Does My Grief Make You Uncomfortable?

Why I Talk About My Dead Baby Even Though It Makes People Uncomfortable.

It was Otis’s nose. Don’t get me wrong. All baby noses are cute. But his was absolute perfection. In fact, everything about Otis was perfect. Right from the beginning.

We knew we wanted one child…eventually. Mark and I had already been married for 6 years, together for 10. But we had both been focused on our careers. And honestly, we were enjoying the freedom of our schedules that finally came after we both finished our master’s degrees. We weren’t yet seeing that steady flow of disposable income we had been promised as a reward for our educational endeavors. But we figured that would come as we continued to climb our respective professional ladders.

As I approached my 30s, however, I knew it was time to start making space in our lives for that one hypothetical child. For some reason, probably because a doctor or two had suggested it throughout the years, I had convinced myself it was going to be quite a long process for us to conceive. I figured I’d go off birth control and it would take months, if not longer to get pregnant. I was wrong. I got pregnant my first month off birth control. Without even trying.        

I remember when the thought first occurred to me that I could be pregnant. I said it aloud to Mark. I didn’t even take myself seriously as I heard the words exit my mouth. Nonetheless, I took a test the next morning. I think my intention was not to see if I was pregnant, but rather to confirm the absurdity of the thought. Mark had already left for work.

Sidenote, remember that whole master’s degree and professional ladder thing I mentioned? Well, Mark was on an interesting rung of his climb. See, Mark did have a master’s degree. And he had spent time working extremely professional jobs in emergency management. But the truth was, despite his Ivy education and MPA, Mark always wanted to be a paramedic. You know, the exceptionally low-paid person who keeps you alive by doing advanced medical procedures while barreling down the highway in a moving garden shed? That one? So when I was taking the pregnancy test, Mark had just left for his 24-hour shift in the shed.

As that line turned pink, I started saying aloud “Um…no…no…no…?” My protest was not because I didn’t want a baby. But rather because I was astonished at how easily it was to get pregnant. But as I said, everything about Otis was perfect. Right from the beginning.   

I felt sick during the first trimester, but rarely threw up. He grew steadily and moved constantly. During his 12-week checkup, we saw his little body doing sit-ups in my uterus while “Eye of Tiger” played muffled through the ultrasound speakers. We have no clue how he got an MP3 player in there. Other than practicing his summersaults while I was trying to sleep, it didn’t bother me. I always knew my little boy was strong, healthy, and alive. I had been so worried about getting pregnant, it never even occurred to me to be worried about anything past that.

My delivery was comically short and smooth for a first-time mama. My water broke around 3 am and he was out before noon. I think I did less than 30 minutes of active pushing. Honestly, I didn’t even have to push that hard. I carried Otis so low during my pregnancy that he was pretty much in place already. Turns out gravity has its perks. When my oldest brother, and father of 3, heard how quickly Otis was born, he joked that I “got off too easy.” As I said, everything about Otis was perfect. Right up until it wasn’t.

For reasons we still don’t fully understand, and never will, Otis suddenly stopped breathing the first night we brought him home from the hospital. Mark was used to being awoken in the middle of the night to handle medical emergencies. But he was usually at the station. Woken up by radio tones. Called to manage a stranger’s worst day. This time he was in his own bed. Woken by his own wife’s blood-curdling scream. And it was his own worst nightmare.

Nonetheless, Mark was a professional. Muscle memory kicked in and he jumped into action. While I could barely figure out how to use a phone to call 911, Mark started CPR. I can still see Mark’s giant hands wrapped around our newborn son’s tiny chest as he performed compressions in his underwear on our living room floor.

A description of Mark doing CPR on his own son is usually what makes people squirm the most when I tell our story. Even more than when I tell people about the following three days of Otis being on life support, and our ultimate decision to allow him to die. Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand why that particular part of our story is so disturbing to people. It’s certainly burned into my memory forever.

But the truth is, our entire story has a tendency to make people uncomfortable. Some of the details may cause greater distress than others, but just the simple fact that we lost a child is deeply unsettling to people. When I tell our story or even mention our dead child to people familiar with the story, I can see their physical discomfort. I can tell that they don’t know what to say. I can often sense that they want me to stop talking about it. Change the subject. Pretend like it didn’t happen. Or at least not make my grief their discomfort. But I decided early during my grieving process that I was not going to stop telling my story simply for the benefit of other people’s comfort.    

Grief is a difficult emotion in any context. But I've found both through personal and professional experience that humans have a visceral reaction to the idea of grieving a child. This makes so much sense from a biological and evolutionary perspective. Our children are literally our future. Our continued existence as a species depends on our innate drive to protect our offspring more than any other members of our society. And on an emotional plane, human connection to our children is unparalleled. We have deep emotional attachments to the adorable little versions of ourselves that we create.  For most people, even just the thought of something happening to a child causes an immediate drop of the heart.  

So if grieving the loss of a child makes people so uncomfortable, why don't I spare people that discomfort by not talking about my story? Is it because I like watching people squirm, trying to figure out how to respond when I tell them I have a dead child? Of course not. I’m a mental health professional. I certainly don’t take pleasure in other people’s displeasure.  Is it because I feel like they should “just have to deal” since it’s my trauma and not theirs?  Again, no. It’s not about other people having to absorb my emotional baggage for my benefit. It's not like it decreases my pain if others experience it with me.

So why don’t I stay quiet like all the others who reached out to me after my loss and shared they had also experienced the loss of a pregnancy or infant but “never talked about it much because it wasn’t something people really talked about?” Well, in part, because of exactly that. I was astonished at how many stories I heard after my loss. Stories that had existed for years. Stories that wanted to be shared. Pain that was hiding under the surface of faces I knew well. Children whose lives were lost but names were never spoken. Some of them because they never had names. And those who did because their names were too uncomfortable for society to hear. So they were banished into “memory boxes” to be stored in dark corners of the house and mind. 

It was that thought that bothered me most. It felt like all those people who said they never talked about their loss had gotten the message from society that “Your pain is too uncomfortable for us. Spare us. You must hide it from us.” But as I mental health professional, I knew how the brain could take messages like that. Translate them. Misconstrue them. Tangle them into webs of lies. False beliefs. And ultimately, envelop them in a deeply tinted cloud of shame.

When you’re encouraged to hide a part of yourself, be it an experience, an identity, or an emotion, that hidden piece often takes its removal from the world as evidence that it is a source of shame. Why else would it be a taboo? Forbidden topic. Something to be whispered with great caution, if ever spoken aloud at all.

I decided very quickly that shame was an unacceptable direction for my grieving path to take. I refused to associate the concept of shame with my story. With my Otis. Now please understand that shame can be a very powerful, and at times very helpful emotion. It’s a necessary emotion that we can harness to motivate behavioral changes. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to hide from shame rather than utilize it as a constructive tool for transformation. If you’re interested in learning about shame, I highly recommend Brené Brown’s work. She’s a well-known shame and vulnerability researcher.

But the problem with feeling shame about my story is that I had no behavioral changes to make. I experienced a horrible trauma. It happened to me. Let me say that again: my trauma happened to me. I didn’t choose it. Shame could not help me make healthy adaptations. Give apologies. Grow. Become a better person.

Funny thing about shame is that when applied appropriately, it can be a productive, helpful emotion. But when it’s inappropriately assigned to something that does not deserve that label, it actually makes things much worse. It causes an entirely new layer of emotional distress. Distress that doesn’t need to exist. Shame in itself is an uncomfortable emotion. But placing shame on top of grief…grief of a child nonetheless…Shame could only make my unbearable pain even more painful.  

And since improperly distributed shame cannot be relieved with behavioral changes, the only solution is to not assign it in the first place. Or assign it, go through years of emotional distress, and then the difficult therapeutic process of unassigning it. Luckily, as a therapist, I was aware of this potential pitfall and cut it off at the pass.

That’s why I share my story. Not because I want to make you uncomfortable. And I understand that it might. While I’m not going to apologize for that discomfort, I will say I hope it does not cause genuine trauma. If it does, you may want to seek some support around practicing healthy empathy and setting stronger emotional boundaries. Hearing other people’s stories from time to time doesn’t need to make you feel like you’ve experienced their traumas. (This is not to dismiss or downplay vicarious trauma/secondary trauma, but that’s out of the scope of this post).    

I tell my story because I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not ashamed of my grief. And I’m not ashamed of Otis. In fact, Otis was perfect. And I like talking about him. Just like other parents like talking about their kids. My story may not bring as many smiles as other parents’ stories. I can’t help that. But I hope I have helped you understand why I talk about him despite your discomfort.

Maybe another time we can talk about things that are helpful and unhelpful for you to say during our uncomfortable conversation about my perfect dead son.   

Keywords: grief therapy for infant loss