It’s surprising how long grief can last, when you’ve lost a baby. I had a miscarriage, and thought I should have gotten over it quickly. At least that’s the message I got from society. But it doesn’t work that way: we don’t just get over losing a baby, even if the loss was early.

I’m sure that with stillbirth and postnatal death, it’s the same. “Grief is grief” no matter what age the baby was.

But with miscarriage, it’s as though the baby wasn’t real to anyone else. It was even different for my husband, Dave, than it was for me -- though he was deeply saddened too. He could see that I was ‘stuck’ in my grief, so he decided to look for support.

And what help he found!

Dave found a local group of the Compassionate Friends charity. These groups are all over the world: for bereaved parents whose children died at any age, for any reason. Everyone there knows what it’s like to lose a baby or child.

When your baby dies, it’s so isolating. You think that nobody else has gone through this, simply because nobody talks about it. But with Compassionate Friends, at last I had a voice. I found people who really understood. I wasn’t alone anymore.

I’ve also received support and hope. When we lost our baby, I thought my grief was never going to end. But at my first meeting, I met parents who had gone through the same thing, but that they were much further along in their grief (and sometimes past it). So this gave Dave and I hope that the grief was actually going to end for me too.

Today, my grief has passed. And I’m sure it has passed a lot quicker, thanks to the Compassionate Friends. Today, Dave and I still go to these monthly gatherings, because we are now among those who give our hope and support to the new members.

Whether you are a bereaved parent, family or friend, or a professional: I urge you to find out more about this wonderful charity. To find the group nearest to you, check out: http://www.compassionatefriends.org/