Watching Kermit the Frog mourn the loss of his son Tiny Tim in The Muppet Christmas Carol, I can’t help but compare my own grief with Kermit’s. He tells Miss Piggy about the spot he chose for his son’s grave, how it overlooks the river, and how Tiny Tim used to love seeing the ducks.
“Are you crying?” my girlfriend asks.
“I might be,” I reply.
We’ve been putting up the Christmas decorations in our flat. The lights gleam on the tree behind us. Scrooge goes on to learn his lesson. We say no more about my tears.
Back in May this year, my girlfriend had a miscarriage. It was only about six weeks into the pregnancy. We didn’t even know she was pregnant until things went wrong, although we’d already agreed that we wanted children. The night it happened, we were in different towns. She called to tell me what was happening as she sat alone in a bathroom. The next day, we both went to work as if nothing had happened, as if our world hadn’t changed.
If things had gone right, we’d be expecting our first child in January. My girlfriend would be wobbling around the flat, proud of her bump. There would be tiny clothes wrapped up under the tree. We’d be falling asleep on Christmas Eve with a hospital bag by the door, just in case. It would be our last Christmas without children.
Christmas is a time for children, from the cold night in Bethlehem when Christ was born in a manger to children pleading at family gatherings to be allowed to open their presents already. In the supermarket, when getting the groceries, I overhear a woman saying how she doesn’t like Christmas, but it’s for children, isn’t it, so you’ve got to make an effort for them.
I can’t help but think about what we won’t have. Miscarriage is a strange form of grief. Normally, when we lose a loved one, we have memories of them we can draw on. There are happy times to look back on with fondness.
After a miscarriage, it’s different. I don’t have those memories. There was no opportunity to watch the ducks together, like Kermit and Tiny Tim did. Instead, I’m mourning the loss of what could have been.
Like a lot of couples, we gave the child we lost a name and picked a gender for them. She became Luna. It helped us to build a picture of the person the baby might have become. We did this instinctively. It felt right.
At first, all we had to go on was instinct. It took us a while to find the support we needed. We discovered there is a lot of miscarriage advice and support aimed at women. After all, miscarriage is something that happens to the mother. Since it happened, I’ve been asked “How is your partner doing?” more often than I’ve been asked how I’m doing. My girlfriend has found solace in some wonderful books written by women who have gone through miscarriages, which have helped her make sense of her feelings and feel less alone.
With fathers, there’s an awareness that, in the words of a slogan used by the baby loss charity Saying Goodbye, Dads Matter Too, but there is less support available for us overall. I posted about it a little bit on social media and had some very kind messages of support. I told the group of boys that I go to the pub with about it. We didn’t talk about it for very long and it doesn’t get mentioned now when we go out. I’m glad about that. It would kill the mood of a good night out.
Instead, what I’ve found has helped is a mixture of counselling and honouring our lost baby. We had couples counselling with the charity Petals, which gave us a supportive environment to talk about things and find out more about how we both feel and what we need. People grieve differently and, as a couple, it’s been important for us to make room for each other’s feelings.
Our counsellor recommended that we buy a memory box, in which we’ve put little gifts we’ve bought for the baby after the miscarriage. We’re not remembering events in this box. Instead, we’re commemorating the love we feel for the child and finding an expression for it. While I’m not one to talk a lot about how I feel, I’m finding it helpful to do things which include our lost child.
In November, we went to a Saying Goodbye service at Ely Cathedral. We lit a candle for our girl and a bell was rung for her. When we decorated the flat for Christmas, we wrote her a little message that we put in a bauble on the tree, a little note wishing her a Merry Christmas. These are ways we can create beautiful memories of the child we’ve lost.
Of course, these memories aren’t what we want. We want to be excited and nervous and stressed out about an upcoming birth. But Christmas doesn’t have to be an easy time and it’s normal for joyous moments to be tinged with sadness.
Unlike in A Christmas Carol, there are no overnight transformations in real life. It’s been important for us to seek help, and talk about what happened. With support from others who have been through it, we’ve slowly started to find ways to make it through. I’m not sure that we could have done it alone and we know it’s still going to be hard. I’ll have bad days over this Christmas period and so will my girlfriend. There’s no avoiding it. Each lost child is irreplaceable. But we’ve learned enough to have hope. Next year, we’ve decided, we’re going to try again for a baby.
A candle lit in memory of Luna.
