Baby Loss & The First Months After Losing Your Baby

In Episode # 4 of the Grieve and Grow with Julia Go Podcast, I'm talking about the first period of time after losing a baby. I'll cover numbness, searching and longing, thoughts, feelings, and especially the questions we ask ourselves and how to cope with those.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Break and Grow with Julia Goh Episode number 4,

Baby Loss and the first weeks after losing a baby.

I am Julia Goh,

I am a certified transformational master coach and I am a bereaved mom.

I lost my son Ziman in February 2016 when he was born prematurely and died in my arms five days later.

Since then I went on an intense healing journey and I decided to share what I've learned and become the person that I felt I needed in the time after loss.

In today's episode I am sharing a recording from 2019 so without further ado I will share this episode with you.

Today I want to talk about the first weeks and months after losing a baby which is basically a time of searching and longing and it is a time when we slowly waking up from our shock that we experience and the reality slowly slowly creeps up on us and from my experience and the experience of other women that I talk to and work with it is a mix of like sometimes you are living in the reality and you are realizing what happens and then on other days you can't really believe it and you feel like now it's just a dream.

But I am talking about the time when we start to really grasp what happened to us and it's a time where we start searching for what we've lost and where we just have a longing that nothing can really satisfy and often times this is also a time where we are wondering,

Where we are thinking a lot about questions that no one can answer and with all those questions that we can't answer a lot of what if questions are a lot of questions of how he or she would have looked like,

What would have happened now and yeah questions about the past,

Questions about the future.

With all those questions and thoughts there are also a lot of emotions coming up,

They are just bubbling up,

Pain,

Anger,

Guilt,

Fear,

Also a feeling of failure and a really really strong emotion that I experienced quite shortly but I know a lot of women experience a little bit longer is the feeling of envying other women or other parents when they have babies or they are pregnant.

I don't really like putting timeframes on something but often it's several months long or half a year and so no despair and compare place,

No judgement,

Grief is different for everyone and this time often is like having a surgery with anesthesia and you are waking up and you are still numb and then step by step this kind of being numb gets less and less and you feel more and more and you feel like something got whipped out of you and of course that's causing pain and those,

This pain,

This emotional pain sometimes just hurts physically too and with that all other underlying emotions can come up and it is such an important thing to find a way to express your feelings and to cope with your feelings and from my experience this is one of the most important tasks for you in this period of time and one of the steps that you need to do to heal.

The thing is that the love that we carry in us,

The love for our baby,

For our child becomes this strong longing and you just feel like you're lost and you might dream about your baby,

You might dream about the hospital,

You might see or hear things that remind you of your child constantly.

I remember that I went just shopping in a kind of supermarket and I was okay at that day and I just like from one moment to the other I felt weird,

Like sad and under pain and shocked and I was thinking about what just happened,

Why do I feel this way and I realized that there was a beeping sound from the counters or somewhere in the store there was a beeping sound and my brain must have just connected that sound with the monitors that we had in the hospital and with the life support and all the time they were beeping and meant something's wrong and that just came in there like a kind of aftershark I guess and those are just some things that can come with it and other emotions can just be like anger,

Anger and I'm going to talk about that in a separate episode a little bit longer but anger on what the doctors did,

Anger on what they didn't do for example or the midwife or maybe your partner and anger because of what you did or didn't do.

This is really really common and it's just an emotion that's bubbling up in that period of time and totally valid to feel this way because we might hope that if we find someone who's guilty that might make things better and still it is something that we need to learn to cope with and often it comes with being helpless in that time you know of course you're angry when you don't know what to do now and you can't change anything no matter what you do so you hope if you're angry long enough and complain long enough maybe you can change something but that of course doesn't work so it's hard to have no control about what happens and one thing that I just want to say is that I invite you to ask yourself for yourself how does the grief about what you experience show up in your life,

Which emotions are there and where are you with your grief at the moment so maybe just take a piece of paper write down those two questions how does the grief show up for yourself and where are you at the moment with your what's called a grieving journey and this time is also the time that comes with many many questions and I just want to give you some I'm sure you have them on your own but sometimes it is actually nice to think about it one thing that you might wonder is how did your baby look like if you didn't see it who would have had resembled growing up and where is he or she now and it's also coming with a lot of questions around what actually happened why did it go wrong where did it go wrong and could I have changed something of course did I do something wrong is it my fault and maybe you're wondering in a spiritual way or I don't know if it's a spiritual way but it's like like you know you're feeling guilty because maybe during pregnancy you were asking yourself like I'm already I'm already so stressed busy whatever can I really cope with having a baby and how can I cope with having two kids or you know sometimes in our pregnancy and I just want to point it out there are coming up questions no matter how deeply we love our baby and that might not be the case for everyone but I know that I was in between when I was in a stressful period during my studies that I was like how am I going to manage this was this the right decision and I'm not did not ask that maybe a little bit of course did not even ask it for a selfish reason but also you want to give your baby the best and if you think like oh am I ready for this will I be the man that I want to be and you're you know questioning your decision and then you lose your baby you think like am I guilty because I manifested what happened and maybe you had problems in your relationship coming up during your pregnancy and you were questioning if it was the right decision to have a baby with this partner and I mean there are so many questions that if something like this happens lead to feeling guilty and feeling shame and this is totally normal and I promise you that a lot of the women who have living babies ask themselves the same question during pregnancy and that didn't lead to losing their babies but still it's valid to ask those questions I just want to point it out that it's nothing that is your fault so that's also the time where you ask about what happened like physically,

Medically why did I have a miscarriage why did I have a stillbirth why did I have a premature birth what problems occurred will that happen again did my baby suffer maybe you know that he or she suffered what can I learn about it can I learn something about why I got that was it a disease of the baby will that happen again or is there a chance that it might happen again in the next pregnancy and also it's like a question of remembering even if like for me it was like I can't I needed to ask people around me what actually happened and just get an idea around the timeframe that I took me from going from calling the ambulance to going to the hospital to going in birth which I was under narcotics and just piecing those puzzle pieces together again so to just know if that what you experience is just memories something that happened in your mind or if it is the reality and one thing that you could do and that helped me a little bit is I looked for the people that surrounded me in that time the doctors who were there and the midwives and being out of the hospital I'm not sure for how long one month two months I went back there and got an appointment to talk to them and we were going for the medical details and the timeframe and looked at the documents and I could ask questions and that just helped me to get a clarity around what happened because sometimes it's just unbelievable and you need to know that it is real and it's also time where you can research read books watch youtube videos listen to podcasts share experiences with our parents with other parents and just yeah go in the library use the internet it's part of your healing process it might seem most obsessive for people on the outside but it is not you could ask yourself in that case which questions do I really have and instead of just asking them over and over and over again where could I get an answer for this question so with who could I talk again would I like to talk again I mean there are some doctors that you don't want to see again so how do you cope with all those questions and feelings and I'm gonna dive into feelings in the next episode a little bit more but one thing that I want to share with you that I got actually from a German book that I was reading after my son Simon died her name is Hannah Lutrup she was writing in her book about baby loss that one thing we could do is getting a power place a peace place where we make it especially comfortable with blankets some cushions a candle maybe a little book and a pen and we can go there like it's something where you like the atmosphere it is a peace place for you and you can go there and breathe deeper and you go get more relaxed and more calm and just feel nourished in sight and you're like it's a quiet place so you're out of any disturbance and it can be in your house like I said with blanket and so on or it can be a space in nature where you like to go and it's just a place where you can process what happens and ask yourself your questions be with your feelings with your thoughts with your with the things you want to know and what I like to do after Simon died it's crazy what new habits you do to develop I always had like a little candle light with me that I could just light up wherever I was and depending on what you like to do to process you could then make music or paint or just make yeah make something do something for yourself there and questions that are one another thing for some of us like sitting down is not the right thing to cope with emotions maybe you like to cope with emotions when you're walking and you just go for a walk or for a run depending on what kind of person you are so now maybe ask yourself which of those possibilities for healing and your own space with feelings thoughts and questions suits you best how did you cope with other things in the past what feels what feels right for you and I really really invite you to try it out this was episode number four of the Grief and Grow podcast I hope this episode was valuable for you and you got some insight tools and thoughts that help you through this very difficult and traumatic time I'm really really sorry for your loss as always please reach out to me send me a message if you would like to check in and say hi let me know who you are tell me about your babies I'm always honored to hear from you and I would be super honored if you would leave me a review on the Apple podcast so more women can find it or you share it if you know someone else who might get value from listening to the podcast and I want to leave you with the thoughts that you deserve to take care of yourself you deserve to hear and be gentle with yourself love yourself through this experience because it's tough enough for it happen to you you don't need to be hard on yourself on top of them bye