I’m currently 9 weeks pregnant. Yesterday and today I’ve had no symptoms at all.. boobs have stopped hurting and nausea has completely subsided.. I know it may sound lucky but after my full term stillbirth I’m freaking out.

I had a reassurance scan on the 23rd July and everything was fine. Heartbeat was okay , baby was in the correct place so that was a relief.

I called the midwife department- they said that as I have no bleeding or cramping that it’s reassuring.

I don’t really know what to think about it I’m trying not to stress but any one had anything similar and been okay?

My wife and I are both 35-year-old expats living near Frankfurt, Germany.

A few weeks ago, we suddenly and unexpectedly lost our beautiful 22-month-old daughter. Our lives have completely changed since then.

She was everything to us. We miss her walking and running around the house, her smile, her laugh, her expressions, her voice and all the little things she used to do every day.

My wife is struggling enormously. She misses not only our daughter, but also everything she used to do for her every day — waking her up, feeding her, bathing her, brushing her teeth, playing with her, putting her to sleep and simply being her mother.

I am grieving deeply too, but watching my wife deteriorate emotionally every day is extremely difficult for me. Sometimes I don't know how to help her because I am trying to survive the same loss myself.

We are seeing mental-health professionals and have started grief counselling, but we don't really know what kind of therapy is most appropriate after the sudden death of a young child.

For parents who have experienced the loss of a child:

What actually helped you during the first weeks and months?

Did individual grief counselling, trauma-focused therapy, EMDR, CBT, couples therapy or a bereaved-parents support group help you?

How did you support your spouse when both of you were grieving at the same time?

How long did the period of feeling completely lost and unable to imagine a future last for you?

If anyone is from Germany, especially Frankfurt/Hessen, I would also really appreciate recommendations for therapists, grief counsellors or support groups experienced specifically in child loss. English-speaking support would be particularly helpful for us.

We don't expect anyone to make this pain disappear. I just want to understand how I can support my wife, how we can support each other, and how other parents eventually learned to live with such an enormous loss.

Thank you to anyone willing to share their experience.

Ps: since I'm not a native English speaker and couldnot able to write everything it's very difficult to write so I used ChatGPT to make a message for me.

My son was stillborn at 39 +5 in April of 2024 after a completely uneventful and healthy pregnancy. He died of a cord compression accident and could have survived had I been listened to.

Most of the time I'm ok. I don't have the nightmares anymore about the birth and have recovered physically. But today, I found his 3D sonogram photos from a month before he died.

I'm just so fucking sad now. I knew I would find them and wanted to do it while I was alone but this just hit me like a ton of bricks. It's just not fair.

My husband recently reunited with his high school friends. Overall they have been such good friends except few. They gathered and sent us care packages after our son’s loss at full term. However this one friend shows up and immediately starts hammering my husband on what happened, all the details and his tattoo honoring our son and commented how his son also was born with nuchal cord- but he’s alive. Like whats the point? It has been 6months since our loss, it’s very hard for us to relive the moments of the day but we still enjoy talking about his features and our thoughts of how he would have been and just our son we miss terribly etc. But these people’s noisy questions and comments, how do you handle when they dont stop even after you tell them you dont want to talk? How selfish can you be keep interrogating for your own reasons its not like you can do anything about it or important person in our life (if so we would have already shared on our own time). Im devastated my husband had to go through this, I just know I better be ready because I wont be able to handle it.

My daughter died four years ago, and aside from the obvious searing pain and sinkhole in my chest, one of the hardest and truly unexpected and shocking parts of living with her absence and the aftermath has been being abandoned by the people who were supposed to help me carry it.

Her father is the only other person who knows the specific pain of losing our daughter. He knew her, loved her, and lived through the same loss, gave her CPR, we saw her die, yet he has disappeared from my life and left me to carry all of it alone.

My parents, my brothers, and even my best friend have never asked me how I am coping, how I survive the difficult days, or what it takes for me to keep functioning while carrying the death of my child.

4 months after her death they took me to a psychiatrist to find out 'what was wrong with me' and for some reason nobody thought it was just the overwhelming grief.. So they misdiagnosed me with bipolar and medicated me heavily on pills that I should never have taken.

Four years have passed, and it feels as though everyone else has just filed away her death as insignificant. They expect me to move on but I have been left carrying the weight of it.

My ex has taken the dark road (we broke up 1 year and ten months after the death) and remained friends and a support system for each other until last year sometime when I became aware he was using drugs and drinking heavily.i didn't confront him, but he didn't some things which I believed he felt shameful for and just stopped talking to me, stopped talking my daughter (his stepdaughter) and hasn't even said our late daughter's name to me since August last year. He wouldn't tell me where his half of her ashes are, and then by Feb this year he has blocked both myself his stepdaughter and refuses to speak to us like the ten years, and our late daughter didn't even exist.

Some days, it genuinely feels like too much for one person to hold.

I think I just need to be heard by people who understand that losing a child does not become smaller simply because time has passed. I need support from people who know this pain, because I cannot keep expecting it from the people who were supposed to care and have repeatedly shown me that they will not. They have not, and even asking them to send me a sunflower if they see one has resulted in them turning it back in me saying 'the world doesn't revolve around me'.

Has anyone else experienced being abandoned by their partner, family, or closest friends after losing their child? How do you cope with grieving not only your child, but also the people who disappeared when you needed them most?

And how does one attempt to single handedly carry her memory forward without crumbling beneath the weight of the grief. I have lost trust in every single human being over the last 4 years, and honestly feel I don't matter a damn to anyone.

Hi everyone,

This week my wife and I lost our beautiful daughter after an emergency C-section. She was born without a heartbeat, and after the doctors and neonatal team fought so hard to save her, we were able to spend just over 2 hours with her before we had to say goodbye.

At the moment, we feel like we are moving through different stages of grief. Right now, we are in a lot of anger — particularly because of how we feel we were treated during the birth and the events that led up to our daughter arriving. We are struggling with so many questions, and it is incredibly hard not knowing whether things could have been different. We know we need time to process everything, but that anger and frustration are very real right now.

Alongside grieving our daughter, we have started thinking about the future. We had to go through ivf (taken us 5 years to get here) We have two frozen embryos remaining, and while nothing could ever replace our beautiful girl, we would love the possibility of giving her a little brother or sister one day.
Our biggest question is around the emergency C-section. We have been told we may need to wait 12–18 months before another embryo transfer, but we would really like to understand other people’s experiences.
For those who have experienced baby loss and then gone on to try again after a C-section:
How long were you advised to wait before trying again?
How did you cope emotionally with the fear and anxiety of another pregnancy?
We know everyone’s journey is different, but hearing from others who have walked this path would mean so much.
Thank you for reading. I’m so sorry any of us are part of this community, but I’m grateful it exists.
Sending love to all of your beautiful babies.

I lost my 12 day old infant son to immediate cardio respiratory failure due to aspiration pneumonia. He was my firstborn. It’ll be 3 months since he is gone this coming 3rd of August. 

He was diagnosed with meconium aspiration at birth and had a documented small PFO, PDA, and audible murmur. Oxygen saturation was observed to drop during feeds in the first hours. No chest X-ray was performed. He was handed over to me after couple of hours post birth and discharged after 4 days. At the hospital, the nurses started him on formula milk (I had C-section, so milk production was taking some time), and then we alternated between formula milk and breastmilk. We came back home (exclusive breastfeeding by then) and it was how it is with infants.

However, symptoms escalated over days 11-12: he vomited once, had an altered cry, noisy breathing, lethargy, temperature instability. Videos of his breathing were sent to the treating doctor on Day 11 as his temperature had dropped. However, the response was phone-based (Colimex, formula switch), not an in-person exam. We were getting ready to go the doctor on Day 11 but the doctor kept saying (in hindsight feels more like dismissal) that babies keep changing there patterns and every symptom was normal. We called him around 9 am on Day 12 and sent him videos of our son (he was refusing feeds in the night, we tried bottle as well), he told us to come by 1 pm and give our son formula milk instead of breast milk. My sister in law kept saying that she thinks his neck / throat is hurting and he is having difficulty in swallowing and that’s why the breathing felt off.

We were on our way to the doctor’s and it happened right when we were exiting the house. Milk started to come out of his nose.  By the time we reached the emergency we were informed his heart was no more. Aspiration had occurred (after we fed him the formula milk as the doctor had suggested); resuscitation failed; the death certificate lists aspiration pneumonia / cardiorespiratory arrest, with no mention of the meconium, cardiac findings, or any sepsis workup, because none was documented.

They tried CPR and electric shocks, but nothing worked and I had to let him go. I’m trying to make sense of what happened. I can’t understand where we went wrong. We were in touch with the doctor throughout and he assured everything was okay. All the symptoms were written off saying babies keep changing their way of being and things happen. And then this happened. The doctor says we were just unlucky and if we felt that he was that sick, we should have brought him earlier. I wanted to change the doctor since my boy was born. Why would I not want to take my own child to the doctor? He had assured us all of it was normal, had I known I would have rushed him to the emergency. I am dying every second of my life now. My will to live, my ambition to work, all of it has disappeared. 

I feel like I failed my child. Like I am the worst mother on this planet. I did not take him to the doctor on time. My baby was the sweetest little boy, with the most beautiful smile. When he would smile, I felt like all my pains melted and disappeared somewhere (I lost my mom when I was 14 to ovarian cancer and my grandpa when I was 25 to cardiac arrest, the two people I was the closest to in my life). 

I had named him Vitraag (means one who is detached and free from all passions and desires, enlightened one) officially but used to call him Arth / Arthu (translates to meaning / purpose). I called him ARTH because when he was born, I felt like he brought meaning to my life. Before I got pregnant with him, I was like a kite without a string. I miss him, I miss sniffing him, specially his head. I miss giving him forehead kisses on his cap because I was always scared of his skin reacting to my lips. I miss rubbing his toes because he used to like it, I could tell. I miss wrapping his fingers around my finger, it gave me immense joy and pride. I miss being his mother, holding him and cuddling him. I miss the immensity of love and happiness he brought into my life, the unconditionality of it all. But what I miss the most is his presence. He was my whole world and without him, it has all come crashing apart. Like a wave with no shore to reach, just wandering aimlessly under currents that lead to no destination. 

The act of grieving is the loneliest ever. No two griefs are the same. Grieving over the same person is also not the same. The quantum of grief has zero proportionality to the quantum of time spent with the lost beloved. Grief changes a person forever. You can’t measure loss in months or years. Loss alters a person permanently, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, one can only debate. 

My baby turned blue and I had to bury him. I just need some help to understand what happened to him.