When My Baby Died, I Was Shocked By What People Told Me. This Is The 1 Sentence I Wish They'd Said Instead.

My second child, Ben, was stillborn at full term on New Year’s Eve 2003. It was an out-of-the-blue, devastating shock that started my indoctrination into living with grief — and other people’s opinions of how I should live my life with grief.

Weeks after the initial devastated reactions from friends and family, and the agony of a memorial service, I found that people had a lot of opinions about how I should handle my loss. As I was dealing with a confused 3-year-old, trying to be an OK-enough parent and partner and feeling unsure of how I would manage to get out of bed the next morning, I also had people freely telling me what I should do, and they continued to do so over the next year and beyond.

I know, in another person’s shoes, I may very well have parroted back the same awkward platitudes, which are meant to ease the speaker’s mind more than the recipient’s. Grief is hard — we don’t talk about it much as a society — and Ben’s death opened my eyes to just how grief-averse most of us are.

There’s no time to prepare for or process this kind of loss. The future that my husband, Simon, and I had pictured was ripped away from us, and we were left with a closet full of diapers and clothes, a crib ready to hold our son, and a 3-year-old who wondered when her baby brother was coming home. I was left with a grief so deep that most days I didn’t want to move, and I was convinced I could not survive my pain.

What I wanted was a map to direct me through the loss, to pinpoint the landmarks at months three and six and 12, like mile markers on a highway, so I knew where I was and how far I had come. But there isn’t a map, or directions, or a guidebook. And Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ famous five stages, which are so often cited in books