How to talk to your child about loss
How do you tell a three year old that his baby brother is never coming home?
How do you tell him that his heart stopped beating and that we don’t get to know why?
You tell him the same way you told him where babies come from. Truthfully, simply, and with real words that he’ll understand.
We told C that the baby wasn’t in my tummy anymore. He got somber. He could tell something was going on days before, probably when his grandparents picked him up from school with no warning. We told him that the baby’s heart had stopped beating and the doctors had to take him out of my belly. He’d heard the baby’s heartbeat weeks before on my fetal doppler. It scared him because it was too loud. We told Cillian that, just like the pictures we’d seen of fetuses the same age as his baby, this baby was too small to live outside of his bubble in mommy’s belly. We told him we would not get to bring the baby home. We held him and showed him the pictures of his brother, Mile Bubbles Clayton. He smiled when he heard his name choice. I held his hands in the size that Miles had been. I told him it was ok to be sad that we would never get to have our baby come home. We clearly and simply said to him, “The baby died.”
He asked me to go play cars with him. I think that is a child’s way of saying, “I’m going to be ok.” or “I’m going to go process this in a way that I know how.” And that’s ok. Children need patience and calm too. They need to processes these emotions that are far bigger than they are. They need time to grieve in their own way.
A few hour later, he told me he was sad because the baby doesn’t get to come home. I told him I was too. He asked if the doctors were going to keep the baby forever and if they took him all apart. My heart shattered into even smaller pieces. I reassured him that we were going to take Miles to a special place and bury him, all of him, with Jon’s Grammy and that he would be safe. Miles’s tiny head and body and legs were all still attached just like his own are, but that he just wasn’t alive. His spirit was gone from his body.
On the way to school the next day, C did his familiar routine of, “This is what the baby will sound like! ‘Goo goo ga ga!’” Then he added, “But we won’t ever get to hear him.”
It’s oddly comforting to hear that he understands what this means even if he doesn’t understand what happened.
I know there will be more questions and more blunt comments. I’m already dreading the holidays – Halloween, birthdays, Christmas – because we had talked about how we would include the baby in our celebrations. But we will just take it one comment, one question, and one celebration at a time being as honest and open as can, answering questions that are asked without giving more information than he’s looking for.
This is going to be hard, for the rest of our lives.
Thank you to everyone who has asked about C during this time or sent him special gifts. Everyone is quick to consider me, the mama, but few recognize that this loss was shared by so many more.