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Child Loss Quotes

Browse 23 quotes about Child Loss.

Child Loss Quotes

“I’d spent seven months of my life obsessively and delightedly planning for a future that included months of caring for an infant. I expected my entire life to revolve around the person who had been closer & realer to me than anyone. Now she was suddenly and inexplicably missing from my life. My life with her and I am been so close I could taste it..”

“If you can't tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark storyline. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it. The trees will not ask, "How are you really?" and the wind doesn't care if you cry.”

“Things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "You'll become a stronger/kinder/more compassionate person because of this" brings out rage in grieving people. Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they're being insulted but can't figure out how. It's not just erasing your current pain that makes words of comfort land so badly. There's a hidden subtext in those statements about becoming a better, kinder, and more compassionate because of your loss, that often-used phrase about knowing what's "truly important in life" now that you've learned how quickly life can change. The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow. It says that you weren't aware of what was important in life before this happened. It says that you weren't kind, compassionate, or aware enough in your life before this happened. That you needed this experience in order to develop or grow, that you needed this lesson in order to step into your "true path" in life. As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.”

“What happens when the order of birth and death are disrupted? Stillbirth goes against the way most people think about life and death, and the timeline in which they occur. It's unsettling. When death takes a life before birth, is it a life? I don't know. I don't think there will ever be an answer that feels certain, or one that is right for everyone. But right here, right now, I wonder, is it really just a single breath of air that creates a life? And the absence of it that makes a death?”

“I never know when I'll sense Reid's presence. It isn't in a toothbrush left behind or a frequently worn item of clothing. It's in the absences that I feel him most. It's everywhere that I had imagined he'd one day be. For me, he is more than a body. I knew the soul, not the flesh. When I look at photos of him, I miss him, but not in the same way I miss him when I look at photos of myself pregnant. He is a feeling. He is a feeling more than anything because of the simple fact that he died before he was born. Because he was stillborn. He is not defined by this, but the definition matters. I was meant to be his portal, the one that would lead him from his world into ours, but he left for another world, one altogether foreign to me.”

“We've got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you're either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you're going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before. Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed. It doesn't seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.”