Is a mother’s grief proportionate to the amount of time she was blessed to have with her child? Is her grief harder to bear when her child dies as an infant, leaving behind unfulfilled hopes and dreams of a life together, or as an adult who has built decades of memories?

Our world asks these questions of us, pits grieving mother against grieving mother, in a perverse competition of the mourning. For the first year after Nicolas’ full-term stillbirth, I felt I had to defend not only his existence as a human being but my right to mourn him as his mother. A friend of the family even had the audacity to say we were fortunate to lose Nicolas at birth rather than at five years old. I still have difficulty justifying this brilliant bit of logic. I suppose in her mind it is better Nicolas was robbed of the simple gifts of life – feeling the wind, tasting chocolate ice cream, laughing until his belly hurts, sneaking downstairs to see his Santa gifts under the tree on Christmas morning, feeling unconditional love in his parents’ hugs – than to have had these experiences for five years. In her mind it is better we lost Nicolas before his first breath than to have had the gift of watching our child flourish and live for five years.

The fact is each loss is unbearable – each loss brings a lonely anguish only the mother of a child who died can know, whether her child died at birth or at 45 years of age. I came across an article on mothers’ grief and would like to share. Through stories of mothers who have lost children at different ages from different causes, “An Uncommon Loss” describes a common grief among those of us living without our children.

“Uncommon Loss, Mothers Who Grieve The Death Of A Child”