Writing Through Grief

Blogs are incredible vehicles for exploring our passions and finding our voices. They can also be powerful tools for healing in the face of trauma; for many of us, the act of writing is a cathartic one.

These brave moms are blogging their way through one of life’s more traumatic losses: the loss of a child. Calling themselves babyloss blogs, they provide insight for those of us who have never experienced this unique pain and support for other parents starting to navigate the same grief — along with hope that life does go on, and happiness is still possible.

C is for Crocodile

2014 BlogHer Voices of the Year winner Timaree started C is for Crocodile to chronicle her pregnancy, never imagining that after three years and five months, she would instead be chronicling her son’s fight with juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia — an incredibly rare form of cancer. She blogged through his treatment and now writes her way through the aftermath, as in this piece published during the recent BlogHer conference:

I grabbed a glass of champagne, tucked myself up on a set of stairs, and I watched from Planet I Miss My Son as people strolled by, stopped, read, dug around in their bags for tissues, and moved on.

She shares the blog with wife Jodi, and together they’re documenting the journey to their new normal with honesty and eloquence.

Expecting the Unexpected

Connecticut midwife Meghan was pregnant in March 2014 when she learned first that her daughter had down syndrome, and then a potentially fatal kidney defect. On Expecting the Unexpected, she does not blunt the edge of what happened next:

The story of my daughter began with a positive pregnancy test and ended as I held her in my arms as she died six hours after birth.

Her blog gives her a space to mourn and process the loss as she works not only to heal, but to re-enter what became a painful profession.

The Mourning After Natasha

Natasha was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age seven, and passed away five years later. Like Timaree and Meghan, mom Suzanne turned to words to help deal with the pain of a devastating loss. In her latest post, she explains why she’d prefer that you didn’t call her child a “hero”:

To those she loved and trusted, she didn’t soldier on with a smile on her face as the hero-philes would have it. She mourned the injustice of the good health that she had irrevocably lost, noting that her friends who had morphed into gangly preteens got to play a brisk game of basketball.

Along with her blog, Suzanne helps other grieving parents feel less alone with regular pieces on The Huffington Post, Mothering, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many more.

Hang Your Hopes from Trees

The blogger behind Hang Your Hopes from Trees began writing in the aftermath of a traumatic miscarriage:

This is not a goldfish! My head raged. This is your baby! Pick it up! Hold it, you will NEVER get another chance! Another voice rang in, steady and calm. Don’t touch the baby, it said. The baby is gone, has been gone a long time. If you pick it up, what will you do with it? Will you ever be able to let it go? Will you be scarred, more deeply than you already are?

At, Hang Your Hopes from Trees she writes to forgive herself — and her body. This month, she opens a new chapter, learning to reconcile her joy at the birth of a daughter with the lingering pain of her loss.

Sadly, these four women are not alone; there are countless other bloggers using babyloss blogs to write through their grief, including:

• Jo-Anne, who mourns her stillborn daughter in prose and poetry at This Little Light of Mine.
• Writing the Roads of Grief, a blogger whose son took his own life.
• Carla of Loving Luca: Life Without Him Here and the blogger at following my sun, both of whom only shared a single day with their newborn sons.

These women tell their painful truths to help themselves heal and to keep the memories of their children alive — and in doing so, they help countless other parents who find themselves crushed and bewildered after the loss of a child.