Yes, You Can Heal From Loss Without Guilt. These 5 Soothing Steps Will Help

The stats around the loss of a child make me shudder—especially since I'm counted among them. One in five pregnancies ends in pregnancy loss. One in 160 ends in stillbirth. Thousands of children die in their first year of life because of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). When the unimaginable happens, what do we do? How do we respond? They journey of life after loss is not as clear-cut as our society would have us believe.

It was my second pregnancy and I was blissfully naïve—and confident; I had already given birth to one healthy child. Around the 25-week mark, an ultrasound discovered something that should not have been there. A large tumor encircled my baby's heart like a string. It was tied so tightly that my unborn child's heart was failing and there was nothing the doctors could do. My son, whom we named Zachary, was born at 30 weeks' gestation, and died in my arms, skin to skin, heart to heart, just moments later.

I felt like my body had failed my baby in the one thing it should innately know how to do. When I left the hospital with empty arms, the sharp edge of isolation became my companion. I felt that no one could possibly understand how my heart was being torn in two. I was alone in my grief—until I chose to tell my story.

When I began talking with others about what I'd been through—what I was still going through despite societal expectations of the grief timeline—I began to realize that so many women carry this sorrow inside themselves. Sharing stories between friends, and even strangers, helped me find support. As an artist and writer, I began to express my own personal journey through creative storytelling. I learned that the arts are an incredible tool that can help set us free when we feel hopelessly tangled in grief.

When a child dies, the loss is devastating—and there are a plethora of secondary losses that also need to be acknowledged. Those could include the size of your family, your ability to have more children, and of course the future you would have had with that child. Collage is a beautiful exercise in editing. It connects us with ourselves through this selective process.

Poetry may grow out of collage-making as you collect words that resonate with you. Writing poetry causes us to find the right word. It forces us to be in the moment and discover what we are really thinking and feeling. Where I may write that I am "mad at life" as I scribble out my thoughts in my journal; when I pause and ponder, maybe something else describes my grief more aptly. Maybe what I am actually feeling is "powerless" that I could not save my child. Or the emotions of being "deeply discouraged" or "outraged" that this happened to me and my family.

No one teaches us to play when we are kids. Creativity and touch are our first language of communication. We put our hands on our parents, on our food and try to squish, taste, and effect change on the world around us. This is how we learn. Play is a joyful act. It makes us smile. We laugh. We get messy and don't care.

Instead of being snap-happy, taking a multitude of photographs quickly, try the opposite. Pause from the hectic pace of life, and from your mind racing through the tunnels of grief, and just be. Before raising your camera (or phone), really look at what you want to take a picture of. Observe it deeply with your eyes first, and take a series of deep breaths. When you hold your lens up to capture the image, think about how you want the picture to look. Will the composition be better if you take a step closer or two back? If you wait just one more minute, will the sun break through the clouds and give you the most gorgeous light?

If you're not a dancer, that's OK. Close the curtains and rock it out on your own. It really doesn't matter what you look like. I'll often turn on my favorite music and, like I mentioned before, simply "be free." There is something near magical that happens when we get our bodies moving. Our heart rates rise, the lyrics find their way to our tongues, and we work up a sweat. Often, we end up feeling more alive than we have in days (and for some of us, much longer).