³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Good morning. ‘Sometimes things come along that you didn't know you needed until you’re offered them.’ That’s how Woman’s Hour presenter Emma Barnett spoke yesterday about the government's new baby loss certificates.

Two years ago, Emma and her husband lost the baby they’d conceived after five rounds of IVF. The weeks after were grim and tearful. Emma recalled how those around you want you to move on, not lose hope, and try again. But she didn’t want to move on.
For Emma, applying for a certificate was in part a political act that recognised how for much of history women and their experience were obscured from the record. The document was a vindication of what had happened.

Baby loss is different from most forms of grief. Usually bereavement means having the past and present taken away. But baby loss isn’t chiefly about the past and present. It’s about an imagined future. As Emma put it, ‘Our dream was over.’

We live our life in stories: constructed narratives that make sense of the past, imagined dreams that envisage the future. When you find you’re pregnant, you assume this new life will be with you the rest of your days. Having that future dismantled can be a shattering experience. But one in four pregnancies end in loss.

One day my mother sat me down and said something my childhood brain couldn’t comprehend. ‘Your sister isn’t your only sibling. There were two others. One before her, and one after her and before you.’ The taut expression on my mother’s face told me that my two lost siblings, who both made it to term, were still at large in her consciousness. Their unlived futures were part of her daily experience.

It’s not just that she’d have valued a certificate. I think I would too, 60 years later, along with other tangible family records. Grief struggles with whether anything really matters. A certificate says ‘This was real. It wasn’t the fulness of life; but it was existence.’

For me, the Christian hope is that death does not have the last word. None of our lives turn out as planned. All of us die. But as I see it, faith means trusting that the Holy Spirit can make of our fragile bodies and unfulfilled dreams something beyond the finality of death.

Loss, grief and bereavement are real. They’re agonising, because they feel like the end of a story – the erasure of meaning and hope. But Christianity, as I understand it, is trust that nothing is ultimately wasted, everything eventually finds its purpose, and all is finally redeemed. A certificate says, ‘You mattered.’ That’s concrete and even cathartic. Faith says something else, more tentative and tender: ‘You always will.’

Show less