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Last month a dear friend of mine lost her sweet baby Alberta at 17 weeks gestation. Amber delivered the tiny girl whose heart had stopped beating for no known reason a few days earlier. She held Alberta in her arms, marveling at her perfectly formed body — this precious child whose family had celebrated with pink at a recent gender reveal party. The loss was crushing.
I could mostly only listen on the phone as Amber grieved, assuming a “big sister” role in this narrative, one where meaningful words of comfort run short. Just check out the sympathy card section at the drugstore — “Words cannot express” is a very common sentiment on cards, and for good reason. Words generally can’t articulate a parent’s grief at the loss of a child.
So when Amber sent me this clip, A Saying Goodbye Film/ Every Baby Matters, I was captivated. She described watching it on repeat, which I ended up doing as well. The poet articulated a few painful losses in my own life in a manner no one else had before — as “conversations cut short” — one loss being a miscarriage I hadn’t contemplated enough myself. I guess I wasn’t the “big sister” in this narrative after all; I too had perspective to gain.
The almost 5-minute film features the spoken word poetry of Dai Woolrige and is sponsored by Saying Goodbye, a non-profit organization based in the UK that provides support for parents who are grieving the loss of a child. With almost 100,000 views it’s safe to say the message that Every Baby Matters is certainly being heard: “You can celebrate the life lived, though far too short; you can continue the conversation; you can say ‘I never regret the time when we talked.'”
And today we celebrate...