National Bereaved Parents Day 2023

Alistair and Sarina

"We tell our sad story of personal loss because it’s a therapeutic process in itself, whether telling it to a professional therapist, to our TCF grief companion (who we had between year one and two), to other bereaved parents in support groups facilitated by child loss organisations including TCF, or just to the trees and birds.

We share our story of Sarina's very short life because if somebody else is also experiencing something similar then they might take a tiny bit of comfort from knowing they're not alone. We also want to share it with a wider audience - to appeal to people who fortunately for them won't ever have to experience something similar.

Because it can be a very lonely existence as bereaved parents, when on top of everything else people can often be unwilling to validate the way we choose to move forwards with our lives". - Alistair

It won’t deter us from trying to include others on our journey of building resilience as we incorporate our past into our present. Specifically a very brief period in our past - the seven weeks that Sarina was with us, that will always be our most precious time, nothing can ever match it.

Despite the sadness in the outcome we never want anything to eclipse the memories first and foremost. Ultimately, we make initial connections so people without a similar experience might come to understand that our way of escaping reality isn't so different to theirs, that we like to include our child's memory in the same things everybody does to relax and restore.

This is reliant upon them either having already or showing capacity to learn some emotional intelligence. We’re wide open to feeling hurt by their response (or lack of) so it’s done sparingly for our benefit. We accept it won't work on many more occasions than it will, but we have the rest of our lives to keep trying. Some will steer clear but we remind ourselves we are only human beings, therefore we can never be perfect, and our situation means that we will be unreliable at times in a world where there’s a massive emphasis on trusting others to serve us at our convenience.

Bereaved parents can be exceptionally innovative with our representation of the truth however. This is where continuing our bond with Sarina has been such an effective coping strategy. It’s become our outlet for feeling angry (and other painful emotions). We’ll try hard to avoid feeling anger towards God because he’s looking after our daughter until we’re returned to each other after all. But we can be angry towards people who appear to carry on with their own lives, oblivious to our daughter’s brief existence. Of course this feeling is irrational in the first instance but it doesn’t mean we should be ashamed of feeling the way we so often do.

If someone should say to us that Sarina has died and is gone from this world, then they would be absolutely right to a degree. But they would also be showing a complete lack of emotional intelligence and empathy because they would need to assume that we’re expecting her to return to this world. Of course that isn’t the outcome we’re looking for - indeed, there is no particular outcome to aspire to, nor any reward - which is quite alien where most problems can be fixed one way or another, and where competitiveness tends to usually define the best path forwards.

If we’re feeling anger and we either express it passively or aggressively (or a combination of the two) on the basis that we don’t want to upset anyone or because it makes us think we’re taking control of our pain, this understandably doesn’t enable other people to engage with us. Unfortunately there’s also plenty of examples out there that may discourage us from expressing difficult emotions - it’s very easy for us to believe that we're ‘out of control’ just because that’s what feeling angry often looks like to others. But we would be judging our own situation if we believed that applied (and would therefore be removing ourselves from our own experience) on that basis.

So when we show we’re able to tell our story of loss, we also need to manage our stability. In other words we need to believe in the therapeutic process of grief work, that Megan Devine calls the middle ground - ‘a place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief, and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honours the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.' (1) It’s a bereavement concept idea derived from the window of tolerance (2).

If we didn’t let ourselves feel difficult emotions, the trigger would be capable of destroying us every time. And we couldn’t discover what the feeling is trying to tell us at that moment or on that particular day. I’m grateful that coincidentally I’ve been sober now for the last seven years, an ongoing experience that has probably helped by limiting the way I might respond to feeling angry. I’m also grateful to be physically well because it opens up more options to continue our bond.

Since Sarina died at the age of seven weeks in January 2022, we have begun fundraising for SOFT UK and NEC UK, by running a virtual mini marathon last June, then the 2023 London Marathon in April. We also ran the Reigate half marathon last September with family members who fundraised for the NICU. We’ve contributed ‘in memory’ cakes to NICU bake sales and baked cakes to mark Sarina’s significant dates including celebrating her birthday this year.

We keep a private What’s App group called ‘It’s all about Sarina’, and also blog on Facebook and post on Instagram. We tend to Sarina’s garden on a weekly basis, including (re)painting the garden’s wooden edging, cutting the grass around it, and arranging flowers.

Without doubt there’s the temptation instead, to do what much of society expects us to do if pushed to consider what it’s like to live in our shoes. Successfully educating just one person at a time helps us to feel a tiny bit less lonely.

1) https://refugeingrief.com/2015/10/19/middle-ground-grief/

2) Dr Dan Siegel’s concept (from The Developing Mind, 1999) adapted to trauma by Dr Pat Ogden (et al), 2006.