Stillborn and Still Breathing: A February Healing Technique

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

My sister wrote a beautiful blog post for Stillborn and Still breathing, called Moments a few days ago. I read it and tears came to my eyes. It was her first post on my blog. I texted her after and said, “I’m glad I invited you into my life more and more. I feel the same way about everything you wrote. Your post was beautiful. Thank you. Nora has and awesome aunt.”

She responded by texting, “How do you do it. That was fairly hard for me to write”.

I wrote back, “I cry every time. But, it helps me grieve and heal. It gives me a chance to be her mom, like it gave you a chance to be and act as her aunt. It makes her real.”

Blog writing and posting has allowed me to feel that my daughter is real. Often after a parent experiences prenatal loss, and has not had the opportunity to connect with their child outside of the womb, there is a sense of “did my child exist?” It’s a complicated grief that I am wading the waters of slowly. However, blogging has provided me space to BE a mom. I don’t get to be a mom to a living child, but writing and posting my thoughts and feelings on a webpage, helps me reclaim my role as a mother.

I am a mom. It is hard to believe sometimes since Nora is not here. But, this blog space helps me define my role as a mom, and also come to terms with the kind of mom I have to be. A mom to a dead child. It serves the same purpose as my journal to her, but in a different context. Often times as we become parents we get to be “Mom” or “Dad” in different venues and in different ways. The blog and the journal combined, help me make my role as a parent more complex, like those with living children get to do.

When it comes to healing, so far, blogging has been a wonderful tool to work through my grief. Not just because of adding a complexity to my role as a parent, but because it is creative and, when I make the blog public in March, it will allow me to connect with others through technology.

Technology is an important new tool in the grief process, which I believe we naturally utilize. I haven’t had time to look into it, and will do so more next month, but I am curious to see how much research is out there on the use of technology in grieving. It seems like this would make a good graduate thesis.