Mothering Through Grief
Since losing Blair over seven weeks ago, I have experienced the strangest and most wild combinations of feelings I’ve never thought I could feel all in one breath. I’m learning about death and grief for the first time in my life compounded by this death being that of my own child who literally died inside of me. Adding more to this, I am learning how to grieve my dead child - our beloved stillborn daughter - while mothering our blossoming and living twin daughters. Early into my grief, I wrote often on Instagram to try to make sense of what I was feeling. In one post, I wrote:
Day in and day out, I mother our two living children while grieving our dead child. I can giggle and dance with my toddler girls and kiss their cheeks while remembering Blair’s sweet cheeks and still body in the same breath. Moving forward with Blair means grieving and honoring her memory while also being open to joyful moments. I say her name as often as I can to keep her memory in the forefront of V and C’s minds so they will always remember that they have a baby sister. And that I am their mama, but am also her mama. That her name is Blair Elise. That together we are a family of five. Although we lost Blair in the physical sense, there is no past tense when we talk about her. Blair is, full stop. We carry her with us always.
In another, I wrote:
Grieving Blair and teaching the letter B to her big sisters this morning. The girls were just being their playful toddler selves and taking the play dough away as I tried (desperately) to make this shape over and over again. They just didn’t have the patience to let me finishing shaping it. And I broke down in tears. I went back to it after a while and finally was successful. Sometimes I can talk about her in reference to something we are learning about together, others times not. I know one day they will talk about her just like I do. This morning just wasn’t one of those moments.
A week or so later, I wrote:
Tomorrow marks five weeks since I delivered Blair. This week felt like a flurry of activity with excitement over the early stages of building Blair’s memorial research fund. I’ve located two research groups to put under our consideration and am waiting on two more. I’m also building a website to where I’ll likely relocate or duplicate my writing to and share stillbirth awareness and research fund info. It has felt good to grow something out of losing Blair, if that makes sense.
The girls have been obsessed with the color yellow and the letter B this week. I haven’t even tried that hard to bring up their baby sister. It seems they have naturally weaved grief into their lives as well. They still sometimes don’t fully understand that she died and is no longer growing inside of me. (Edited to add: I have to work on that.) When I reminded C at bedtime tonight that Blair is now in heaven, she repeated the word for the first time in her own way: “heay-min”. The way she said it was heartbreaking-ly beautiful.
Personally, I’m writing on this blog as a coping mechanism for the grief that I have for my third daughter. More broadly, I am also writing to show the world how stillbirth impacts families and to do my part in breaking the taboo of talking about stillbirth in our communities. Grief is so different for every person, so different that grief can be described as unique as a fingerprint. Please follow along as I learn how to grieve in healthy ways for myself and also teach my living children about their baby sister.
