It's been six months since Zia died and my son Brady (4) is really having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that his sister is never coming home.

Six months ago my husband and I being Christians at the time (We are now more Agnostic Athiests) told him that Zia has gone to be with God and she is an angel now and she looks down on him and is with him all the time. That she couldn't come back home and that maybe someday he will have another baby brother or sister. At first he was so angry and he cried saying that he doesn't want her to go to God or be an angel, he wants her to come back. He then became terribly sad and asked about her all the time. He seemed to be coping when we started putting her scan picure up, involving him in candle lighting etc. but he is now sad about it again and actng like a baby. We think its a way for him to cope but it's just so hard.

Look I am well aware that the angel baby approach isn't the best aproach but we didn't know what to do and figured we could just say that so that she is always a part of our lives until he can understand and accept that she is his sister who passed away when he is older. Its that thing you do to not crush his innocence, it's done without much thought to try and offer him comfort and to give her some sort of form he will understand.

He asked his dad yesterday if we could pay and ask our baby to send us another baby. It's jus so heart breaking and I wanted to share this and ask other parents how they are handling the grief of their living children?

I have no words of advice, Grace is my oldest so her loss will be part of the fabric of Rosabella's life. I know that there are some books about baby loss for kids, but many of them have a strong Christian bent. I am so sorry for this, watching your grief reflected in your son and intermingled with his sounds so hard.

I think your Brady is about the same age as my oldest daughter, Io. He sounds like such a sensitive and loving little boy, who loves his sister very much and wishes she could be there with him. It must be so hard to see him grieving while you are grieving too.

Acacia died in May and over the summer I took Io to see a play therapist about six or seven times because I wanted her to be with a grown up who was focused on her emotional needs at a time when I felt incapable of addressing them. It seems to have helped, maybe? I know she enjoyed going and they just played together. I also sent her to pre-k in the fall, which couldn't have come at a better time. It's been really positive to have her go somewhere for four hours a day where there are adults who aren't razed by grief able to focus on her needs. Getting outside help has been one of the most helpful things. It's given me space to heal so that I can start to meet her needs again.

I think we all do our best to explain death how we understand it. The play therapist told me it was ok for her to have different idea of death than her father or I do, and that no matter what I told her, I wasn't "messing it up." I think what you told Brady is beautiful. Grief is hard. There's not the easy answer.

We read the Lifetimes book: http://www.amazon.com/Lifetimes-Beautiful-Explain-Death-Children/dp/0553344021

I found this book very comforting for myself and she seemed to be comforted by it as well. We told her that her sister's body stopped working and she died. I didn't know what else to tell her. I wished I could tell her what happened after but I didn't know so I told her I didn't know.

One thing my older daughter and I do sometimes is talk about what if. "What if Acacia had been able to come home, what would she be doing now?" We talk about that. She asks me that question almost every day. It used to be a punch in the gut every time she asked, but now it's almost a ritual, and it makes us both smile to talk about the baby her sister could have been.

She also sometimes tells me she is sad about her sister. Then I say I am sad too and we hug. I wish I had anything better to say. The pain doesn't go away, does it? ((((JoAnn)))

Also.... what do you want to tell him?

Oh Joanne I'm so sorry Zia is not with you and you are fielding such tough questions from your son.

I can't give you any advice or insight to your question because I lost my first child so my living child is his younger brother. But I wanted to say that however you described Zia's life and death to her brother (angel baby or not) the fact that he is asking these tough questions shows that you have already done a brilliant job.

He feels secure enough to ask you the hard questions, you have created a safe environment in his world where it's ok to talk about her.

We aren't religious at all but when we lost our first son we found a book called "we were going to have a baby but had an angel instead' was the best way to explain to a friends 4 year old why the baby wasn't coming any more.

6 months out is so tough, it's still so raw, be kind to yourself.

X

Hi everyone,

It's helpful to read your posts here. I think one of the very hardest aspects of this whole experience of stillbirth and grief for me has been watching my oldest daughter grieve and cope. She had just turned three when her baby sister died and people often assume that she didn't understand enough, or now can't remember enough, to really be grieving, but that is bullshit. She was devastated. Like you, Jo-Anne, we didn't know how to talk to her at first, what to say. First we said that we were going to go to the hospital and Baby Sister was going to be born, but she wasn't going to be able to come home with us because she was too sick to live and had already died. E screamed "No! You can't leave her at the hospital!" And then burst into tears. Later, we realized how scary it was for her to hear that Baby Sister was sick - then she worried that being sick meant you would die. So we tried to explain it the way the social worker in the hospital told us, which was to say that Baby Sister couldn't survive. Well, that didn't work either because three year olds don't really know what survive is. Finally, we just told her the 'truth.' 'We don't know what happened. She just died. We are all so sad.' We are not religious so told her from the beginning that Baby Sister's energy went back into the living world, the flowers, the trees, the grass, etc. She liked that. I don't know what I really believe, but I like to think that, too. Sometimes....sometimes...it gives me comfort.

E talks about her sister a lot. She loves her and considers her part of the family. E also has some kinds of anxiety...she is afraid to be in a room by herself at any time of day (most of the time), she can't sleep through the night by herself anymore (started right after A died), she holds a lot of secrets in. But she is also very sweet, caring, has a greater degree of empathy than I've seen in many other kids her age.

I have done a lot of worrying about more extreme behaviours and whether they are just normal, developmental behaviours or something caused by trauma. She went through a phase at about 6 months out of having very violent outbursts...hitting and scratching me, HARD. I took her to a child psychologist who told me kids her age don't grieve siblings they never knew. I obviously did not go back there. I still wonder about what is grief-related and what is normal: 2 years out the scared of being alone stuff is hard to take and I wonder if she is just being silly, manipulating...but then I think of how traumatized I still am, so why shouldn't she be?

I get so mad and so sad that she had to experience this. That her mother has been so sad, and tired and not herself. That she has known all this fear and sadness. That is sometimes the very worst of it for me. My poor little girl.

I have a subsequent baby, too, who is nine months old today. I often wonder how he will understand his 'big sister' who isn't here.

I am grateful that people are writing here about siblings...I think their grief is often underlooked...and it is so much for us: to grieve for our dead babies and to parent our living ones. I was a terrible mom for a while. I cringe to think about it now. I resented E, just because I so very badly needed space to grieve A and I couldn't get any. And then I felt so guilty because so much of the babyloss world is stressing constant gratefulness for living children...and although fundamentally I was enormously, unmeasurably grateful for E, in moments, in the day-to-day I frequently wished I could just be by myself, have no responsibilities, nothing to do but grieve. The pressure to be a perfect mother after this kind of trauma is unbelievable and - to my mind - cruel: no one can live up to that.

Thank you for starting this thread, Jo-Anne. Sending love out to all the big and little brothers and sisters, the little innocents who have to learn way too soon some of the cruelest facts of life.

Thank you everyone, for your experiences and suggestions. Just today he looked up at the sky and told her she needs to come back. Oh how I wish she would come back, for all of us. But since that can never be I have to help my son as much as possible.

Jo-Anne,
My experience with my children seems different than everyone else here because my children are much older. I have a son who is 19 and a daughter who is 13. Having had children that were once young, I think you did the right thing with what you told your son and I would have done the same. You should be gentle with their innocence. My son on the other hand was completely distraught when I first lost his sister but now has seemed to clam up about it. I think boys sometimes think they need to be "tough". My daughter and I are very close and she was beyond excited to be a big sister. She helped me pick her name, decorate the nursery, she was filling out the baby book, etc. This has been devastating to watch her suffer. I think because of the age difference, it was almost like she was Bella's little mommy. I have taken her to grief counseling which seemed to help a lot. They gave her ways to cope, express her feelings, and tools to help her handle questions in school. Sometimes we do forget how much this impacts siblings of all ages.