“It was nature’s way.” “You’re still young: you can have another.” “You’re lucky your loss was early in the pregnancy.” And so on. The list of reactions seems endless. We hear words like these all the time, and often many times over whether our baby has died due to miscarriage, stillbirth or postnatal death.

These words are meant to comfort, but they often do the opposite. They make us feel that our pain is not understood. We feel that others are trivialising our loss, our grief.

And we know that this isn’t their intention – these loved ones don’t want to cause us more pain than we are already going through. They are trying to be comforting. But the problem is that we humans simply don’t know any better, because society doesn’t teach us how to respond to the news of someone’s pregnancy or infant loss. We’re simply ill equipped.

So why not equip ourselves then, in order to deal with these well-intentioned but trite comments when they come our way? Here’s a suggestion from an excellent grief and loss counsellor, Deborah England. Deborah has given me her enthusiastic support to share this tool here on this website.

Here’s the tool:

Imagine you go to a garage sale. You look at everything for sale. Some things might be useful to you; others you might not find useful at all. And some things might not be useful to you now, but they might serve a purpose later on (for example, a raincoat).

What do we do at a garage sale? We only buy what we like, and what might be useful to us someday. We don’t buy things we don’t like, or have no need for. Not only that, we wouldn’t give those other items another thought.

Deborah suggests that we do the same thing with all the trite comments that come our way: with each comment, simply decide if it is useful to you, now or perhaps in the future– and if not, don’t give it another thought.

Doing so also enables us to ‘take a step back’ and have a better look at the situation. When we do that, we can then see that it is our loved one’s intention to say the right thing, and their caring is (very) useful to us. So we can appreciate and thank them for caring. But as for their comment, we can decide if it is useful to us, or if it is simply to be ignored.

Makes sense! Thank you so much, Deborah.