We need to remember that even when our babies are stillborn they are still loved. But, there is something else that needs to be remembered.
Three months have passed since our baby girl was stillborn. These few months have been difficult, but we know Frances' short life has a purpose.
Inspired by Dr. Louis E. Lagrand author of Healing Grief, Finding Peace, I have created my top 7 Everyday Small Things to Do to Lighten Grief that I find has helped soften my grief this month. 1. Use Color Remember those old movies set in the Victorian era where the mourner wears black for a year after the death of a loved one. Well, that isn't recommended any more. Why not? Because colors influence mood, emotion, spirituality, attitude, and behavior, according to Dr. Louis E. Lagrand author of Healing Grief, Finding Peace. So why not use bright colors while grieving as a pick-me-up. Blue and Green are the colors often recommend to promote healing and relaxation while Red can be inspiring. Dr. Lagrand recommends staying away from Purple or Black for the time being. So be intentional with what you choose to wear or the colors you decorate your life with. Letting in more color might lighten your grief for a moment or two. 2. Give & Get a Hug When we are grieving, we need to feel connected. Hugging is holding and a form of touching. We need to feel supported and "held" during our grief. Giving and getting hugs can help us feel as if, just for a moment, others can physically "hold' or support our pain. Touching, too, works wonders on healing, it's our first language and we are biologically prone to do it. Touching increases levels of Oxytocin (the love chemical) and can even mitigate pain. So give someone a hug. According to The Power of Touch in Psychology Today, studies have shown that you get just as much benefits from being the giver of a hug as a receiver. You will lighten your grief and maybe brighten someone else's day. 3. Read a Quote Words have POWER! That is why they can be so hurtful or so HEALING. In therapy with my clients I often recommend positive affirmations or quotes as an inspirational tool for healing emotional pain. Reading quotes about other peoples experience with grief can help us learn how to conceptualize ours. It can also provide us hope in knowing others have walked this wicked road before and made it out the other side. I don't have any sage advice, just Google "Grief Quotes" and find ones you like and print them off and put them on your mirror. Or keep a grief quote journal. Or, maybe, like Facebook Pages that share inspirational grief quotes like, The Miss Foundation, The Compassionate Friends, Stillbirthday, The Grieving Parent, or 2012: Love and Loss. They will provided you with daily quotes about grief after child loss. Just remember, there is POWER in words. 4. Be Nourished By Nature There is something so healing about nature. Going for a walk and hearing the leaves or gravel move under your feet. Listening to the birds sing and the wind rustle through the trees and the river babble. There seems to be nothing more nourishing then this. Dr. Lagrand says that mourners are often "nature-deficient." From spending time just trying to do the basics, like going to work and making it through the day. And in doing so we over look the benefits that nature can bring. If nothing else comes from being outside, getting exposure to sun increases your levels of Vitamin D, which leads to an improvement in your mood. 5. Turn off the T.V., Turn Down the Radio Media today is filled with negativity and suffering. The news, for me, can be at times an added source of pain. According to the Journal of Economic Psychology, TV viewers report lower life satisfaction and more anxiety, which one does not need when grieving. Loud music and crowded places also seems to add to my anxiety and grief. You owe it to yourself to only allow airwaves in that add positivity to your life. So, choose wisely in what you watch and listen to while grieving. 6. Indulge Remember to treat yourself kindly during grief. Once in awhile it's okay to be indulgent, as long as it isn't a negative coping mechanism to deal with the pain like drinking or using drugs. Everything in moderation is my moto. In Healing Your Grieving Heart After Stillbirth, authors Wolfelt and Maloney recommend practicing self-compassion by letting go of judgements about your grief. I see this as also letting go of judgments about how you choose to heal as well. So if a piece of cake you normally wouldn't eat brings you a moment of joy or you want to splurge on that massage you have been holding out on, I say, GO FOR IT. 7. Learn Something New By learning a new task we help our brain create new connections and pathways that Nero-science has proven, keeps our brain's healthy. Grief creates stress and negative emotions in our life which can affect how our brain functions. We are essentially on grief overload which activates the pain centers of our brain and slows our thinking process at times. One way to counter this is to always strive to learn something new. Maybe start that hobby you have been meaning to try or revisit an old one. I know that getting involved in the blogging world and challenging myself to be a writer has helped me stay positive during my grief. Pick up a new hobby or learn something new. It might help lessen some moments of grief.
Changing my mind about Trauma
“As I stood over her and spent those last few minutes with her, blood was cascading down my legs and onto the floor. I didn't care - my womb was crying. Everything about me was crying. Watching them wheel her away broke me. My life ended then and there."
Today I am honored to welcome Laila from Loving an Angel Instead. She shares with us how she is transforming her grief into a legacy of love for her daughter Sahar. In doing so she is helping other bereaved families along the way. It always amazes me what the courageous individuals in our bereaved parent community do to give back to others. There is community love here. That is why healing can happen in our community, because of people like Laila. ********************************************************************************* Hello there, my name is Laila and I am a bereaved parent. After 21 weeks of pregnancy, we were told that our little girl had an extreme form of Hydrocephalus. She would never be born alive. On May 7th 2013, she was born, and miraculously, she was born alive. Alive to say goodbye. She left us an hour later. In the blink of an eye, our world turned into a very dark place. There was so much sadness, pain, and heartbreaking grief… But there was also so much LOVE… In the earliest, most raw days of grief, I came across a few truly inspiring people going through the same loss (including the beautiful owner of this website). They have brought an incredible amount of comfort and healing to my heart. Reading all these stories, filled with so much sadness but at the same time this incredible love, made me feel less alone. It made me realize that I too, could survive this. Although the pain is still unbearable, although my heart will forever remain broken, I truly believe I can learn to enjoy the small things in life again. Once you lose your child, a very hard reality follows. You lost her, she’s gone, it’s over. For a parent, that’s never ever the case. Which is why I felt the need to tell my story, Sahar’s story, and let everyone know that she was and will always be my daughter, that she is loved and remembered every single day, and that she is still a part of this family, even if she’s not with us today. Inspired by all the beautiful parents that share their story, their grief, their sadness, their feelings, and their incredibly heartwarming love, I felt I wanted to do the same. I wanted to #SayItOutLoud and tell the world that my daughter mattered, and always will. So I started this blogging journey on LovingAnAngelInstead.com The blog was only a start. I came across the beautiful idea of creating memory boxes on Carly Marie’s inspiring website. After going through the idea with the local hospital and their entire medical staff, we finally kicked off this beautiful healing project. I truly hope these boxes of hope (that’s how I like to call them), bring comfort and healing to the hearts of parents going through the terrible heartbreaking pain that is pregnancy or baby loss. If you would like to help, take a look at my website. I’ve provided lots of information there on how you can help, or donate to help enabling me to continue this project. Everyone thinks of loss as a sad and painful event. And it is. By all means, it is. It is heartbreaking, soul shattering… There are no words to describe this kind of pain. But my girl was my firstborn daughter, and for me, she was STILL a miracle. The most beautiful thing that EVER happened to me. The only sad thing is that she couldn’t stay. There was nothing sad about HER, only the circumstances were. That’s where I decided that I wanted to transform my grief into more than sadness and grief alone. I wanted it to become love; I wanted it to become beauty, because SAHAR was all about love and beauty. I wanted the whole world to understand what a beautiful impact she had on our lives… This is my way of honoring her. And it’s something I’m working on every day since we lost her, and I will keep doing so for the rest of my life. Laila is a bereaved mother and the author of Loving an Angel Instead where she writes with love and beauty about her daughter Sahar. In effort to transform her grief she has started a "Boxes of Hope" memory box program in Belgium for families whose babies are born still.
My dad told me a story the other day of a co-worker whose son had died at age 19. This young man’s dad said that since the death of his son his, “Life used to be in color and now it is forever in black and white.” I appreciated this man’s metaphor of his grief, and I see how it can be true. But for me, it’s as if the dull moments of shades of gray once in a while give light to flashes of vivacious color. Since the stillbirth of my daughter, I actually find life to be more vibrant, to be more remarkable, and to be more dynamic with colors I used to not appreciate. I understand why the grief of losing a child would be described more like a 1920’s black and white photo than of a vibrant Monet painting. But for me, after the grays of the initial period of grief lifted, colors of beauty have started to appear all around me. The color of my husband’s green eyes shines livelier as I gaze into them, the golden moon glows more brightly on the freshly fallen white snow. With spring finally arriving, the red breast of the house finch shimmers in the daylight shining through the trees. Dawn and twilight are more effervescent as I notice the reds, purples, oranges, and blues of the sun setting and rising in the sky with added joy. The loss of my daughter has changed me, has moved me, and has shown me the treasure of what this life is, with all the beauty it holds. Nora’s existence, no matter how short, has taught me about how brilliant the colors of life are and how I need to be grateful for every moment I have with this beauty, since she was never given the gift of seeing nature’s canvases of color. I appreciate the beautiful hues of life more fully now. Mother Nature’s perfect Picasso. Yet, sometimes living openly to this beauty can be a catch-twenty-two. I appreciate the stunning shades of the world more, but I also see what I am missing with my daughter. I see a child’s bright blue eyes smiling in the coffee shop and my mind is confused. Part of me sees the sparkling cobalt eyes and I acknowledge how exquisite and amazing the gift of life is, but a part of me dies inside and my heart sees muted tones of gray because I will never get to experience the colorful beauty of my own child. People tell me that becoming a parent changes you. Maybe it’s because I have transformed from entering parenthood in this way that life seems more beautiful, or maybe it is because with the death of Nora I have learned just how precious this life is. Either way, I am grateful that Nora has given me the gift of colorful grief, but I wish I could have had my cake and eat it too. I wish the beauty of a more colorful world came with being a mother to a child in my arms instead of forever in my heart. I know that if I could have Nora back I would willingly go colorblind, but for now I will have to hang my gift of a canvas full of color next to her empty crib.
Three months have passed since our baby girl was stillborn. These few months have been difficult, but we know Frances' short life has a purpose.
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson In the days following Nora’s death, after the funeral was over and the family finally went home, Nick and I were left only with questions. Why did this happen? What did we do wrong? Could it have been prevented? Can we still have children? Will it happen again? Some of these questions we were able to answer. Others only lead to more questions, those more of the spiritual nature. “Do you believe in God now?” We asked back and forth. Often our answer was, “I don’t know what I believe.” “What meaning can come from this? I need meaning to make sense of it.” I would tell him. And when he shrugged his shoulders in response to the question we then both turned to books. On the cold snowy January days, that we had planned to be house bound and cuddling with our newborn baby, we spent snuggling with each other instead on the couch with our noses in every book we could find about the meaning of life. Nick reached for a classic that he actually suggested to me on our first date, “Man’s Search for Meaning” By Victor Frankl. He revisited the book that brought him strength in times past and, five years after he recommended it, I finally read it as well. In this book I found a new way to look at suffering and loss in the following passage. "We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that can not be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at it's best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation...we are challenged to change ourselves. " Such words of inspiration and hope for life after loss, but also a big task to live up to so early in the grief journey. I decided I needed an expert’s opinion so I reached for famous Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Psychologist, researcher and authority on grief and instead of reading her five stages of grief, I found her book Life Lessons from people who are dying. I devoured every word. It was as if I finally comprehended loss and death for the first time in my life. It was no longer a distant cousin or relative, but an intimate partner in my dance of life. Every word of the book touched my heart and I found some solace in hearing about how those on their death bed would have lived life differently, loved more openly, chased their dreams, and lived more authentically. I wanted to be this person, now that my daughter would never get the chance to be. And over the months since and especially this month of contemplating the Universe, I decided to again immerse myself in books about spirituality from different views. I did not exclude any book for wisdom can come in the least expected of places, but I did focus on the ones that I was drawn to. Like The Secret of the Dragonfly, by Gayle Shaw Cramer. Here in this children’s book a grandmother explains the spiritual secret of the dragonfly and compares it that of our human flesh and body. To be honest, even as an agnostic it made me think about how some comfort can come from this whole idea of life after life. Then there was Forever Ours, by Janis Amatuzio, MD and Life After Death, again by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, both addressing their encounters with the hereafter. Janis Amatuzio is a forensic pathologist and speaks to near death and visitations from spirit experiences her clients tell her about while Elizabeth Kubler Ross talks of her own near death experience and that of others she has studied who claim to also have gone to the other side and come back. I'm not sure what wisdom I find in these stories but the idea of near death experiences intrigues me. Maybe because I hope to find a little bit of insight from those who claim to have gone to the other side and come back? I also found the questions of spirituality uniquely and tactfully addressed in Life Touches Life by Lorraine Ash, a memoir about a mother who’s daughter was stillborn at full-term also due to an infection in the 1990’s. She explores her journey of healing, questioning her faith in God and ultimately finding it again. Even going to psychics and how that fit into the equation along with themes of doubt and a re-emergence of peace between her and her creator. It's stories like hers that I find the most solace sometimes, from other bereaved parents who have to contemplate the same questions I do about life after life. And I wanted to be fair to the Christian faith which I came from but have abandoned along the way. So I pulled out a book I had all but forgotten about. No, not the Bible, I wouldn't know where to start there. Instead a book called Meditations from A Course in Miracles by Helen Schucman and all these beautiful quotes on life were there on the pages before me to contemplate as I chose. Which I did. The one about "the holy" that resignated with me the most was: "When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him you will see yourself. As you treat him you will treat yourself. As you think of him you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself." I liked this nugget of wisdom because it reminds us that "the holy" is in everyone of use. We do not need to look farther then ourselves and neighbors to be reminded of the meaning and beauty that is life. Finally, there is the story of the muster seed in Buddhism, that Nick found in the Art of Happiness by the Dahli Lama in the first weeks after Nora’s passing. These ancient words are what he identified that brought him the most comfort and they weren’t even words on the afterlife as much on how to live the life we have now. "In the time of Buddha, a woman named Kisagotami suffered the death of her only child. Unable to accept it, she ran from person to person, seeking a medicine to restore her child to life. The Buddha was said to have such a medicine. Kisagotami went to the Buddha, paid homage, and asked, "Can you make a medicine that will restore my child?" "I know of such a medicine," the Buddha replied. "But in order to make it, I must have certain ingredients." Relived, the woman asked, "What ingredients do you require?" "Bring me a handful of mustard seed," said the Buddha. The woman promised to procure it for him, bus as she was leaving he added, "I require the mustard seed be taken from a household where no child, spouse, parent, or servant had died." The woman agreed and began going from house to house in search of the mustard seed. At each house the people agreed to give her the seed, but when she asked them if anyone had died in that household, she could find no home where death had not visited - in one house a daughter, in another a servant, in others a husband or parent had died. Kisagotami was not able to find a home free from the suffering of death. Seeing she was not alone in her grief, the mother let go of her child's lifeless body and returned to Buddha, who said with great compassion, "You thought that you alone lost a son, the law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence." NOTHING IS PERMANENT! At least not in the physical form. This short story helped me realize the truth in this along with the truth that I am not alone in my grief. But in the search for meaning, let’s not forget science. What book did I read on science and spirituality that brought me solace? Well, it wasn’t a book but a quote/poem that I saw on facebook about death from a physicist’s perspective and it goes like this: This is what resonates with me the most. But every single one of these books have helped me contemplate the nature of what “comes next” along with allowing me to find peace in not really knowing the answer to that question. Maybe in this case, like in life itself, the meaning is more about the journey then the destination. What spiritual book would you recommend to a bereaved parent contemplating God, the Heavens, and the Universe while in grief? Resources Here is my reading list of spiritual books I have referenced to help me in my time of mourning. Check them out below: Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl The Secret of the Dragonfly, Gayle Shaw Cramer The Art of Happiness, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler M.D. Meditations from A Course in Miracles, by Helen Schucman Life Touches Life, by Lorraine Ash On Life After Death, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross M.D. Life Lessons, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross M.D. Forever Ours, by Janis Amatuzio, M.D.
Miscarriage Quotes: 50 celebrities share raw emotions about pregnancy loss. If you are grieving a loss, it can help to know that you're not alone.
Today I am honored to welcome Laila from Loving an Angel Instead. She shares with us how she is transforming her grief into a legacy of love for her daughter Sahar. In doing so she is helping other bereaved families along the way. It always amazes me what the courageous individuals in our bereaved parent community do to give back to others. There is community love here. That is why healing can happen in our community, because of people like Laila. ********************************************************************************* Hello there, my name is Laila and I am a bereaved parent. After 21 weeks of pregnancy, we were told that our little girl had an extreme form of Hydrocephalus. She would never be born alive. On May 7th 2013, she was born, and miraculously, she was born alive. Alive to say goodbye. She left us an hour later. In the blink of an eye, our world turned into a very dark place. There was so much sadness, pain, and heartbreaking grief… But there was also so much LOVE… In the earliest, most raw days of grief, I came across a few truly inspiring people going through the same loss (including the beautiful owner of this website). They have brought an incredible amount of comfort and healing to my heart. Reading all these stories, filled with so much sadness but at the same time this incredible love, made me feel less alone. It made me realize that I too, could survive this. Although the pain is still unbearable, although my heart will forever remain broken, I truly believe I can learn to enjoy the small things in life again. Once you lose your child, a very hard reality follows. You lost her, she’s gone, it’s over. For a parent, that’s never ever the case. Which is why I felt the need to tell my story, Sahar’s story, and let everyone know that she was and will always be my daughter, that she is loved and remembered every single day, and that she is still a part of this family, even if she’s not with us today. Inspired by all the beautiful parents that share their story, their grief, their sadness, their feelings, and their incredibly heartwarming love, I felt I wanted to do the same. I wanted to #SayItOutLoud and tell the world that my daughter mattered, and always will. So I started this blogging journey on LovingAnAngelInstead.com The blog was only a start. I came across the beautiful idea of creating memory boxes on Carly Marie’s inspiring website. After going through the idea with the local hospital and their entire medical staff, we finally kicked off this beautiful healing project. I truly hope these boxes of hope (that’s how I like to call them), bring comfort and healing to the hearts of parents going through the terrible heartbreaking pain that is pregnancy or baby loss. If you would like to help, take a look at my website. I’ve provided lots of information there on how you can help, or donate to help enabling me to continue this project. Everyone thinks of loss as a sad and painful event. And it is. By all means, it is. It is heartbreaking, soul shattering… There are no words to describe this kind of pain. But my girl was my firstborn daughter, and for me, she was STILL a miracle. The most beautiful thing that EVER happened to me. The only sad thing is that she couldn’t stay. There was nothing sad about HER, only the circumstances were. That’s where I decided that I wanted to transform my grief into more than sadness and grief alone. I wanted it to become love; I wanted it to become beauty, because SAHAR was all about love and beauty. I wanted the whole world to understand what a beautiful impact she had on our lives… This is my way of honoring her. And it’s something I’m working on every day since we lost her, and I will keep doing so for the rest of my life. Laila is a bereaved mother and the author of Loving an Angel Instead where she writes with love and beauty about her daughter Sahar. In effort to transform her grief she has started a "Boxes of Hope" memory box program in Belgium for families whose babies are born still.
