comes at the expense of the person who is actually in pain. They end up carrying the loss and everyone else's comfort too.

So if you're reading this as the friend, the sister, the coworker or the neighbour, here's what I'd ask of you. This is not their weight to bear alone, and I mean that honestly. I think it's our job to shoulder this kind of pain with the people we love, our communities, our neighbours. Humans aren't meant to live in this much isolation, especially in the depths of a pain that has to be walked through slowly, tenderly, with compassion.

Collective grief looks like sharing the responsibility of remembering. Part of someone's grief might be that they can't express it, or share it, or even feel it all the way yet. So maybe, for a little while, you carry that part for them. Remember the dates: the due date, the birthday, the day their baby died. Send the text. Drop off the food without being asked or reminded. Say "I'm thinking of you" before they've even mentioned what day it is. And if their baby had a name, say it.

And please remember that both partners are grieving. Often the person who carried the baby is the one people check on, while their partner gets asked, "How is she doing?" Both of them lost a child. Both deserve to be witnessed in that grief equally.

Tonight at 7 pm local time, people around the world light a candle for the babies they lost, and as the hour moves through each time zone, a wave of light travels around the globe. You can light one too, for your own baby or for someone else's, and let them know you did.

This year, I'm lighting a candle for the parents who have never spoken their loss out loud. People don't need to invite us into their loss for us to show support. It's a decision to honour the babies we knew, and the babies who never got a chance to be held in our community, together. I walk with you, whether you want to say it out loud or not.

One of the hardest truths about this kind of loss is that it doesn't get erased when a new baby comes into the world. When the test shows those two lines again. When the kicks start, and you hold your breath, praying they never stop. The people around you may treat this baby like the happy ending, as if it erases the pain you lived through. But it doesn't. If you're welcoming another baby while still living alongside the pain of saying goodbye to one, you aren't wrong for feeling both grief and joy. A new child doesn't replace the one you lost. Holding grief together means honouring that too: we can be overjoyed about this baby and still deeply grieve the life that never got to be lived.

If you're a grieving parent, here is what I want you to hear. You are a parent. Parenthood doesn't end when a child dies. This loss is going to change you, and that isn't a bad thing. It isn't a problem to fix. Being changed by this is natural and normal. Grieving them, and the life you dreamed of and hoped for, for the rest of your life, is normal and okay.

And if you love someone who has been changed this way, let them be changed. Grief is lifelong. None of us get to decide when it arrives or how long it stays.

I'm Amie Nelson, MSW, RSW, a grief and trauma therapist in Calgary, offering sessions in person and online across Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia. If you'd like support, a free 20-minute consult is a gentle place to start: tworiverstherapy.ca. If you're in crisis, call or text 9-8-8.