Baby loss: Grief, tears and dreams of Heaven

In an article originally published in The Pastoral Review, the Centre’s Associate Research Fellow, Dr Michael Wee, writes that whilst the grief that follows stillbirth and miscarriage is often complex and not well understood, with the light of faith this grief can also be an occasion of grace and a source of deeper respect for the gift of life.

The fourteenth-century poem Pearl is one of the glories of Middle English literature, revered for its intricate rhyme scheme and the complexity of its vocabulary. The poem sits in the venerable tradition of the medieval dream-vision, but somewhat unusually for the genre, the visionary is a father – the vision, his daughter. All we know of her earthly life is that she died before the age of two; now she is seen in the splendour of the heavenly Jerusalem, older and wiser, and appearing as one of the mystic brides of the Lamb. In one of the poem’s recurring lines, she is memorialised as the dreamer’s ‘precious pearl without spot’. [1]

When I first read Pearl as an undergraduate, I was struck by the vividness of its language and the intensity of the poetic experience it afforded. Who could fail to be moved by the thought of a father losing a young child? But being somewhat bookish and lacking in life experience at the time, my response to this poetic meditation on themes as weighty as grief, salvation and consolation took place on a largely theoretical plane. Never did I imagine at the time that I would, one day, feel a deep personal affinity with the dreamer, owing to my own experiences of losing children to stillbirth and miscarriage.

Some years later, during my time as Education Officer of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, I travelled to Rome to attend a conference organised by the Vatican on the ethical and medical issues surrounding diagnoses of foetal anomalies. My wife and our first child, who was 11 months old at the time, came along and we were received by Pope Francis in a private audience for conference delegates on the last day. Among the small crowd in the Clementine Hall were ethicists, doctors and couples who had faced difficult pregnancies but had chosen to respect human life, regardless of the practical difficulties involved.

In a moving address, the Holy Father spoke of the importance of welcoming unborn children diagnosed with all kinds of conditions as ‘little patients’, deserving of our care and respect, whether or not they could be treated. Life, in all its frailty, was to be cherished. [2] By this time, I was keenly aware through my professional work of the multifarious questions involved in beginning-of-life ethics. But again, I never imagined that my wife and I would soon become one of those couples, like those who gave testimonies at the conference, faced with a heartbreaking diagnosis and the real possibility of losing their little ones in the womb or shortly after birth.

Some might say that I was more prepared than most, owing to the privilege of my education and my subsequent work in Catholic bioethics. In truth, nothing really prepares you for the shock of a difficult foetal diagnosis. Just over half a year following that conference, we turned up at the hospital for a seemingly routine 20-week scan for our second child, who was a baby girl. At no point that morning before the scan did we expect to receive a diagnosis of placental dysfunction. But during the scan the sonographer told us, somewhat puzzled, that the baby was ‘very small’. We were referred to the Foetal Medicine department that same day, where a consultant broke the news to us. Our baby’s chances, he said, were 50-50 at this stage. ‘Placentas misbehave all the time’, he explained, ‘but it’s not so common that it happens this early in pregnancy’. Because the placenta was not transporting nutrients to the baby as effectively as it should have, there was a chance that she might not reach a healthy, viable weight quickly enough to increase her chances of survival.

Eight long weeks later, our daughter Judith was stillborn – ‘born asleep’, as her gravestone reads. At 28 weeks, she weighed just 470g. For comparison, the typical foetal weight at 23 to 24 weeks – roughly the time we typically associate with viability outside the womb – is somewhere between 568 to 670g. [3] At one of the last scans where we saw our daughter alive, the doctor said quite plainly, ‘Her heart is struggling’. We wanted to give her all we could to keep her alive, but we felt so powerless, seeing her small body unable to cope.

We would go on to have a healthy baby girl two years after Judith’s stillbirth, followed by two little babies lost to early, unexplained miscarriage. The question, ‘How many children do you have?’, the sort of seemingly innocent and polite question you might get asked at a dinner party or by a new colleague, is always a tricky one. In my head, I always answer, ‘Two on earth, three in Heaven’. But one is generally expected not to disarm one’s conversation partner with such a revealingly personal answer.

The complexity of grief

One surprising thing about baby loss is how easy it is to underestimate the depth of feeling it brings out in the parents. Even those who have children may find stillbirth or miscarriage, though sad ‘in theory’, difficult to identify with. Some time after we had our first child, we heard news that friends of ours had sadly suffered a miscarriage. Having only experienced a smooth pregnancy at the time, miscarriage felt so far removed from what I knew that I did not, at the time, understand the extent to which they might have been grieving, although looking back now it seems obvious to me.

Perhaps because couples feel it is impolite or improper to discuss something so private with others, or else they fear that their grief will not be understood – which only reinforces that very difficulty – most people assume that they will ‘bounce back’ soon enough. This is especially so if they already have children, or go on to give birth to healthy babies. Perhaps it is also the idea that one cannot grieve over the loss of someone they have never actually ‘met’. Or, related to that, there is the assumption that what a parent is ‘really’ grieving is the loss of a future they had once imagined. These thoughts are understandable, but they do not quite do justice to the messy and complex reality that is grief following baby loss.

Actually, it is normal for couples to simply not know what to feel or what kind of support they need. Part of that is simply that we do not have established social conventions surrounding this type of grief; it is less clear what is ‘normal’ or ‘socially acceptable’ behaviour following baby loss. But another, more significant reason for this ambiguity in grief is that the physical and emotional experience of pregnancy varies so much. Losing a baby before or after one has felt movements in the womb can make a difference. Losing a baby after years of trying to conceive is probably going to be very different from miscarriage after many healthy children have been born. There is no single, ‘correct’ pattern of grief, although that grief will often be deeper than we first realise.

I have come to realise how much my own grief for Judith’s loss has been shaped by the particular circumstances of her brief but eventful life. Unlike those who have experienced sudden stillbirths – surely, a different kind of grief ensues – in our case we had eight weeks of waiting, longing, and extra ultrasound scans, occasionally hopeful, but mostly not. The immediate aftermath of the stillbirth, too, was unique. We lost Judith in March 2020, just a few days before the UK’s first national lockdown, which prevented us from sharing our grief with others in person; I also vividly remember having to notify the register office of the stillbirth by telephone, and spelling out to the registrar every single letter of all the middle names we had chosen for Judith – the names of her patron saints seemed like one of the few things we could give her. These all form part of my personal story of grief.

Every story of grief will be different. For example, early miscarriage often precedes social announcements of pregnancy as well as prolonged physical feelings of being pregnant – in fact, one sign of miscarriage is the cessation of morning sickness. It would be unjust to expect parents to grieve that type of baby loss in exactly the same way as a late stillbirth. None of this need imply that unborn children at different stages of pregnancy are of different moral status. Just as we mourn distant associates differently from close friends without distinguishing between their moral worth, so too might we mourn unborn children of varying ages differently.

But one might say that what unites different types of grief, from losing a baby to an elderly relative or friend, is the simple yet profound longing for physical touch. After all, we are both body and soul. For Christians, there could not be a stronger reminder of the importance of the body for our life of faith than God Himself taking flesh. I often think of how Christ’s life was marked by various significant physical reunions; such an ordinary human experience becomes the symbol of extraordinary moments of grace. Two of the mysteries of the Rosary – the finding of Jesus in the Temple and Our Lady’s Assumption – are reunions of mother and child. But it is the risen Christ’s mysterious words to Mary Magdalene when she is reunited with Him outside the empty tomb that stand out for me: ‘Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father’ (John 20.17).

It is in parting, and the long wait for a heavenly reunion, that we come to realise the significance of the body. And it is precisely because the physicality of the unborn child is so ephemeral and barely tangible that the desire to hold the child can be so strong. Even in more muted cases of grief, such as that following very early miscarriage, the absence of a recognisable body to hold, let alone bury, can be difficult to make sense of. There is almost a disconnect, between knowing one was with child, and seeing no child at all. Hence, tangible markers of the child’s short stay on earth, such as pregnancy notes, a blurred ultrasound scan, or a maternity dress, can take on unexpected significance for parents. The recent introduction in the UK of optional baby loss certificates after miscarriage may also help fulfil that need for tangibility. [4] And certainly for Christians, the presence of a priest or chaplain, who might perhaps come to pray with the parents or bless the remains of the miscarried child in the hospital, can be a sacramental experience – a visible sign of God’s invisible grace, which has been mysteriously present even in the depths of that difficult pregnancy, and which continues to enfold the couple.

So I am continually struck by Pope Francis’s words from that same address, when he broached the subject of ‘perinatal comfort care’ – like ordinary hospice care for older patients, the emphasis is on pain relief and comfort care for the baby and the maximising of opportunities for loved ones to spend time together and say a proper goodbye:

This is particularly necessary in the case of those children who, in our current state of scientific knowledge, are destined to die immediately after birth or shortly afterwards. In these cases, treatment may seem an unnecessary use of resources and a source of further suffering for the parents. However, if we look at the situation more closely, we can perceive the real meaning behind this effort, which seeks to bring the love of a family to fulfilment. Indeed, caring for these children helps parents to process their mourning and to understand it not only as loss, but also as a stage in a journey travelled together. They will have had the opportunity to love their child, and that child will remain in their memory forever. Many times, those few hours in which a mother can cradle her child in her arms leave an unforgettable trace in her heart. And she feels, if I may use the word, realised. She feels herself a mother. [5]

Many parents will, like us, not even have had the opportunity to get to that stage of cradling their baby alive at least for a few minutes or hours before death. But the ethos of perinatal comfort care, so beautifully articulated by the Pope, can begin as soon as the diagnosis is made – be it eight weeks, hours or minutes before the stillbirth occurs. Recognising and intentionally cherishing that ‘journey travelled together’ gives unspeakable light to an otherwise dark experience.

Tears of faith

Around the time of Judith’s first anniversary, I remember struggling with my grief, and I went to see a priest I trusted dearly, confiding in him my fear that I did not want to forget my daughter despite the pain that brought me, and yet I did not want to be imprisoned by grief. His wise, gentle reply was, ‘Tears animated by faith will never imprison’.

I have often pondered the meaning of those words as I try the best I can to make sense of my experiences. My wife and I are fortunate in that there is a small side garden in our parish set aside for the burial of unborn babies, where two of our three unborn babies are buried, and whom we are able to visit often. A little stone flower helps memorialise the baby whose remains were not possible to detect. Not long ago, the Catholic Diocese of St Augustine in Florida inaugurated a ‘Precious Ones Baby Mausoleum’, with burial spaces reserved for babies lost at a young age, such as to miscarriage, stillbirth, or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). [6]

Christian burial grounds, besides fulfilling that universal human desire for tangibility in the face of death, are, most importantly, places of prayer. And so when I visit the graves of my unborn children, I try to bring to prayer the ways in which my Christian life and faith have been enlarged by these little ones. I treasure, for example, the memory that during those eight weeks of waiting and praying before Judith's stillbirth, we felt ready to drop everything at a moment's notice, if there was something to be done to save or prolong her life. No extra hospital stay or medical intervention would have fazed us. Our experiences of baby loss have, no doubt, brought us closer in our married life, and taught us to cherish even more the children God has entrusted us with to raise in this world.

But most of all, thinking of the children I lost has taught me to dream of Heaven more intensely than ever – in my longing to see my children again, I have found a new way of longing to see Christ in Heaven. This, it seems to me, is not unlike the lesson that the dreamer learns at the very end of Pearl. [7] When his vision of the heavenly kingdom ends, he is initially displeased to be driven out ‘so suddenly of that fair region’, from all its vivid sights. But a new realisation dawns: Dreaming of his daughter has drawn him to God's presence; ‘to more of His mysteries I had been driven’. The sadness he feels now is not simply from the loss of his child, but from being far from the joy of God’s eternal presence in Heaven.

This gives him – and me – a strange peace in the midst of sorrow. The dreamer now yearns for no more than what God has given him, for he has found in Christ ‘a God, a Lord, a friend full fine’. This is the true blessing he has received from his vision, which he now commits back to God ‘in the form of bread and wine’ which ‘the priest us shows every day’. And so it is to the Eucharist that we can return, every day, to the heavenly kingdom, where all our longings shall cease, and where we shall meet our children again.

Dr Michael Wee is a Catholic philosopher and bioethicist, and serves as an Associate Research Fellow of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. He was appointed a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2020 and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. He writes in a personal capacity.

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[1] Pearl, translated by Victor Watts, London: Enitharmon Press, 2005.

[2] Pope Francis, Address to Participants in the Conference ‘Yes to Life! – Taking Care of the Precious Gift of Life in its Frailty’, 25 May 2019 (accessed 1 June 2024).

[3] Joanne Lewsley, ‘Average fetal length and weight chart’, BabyCentre, 3 May 2023 (accessed 1 June 2024).

[4] Department of Health and Social Care, ‘Press release: Baby loss certificate launched to recognise parents’ grief’, 22 February 2024 (accessed 1 June 2024).

[5] Op. cit., Pope Francis, Address.

[6] Kate Quiñones, ‘Florida Diocese Opens “Precious Ones” Mausoleum to Support Couples Who Lose Children’, National Catholic Register, 26 Apr 2024 (accessed 1 June 2024).

[7] Op. cit., Pearl, lines 1177-1213.