A Story About Loss
I feel like this article needs to be prefaced with a warning. The Guardian ran a first-person piece about stillbirth from a father’s perspective. If you missed it, I found it a moving and important read, and I appreciated that they gave space for the father’s voice.
He writes: “Losing a child in this way is a horrifying experience, and for women there are online support groups, podcasts, books and baby loss influencers. For men: next to nothing.”
If you feel up to reading this difficult but important piece, please read the whole thing. If you don’t feel up to the entire thing, this was the most perfect way I ever heard loss described:
“I’ve learned a lot of horrible things in the last year, but mostly I’ve learned to think in a different tense: the future lost. If this hadn’t happened, then we’d be doing that; if this happens for us eventually, then we’ll do this.”
Future lost.
3 comments
Future lost is such an excellent description.
Great, now I’m crying in the grocery store. So beautiful and so so sad.
This is probably not the right forum to say this, but for anyone who might need to read this, there used to be a host of beautiful writing by “babylost” fathers at Glow in the Woods (http://www.glowinthewoods.com). And yes, the fathers were on the fora as well. I don’t frequent that site anymore, but I just visited to see if it’s still active, and sure enough, the byline is still “for babylost mothers and fathers.”