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Is It Normal to Feel This Way?

When Someone You Love Dies
- Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—Facing the Grief
  
  The sudden death of a baby is a devastating tragedy. One day an apparently normal, healthy baby fails to wake up. This is totally unexpected, for who imagines that any infant or child will die before its parents do? A baby that has become the center of a mother’s boundless love is suddenly the focus of her boundless grief.
  
  Guilt feelings begin to flood in. The parents may feel responsible for the death, as if it were due to some neglect. They ask themselves, ‘What could we have done to prevent it?’b In some cases the husband, without foundation, might even unconsciously blame his wife. When he went to work, the baby was alive and healthy. When he got home, it had died in its crib! What was his wife doing? Where was she at the time? These plaguing questions have to be cleared up so that they do not put a strain on the marriage.
  
  Unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances caused the tragedy. The Bible states: “I returned to see under the sun that the swift do not have the race, nor the mighty ones the battle, nor do the wise also have the food, nor do the understanding ones also have the riches, nor do even those having knowledge have the favor; because time and unforeseen occurrence befall them all.”—Ecclesiastes 9:11.
  
  How can others help when a family loses a baby? One bereaved mother responded: “One friend came and cleaned up my house without my having to say a word. Others made meals for us. Some just helped by giving me a hug—no words, just a hug. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to have to explain over and over again what had happened. I didn’t need prying questions, as if I had failed to do something. I was the mother; I would have done anything to save my baby.”

Is It Normal to Feel This Way?

When Someone You Love Dies
- It is normal to grieve and weep when a loved one dies
  
  This is supported by the case of a mother, Anne, who had lost her baby Rachel to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Her husband commented: “The surprising thing was that neither Anne nor I cried at the funeral. Everyone else was weeping.” To this, Anne responded: “Yes, but I have done plenty of crying for both of us. I think it really hit me a few weeks after the tragedy, when I was finally alone one day in the house. I cried all day long. But I believe it helped me. I felt better for it. I had to mourn the loss of my baby. I really do believe that you should let grieving people weep. Although it is a natural reaction for others to say, ‘Don’t cry,’ that doesn’t really help.”
  
  How Some React
  
  How have some reacted when desolated by the loss of a loved one? For example, consider Juanita. She knows how it feels to lose a baby. She had had five miscarriages. Now she was pregnant again. So when a car accident forced her to be hospitalized, she was understandably worried. Two weeks later she went into labor—prematurely. Shortly afterward little Vanessa was born—weighing just over two pounds (0.9 kg). “I was so excited,” Juanita recalls. “I was finally a mother!”
  
  But her happiness was short-lived. Four days later Vanessa died. Recalls Juanita: “I felt so empty. My motherhood was taken away from me. I felt incomplete. It was painful to come home to the room we had prepared for Vanessa and to look at the little undershirts I had bought for her. For the next couple of months, I relived the day of her birth. I didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone.”
  
  An extreme reaction? It may be hard for others to understand, but those who, like Juanita, have gone through it explain that they grieved for their baby just as they would for someone who had lived for some time. Long before a child is born, they say, it is loved by its parents. There is a special bonding with the mother. When that baby dies, the mother feels that a real person has been lost. And that is what others need to understand.

Is It Normal to Feel This Way?

When Someone You Love Dies
- Miscarriage and Stillbirth—Mothers Grieve
  
  Though she already had other children, Monna was eagerly looking forward to the birth of her next child. Even before the birth, it was a baby she “played with, talked to, and dreamed of.”
  
  The bonding process between mother and unborn child was powerful. She continues: “Rachel Anne was a baby who kicked books off my belly, kept me awake at night. I can still remember the first little kicks, like gentle, loving nudges. Every time she moved, I was filled with such a love. I knew her so well that I knew when she was in pain, when she was sick.”
  
  Monna continues her account: “The doctor wouldn’t believe me until it was too late. He told me to stop worrying. I believe I felt her die. She just suddenly turned over violently. The next day she was dead.”
  
  Monna’s experience is no isolated event. According to authors Friedman and Gradstein, in their book Surviving Pregnancy Loss, about one million women a year in the United States alone suffer an unsuccessful pregnancy. Of course, the figure worldwide is much greater.
  
  People often fail to realize that a miscarriage or a stillbirth is a tragedy for a woman and one she remembers—perhaps all her life. For example, Veronica, now up in years, recalls her miscarriages and especially remembers the stillborn baby that was alive into the ninth month and was born weighing 13 pounds (6 kg). She carried it dead inside her for the last two weeks. She said: “To give birth to a dead baby is a terrible thing for a mother.”
  
  The reactions of these frustrated mothers is not always understood, even by other women. A woman who lost her child by miscarriage wrote: “What I have learned in a most painful way was that before this happened to me, I really had no idea of what my friends had to bear. I had been as insensitive and ignorant toward them as I now feel people are to me.”
  
  Another problem for the grieving mother is the impression that her husband may not feel the loss as she does. One wife expressed it this way: “I was totally disappointed in my husband at the time. As far as he was concerned, there really was no pregnancy. He could not experience the grief that I was going through. He was very sympathetic to my fears but not to my grief.”

How Some React