In 2021 I became pregnant, and my baby was due in December. It was my first pregnancy, and everything was going well, just as in all the pregnancy books and stories.

Week 26

At 26 weeks I felt pain in my back. I did not even think that something could be wrong with my baby.

I went to the emergency department of a hospital in Vilnius. The resident said they would check the baby first and then send me to other doctors about my back. As soon as she started the ultrasound, I saw her face drop. She called a doctor straight away, who said that my baby’s organs were full of fluid and a professor needed to do an ultrasound immediately. From what she could see, she said, the baby should already have died, or would die in my womb within a few days.

This was in late August 2021, during COVID, and my husband was abroad. I was on my own. The doctor asked if I wanted to go home and collect my things, as I would be admitted to hospital. Luckily my belongings were in my car, so I did not have to drive in that state.

When I came back, the professor and other doctors repeated the ultrasound and confirmed that my baby boy had fetal hydrops, but they could not find the cause. Many tests followed. I was sent to a geneticist, who suspected a heart defect but could not confirm it. Later, paediatric cardiologists confirmed that one of my baby’s heart valves was positioned too low, and that this condition is not compatible with life.

Alone in hospital

Two days later my husband arrived from abroad. I begged the doctors to let him in, because I needed his support so much. Under the COVID rules he had to isolate for two weeks after travelling, and I understand that. But the doctor’s words destroyed me. She asked: “What do you need your husband here for?”

My mum was allowed to visit for a few hours each day. Time dragged. At the weekend no doctors were working, and I was waiting for the results from the cardiologist and the geneticist, still believing something might change. I asked the nurses whether it could, but they did not know anything. They only knew that they had to give me medicines to help my baby’s lungs mature.

My mum asked one of the nurses what would happen to the baby after the birth. It was a nurse I had not seen before. She answered my mum, and I heard it too: “The baby will be thrown away with the biological waste.” She said it with an ironic smile. I was in no condition to interrupt her and tell her how many weeks pregnant I was.

As soon as I was admitted, a psychologist was sent to my room. I still could not believe what was happening. We spoke a few sentences, and I did not like her suggestions, such as eating ice cream in different flavours and telling my baby which flavour it was. I asked her to leave. After that there was no social worker, nothing. I only heard a doctor shouting at the nurses: “Give that woman some sedatives.”

Twelve doctors in one room

Then there was a medical team meeting. Twelve doctors sat around the room, and I sat on a chair in the middle. Each specialist told me that my baby would certainly die, but that they did not know when: maybe in a few days, maybe at 40 weeks, maybe during labour. I remember how frightening it was. I still did not believe this was happening to me. The doctors spoke from a professional perspective, as if it were an everyday case, while also letting me know that this does not happen often.

I did not ask many questions. All I wanted was to cry. Before the meeting I had read online that in some countries surgeons operate on a baby’s heart before birth, but I was told my baby was too small for this. I also asked whether I could have a caesarean section instead of a vaginal birth, and the doctors explained why not.

Four weeks of waiting

After that they let me go home and asked me to come back every week for a check-up. For three weeks I went back. In the fourth week I was told that my baby’s heart was no longer beating. That same morning I was admitted to hospital to give birth.

The birth

I asked for an epidural. At first the doctors said morphine would be enough: as the baby had already died, it would do less harm than an epidural. I insisted, because it was too hard to bear the emotional pain and the physical pain at the same time. By the time the anaesthetist came, it was too late. She tried four times, and the epidural did not work.

I do not know whether she had been told that I was having a stillbirth, but while preparing the epidural she was showing her colleague photos of her newborn grandchild, while I was in pain, losing my child. I had been in pain from 10 in the morning until 10 at night and had no strength left. They asked me to put on a hair net myself. I could not lift my arms, and they said they would not do the epidural until I put it on. They had asked my husband to leave, so he could not help me.

A nurse, a midwife and a doctor were with me during the birth. The midwife was very kind and supported me emotionally, like a mother. I think her name was Jūratė. After so much stress I forgot to ask for her details, and I really wanted to thank her later. I will always be grateful to her.

Our decision not to see him

My husband and I had decided that we did not want to see our baby after the birth. We wanted to keep him in our hearts, not in a graveyard. Jūratė told us that this had happened to her own mother, who deeply regrets not seeing her baby. During the birth I kept my eyes closed. The doctor asked if I wanted to hold him, and Jūratė told her that we had decided not to. The doctor said: “How can you not see your own child?”

I had four weeks to think about it, and at the time I believed not seeing him would be better for me. Now I regret refusing to see my baby, Leo. I hope my story can lead to changes in hospitals that help mothers in this situation to be better prepared.

What I would change in hospitals

• One doctor responsible for each mother. A meeting with twelve specialists telling you it is all over is a lot to take in, and a woman in my condition may not be able to think clearly, ask questions or understand what is happening. During my week in hospital the doctors kept changing, and the doctor at each weekly check-up was different. I no longer knew who was responsible for what, or who knew my situation. One named doctor, to whom the mother can bring all her questions, would help.
• More care around pain relief. Please be more sensitive about the epidural and do not delay it. Going through labour without one, and without a crying baby at the end, is too much pain.
• Nurses must know the situation, not only the doctors.
• A psychologist who stays involved. The psychologist should attend the medical team meeting and other appointments, so they can see how the mother is really doing. One conversation may not be enough to understand her. In my first hours in hospital I did not believe what was happening and did not want to speak to anyone, and from the few sentences we exchanged, I do not think the psychologist could see how I was really feeling.
• Information before and after the birth. A psychologist or a social worker should speak with the mother before and after labour, explain all the options for burying the baby, and explain how important it can be to see the baby and to say hello and goodbye.
• A quieter room. I gave birth in a room at the very end of the corridor, and the staff let me stay there afterwards so that I would not be moved to a room with women whose babies were alive. But the room was still on the same corridor as the other labour rooms. It was very hard to hear women scream in pain and then grow calm when they heard their babies cry. I spent more than 24 hours in that room. A more separate room would make a great difference.

Gintarė

Support for parents after loss is listed in our country guides, including Lithuania. If you would like to share your own story with MIMATIS, write to contact@mimatis.org.

Ask a group of mothers, even mothers of several children, to explain what a stillbirth is. Many will hesitate. Some will say it is a very late miscarriage. Others will think it is something that happened in the past, or somewhere else. Very few will know that it happens to around 1.9 million babies a year worldwide, or that in some European countries several babies are stillborn every day.

This is not a failure of the people asked. It reflects how rarely these losses are named. Over the last decade, “pregnancy loss” has become the gentle, inclusive phrase used by charities, hospitals and the media, MIMATIS included. It has done real good. But it is worth asking whether one phrase can carry so many different experiences, and what is lost when it tries to.

What the words actually mean

“Pregnancy loss” can describe any of the following. They differ in how far the pregnancy had come, what happens to the mother’s body, what parents are entitled to, and how others respond.

• Biochemical pregnancy (often called a chemical pregnancy): a pregnancy detected by a pregnancy test that ends before it can be seen on an ultrasound scan.
• Early miscarriage: the loss of a pregnancy in the first trimester, the most common form of loss.
• Ectopic pregnancy: a pregnancy that develops outside the womb, most often in a fallopian tube. It cannot continue and can be dangerous for the mother.
• Molar pregnancy: a rare condition in which the placenta does not develop normally, so the pregnancy cannot continue.
• Late miscarriage: a loss in the second trimester, before the point at which a country counts a stillbirth. Many mothers give birth to their baby.
• Termination for medical reasons: ending a wanted pregnancy after a serious diagnosis for the baby or a risk to the mother.
• Stillbirth: a baby who dies after that point, before or during birth. The mother goes through labour and birth, and her body responds as after any birth.
• Neonatal death: a baby who is born alive and dies in the first weeks of life.
• Sudden infant death: the sudden, unexplained death of a baby in the first year, often during sleep.

And then there is a loss that has no body to hold and no date to remember: infertility, the grief for a child who was hoped for and imagined, but never arrived.

The same baby, different words

Even the line between a miscarriage and a stillbirth is not fixed. It is drawn by law and by medical guidelines, and it moves from one country to the next. In the United States, Canada and Australia a baby who dies from 20 weeks is counted as stillborn. In the United Kingdom and Ireland the line is 24 weeks. Most countries in the European Union use 22 weeks, a few use 28, and Norway uses 12. For comparing countries, the World Health Organization uses 28 weeks.

In practice, this means a baby who died at 23 weeks could be counted as stillborn in France and as a late miscarriage in the United Kingdom. For the parents, the baby, the labour and the grief are the same. What changes is whether the birth is registered, whether a funeral is required, and what leave a mother is entitled to. Our country guides for Spain, France and Austria show how differently these lines are drawn, even between neighbours.

What people actually know

Research suggests the gap in understanding is wide:

• In a national survey of 999 adults in Ireland, only 17% knew how common stillbirth is, and 56% could not name a single risk factor.
• In an Australian survey of 344 people, most of them women, only 25% knew that around six babies are stillborn in Australia every day. A third believed that babies move less late in pregnancy because they run out of room, a myth that can delay care.
• In a survey of over 1,000 adults in the United States, 55% believed miscarriage is uncommon, happening in fewer than 6% of pregnancies. A 2021 Lancet review puts it at around 15% of recognised pregnancies, about 23 million a year worldwide.
• In the United Kingdom, a 2023 survey found that half of all adults had been affected by pregnancy or baby loss, themselves or through someone close to them.

So these losses are common, and they touch most families, yet many people do not know what they are, how often they happen, or what can be done.

Does “pregnancy loss” help or hide?

The umbrella term has helped in important ways. It replaced harsh clinical language: a European consensus of specialists in 2015 recommended “pregnancy loss” and “miscarriage” instead of “spontaneous abortion”, noting that patients prefer these words. It gives everyone a shared place to stand, so that a woman after an early miscarriage and a family after a stillbirth can both feel included in a remembrance day or a support group. And it is easier to say out loud.

But a single phrase can also blur what is different. After a stillbirth, a mother has given birth. Her milk may come in. There may be a funeral, a name on a register, a birth certificate or none at all. “We lost the pregnancy” can sound, to a parent who held their baby, as if the baby is missing from the sentence. The writer Rebecca Little described in STAT how, after her own losses, no available term seemed to fit, and how that left her and many others without words for what had happened.

Vague language also has practical costs. If people do not know that stillbirth exists, they do not know to ask about it. If they believe babies naturally move less before birth, they may wait when they should call. If friends and employers think every loss is “early”, they may expect a mother back at work in days, when she has just given birth.

So, should we speak about it more?

Yes, and more precisely. Not to rank losses, because grief is not measured in weeks, but so that each one can be recognised for what it was. That can start with small things:

• Use the words parents use. If a mother says her son was stillborn, say stillborn. If she says her baby, say baby. If she uses a name, use the name.
• Know the signs. Maternity services advise pregnant women to contact their maternity unit straight away if their baby’s movements slow down, stop or change, and not to wait until the next day.
• Learn what the words mean. Knowing the difference between a miscarriage, a stillbirth and a neonatal death helps families, friends and colleagues respond with the right care.
• Talk about it outside of loss. In antenatal classes, in schools, at work. Information is easier to hear before it is needed.

“Pregnancy loss” opened the door to talking. The next step is to say clearly what happened, and to name the babies it happened to.

After a baby dies, the first question people ask is how the mother is. It is the right question. Her body has gone through birth or miscarriage, and the loss is physical as well as emotional. But the question is often not followed by a second one, about the father or partner, who also lost a child.

A grief that is easy to miss

Researchers who reviewed 46 studies of men’s grief after pregnancy loss and neonatal death describe it as “double disenfranchised”: the loss is often not recognised as the death of a baby, and it is often not recognised as a grief that a father is allowed to have. Men described pressure to be the supporter and to look strong. They also described care that centred on the mother, and limited paid leave from work. All of this, the authors say, made grief harder.

A review by Tommy’s National Centre for Miscarriage Research, covering earlier studies of 231 men, found something similar after miscarriage. Many men felt they were “expected to be unaffected emotionally by pregnancy loss”. As a result, they often did not ask for support, or were not offered it. Many felt like observers in their partner’s care.

What it can look like

A father’s grief does not always look the way people expect. In the reviews, many men kept busy, went back to work quickly or took on practical tasks, and many grieved in private. A scoping review of studies on fathers after stillbirth and neonatal death found that men were more likely to cope by avoidance, including drinking more alcohol, and that they felt overlooked by health professionals. A review of 21 studies of fathers after the death of a child, of any age, found that fathers often avoided talking about their grief and returned to work sooner. In some of those studies, trauma symptoms that eased over time in mothers lasted longer in fathers.

There is a caution in the research. Several studies find that fathers report grief that is less intense or shorter than mothers’. But the scales used mostly capture grief that people show, and the researchers warn that they may miss what fathers keep to themselves. Most studies are small and come from a few countries. They cannot say how any one father will grieve.

The birth, and what a father sees

Fathers are often present. In a 2026 interview study of ten fathers in the United States and Canada after a stillbirth, fathers who supported their partners through a difficult labour described distress that fits secondary traumatic stress. They also described bonding with the baby during pregnancy, valuing time with the baby after the birth, and finding that photographs, keepsakes and rituals helped them remember. Some found peer support groups helpful. Others disliked group formats, and few had a therapist who understood pregnancy loss. The authors note that all ten fathers were white and non-Hispanic, so the findings may not apply to everyone.

What seems to help

The studies do not offer a cure, but they point in the same direction:

• Being asked. A direct question about how he is, from family, friends and the hospital team, not only about how she is.
• Being included in care. Clear, jargon-free explanations and follow-up contact for fathers as well as mothers.
• Support in a form that suits him. The authors of the large review suggest activity-based options, contact with other fathers, online resources, male support workers and counselling for couples. In the UK, Sands runs men-only online meetings and football teams for bereaved fathers.
• Time with the baby, and something to remember. Fathers in the 2026 study valued time with their baby, photographs and keepsakes.
• Time away from work. Researchers call for clearer, reviewed bereavement leave policies.

If you are a father reading this

Your baby was your child too. You do not need to compare your grief with hers, or prove that it is big enough. Our guide You are grieving too covers what to ask for in hospital, the practical tasks that often fall to fathers, work, and where to find support made for men. The helplines for your country are on Find Help, and you can plant a flower with your baby’s name in the memorial garden.

If you love a father

Ask him how he is, not only how she is. Use the baby’s name if he has shared it. Do not wait for him to bring it up: studies suggest many men feel expected to say nothing. Our guide What to say, and what not to say has words that help.

Recognising a father’s grief takes nothing away from a mother’s. It gives the two of them a better chance of understanding each other, and it gives him a place to say that he lost a child too.

Some things are hard to say out loud. A letter gives them a place. A seed letter goes one step further: once it is written, it can be planted, and what you wrote becomes part of something that grows.

Each MIMATIS seed letter is handcrafted from paper with poppy seeds set into it. The card carries a simple line drawing of flowers and leaves in turquoise, pink, orange and green, and three short lines: to write is to remember, to plant is to continue, and for a memory that deserves to bloom. It comes in a soft green envelope.

Why poppies

Poppies have been a flower of remembrance for more than a century. They are also generous plants. They grow easily, they flower in late spring and early summer, and they drop their own seed. Where poppies have flowered once, they often return the next year, and the year after, without being planted again.

That is what makes them right for a letter to a baby who died. You plant the letter once. The flowers can come back every year.

How to plant a seed letter

• Write first. Use a pen or pencil. Write as much or as little as you want: your baby’s name, a date, a few words, a whole letter.
• Choose a place. A garden bed, a balcony pot or a window box, somewhere with plenty of light.
• Plant it close to the surface. Lay the letter flat on the soil and cover it with only a thin layer, a few millimetres. Poppy seeds need light to start growing.
• Keep it damp. Water gently so the paper stays moist while it softens and the seeds wake. The paper breaks down into the soil.
• Wait. Poppies sown in autumn often flower the following late spring. Sown in spring, they can flower that summer.

A letter for the years that come later

Grief after the loss of a baby does not end on a set date. It changes shape. The due date, the first birthday that never happened, the year your baby would have started school: these days arrive whether or not anyone else remembers them. Many parents describe their baby as still part of their lives ten, twenty and thirty years later.

A seed letter does not have to be written in the first weeks. It can be written on an anniversary, on 15 October, on a birthday, or on an ordinary day when you want to say something. Some families write one every year. Each time, the flowers that follow are new, and so is what you wrote.

And when poppies return on their own in early summer, there is something to look at and to name. A place in the garden that belongs to your baby.

A gentle activity for brothers and sisters

Children grieve too, often in short bursts and in ways adults do not expect. They may not have the words, and they do not always want to talk. A seed letter gives them something to do with their hands.

• Children who can write can write to their brother or sister: what they would have shown them, what they feel today, or simply a name.
• Younger children can draw or paint. Colours, shapes, a picture of the family. There is no right way to do it.
• Plant it together. Let the child choose the place, cover the letter with soil and do the watering.
• Watch it grow. Checking for the first shoots gives a child a reason to return to the place and to talk about the baby, in their own time.

For many children, seeing flowers come up where they planted their letter is a way of understanding that love continues, even when someone has died. It is also something the whole family can share, each with their own letter.

Write, plant, remember

A seed letter is small. It asks for nothing more than a few words, a little soil and some patience. What it gives back is a place to return to, and flowers that bring life to a day that may otherwise be hard.

If you would like to know more about MIMATIS seed letters, or would like some for your family or your hospital, write to us at contact@mimatis.org.

Every year on 15 October, families remember babies who died during pregnancy, at birth or soon after. The day covers miscarriage, stillbirth, ectopic pregnancy, termination for medical reasons, sudden infant death and the death of a newborn. It began in the United States in the early 2000s and is now observed in many countries, often under a local name.

The best-known tradition is the Wave of Light. At 7 pm local time, people light a candle and leave it burning for at least an hour. As 7 pm moves from one time zone to the next, the candles form a continuous line of light around the world.

Barcelona: a day of reflection at Hospital de Sant Pau

On Thursday 15 October 2026, Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona held its second conference on perinatal grief, the II Jornada sobre el Dol Perinatal, in the hospital’s assembly hall from 3 to 5 pm. Its theme was the family facing perinatal loss, and how to understand, accompany and remember.

The programme brought clinical practice and family experience into the same room:

• A talk on the cold cot (bressol fred): a cooled crib that lets a baby stay with the family for longer, so parents can spend time together, make memories and say goodbye at their own pace.
• A panel of family testimonies, in which parents spoke about their lives after the death of a baby, the importance of feeling accompanied, and why this loss should be visible.
• An open discussion between speakers, families and the audience.

Across Spain, the day is known as the Día Internacional del Duelo Gestacional, Perinatal y Neonatal. Many town halls read a manifesto prepared by FEDUP, the Spanish federation of perinatal grief associations. The 2025 manifesto called for three things: legal recognition of every baby who dies, whatever the stage of pregnancy, with the option of registering a name; grief-care protocols in every public and private hospital; and specialised training for health, administrative and funeral staff.

United Kingdom and Ireland: Baby Loss Awareness Week

In the UK and Ireland, 15 October closes Baby Loss Awareness Week, which ran from 9 to 15 October in 2026. Churches, hospitals and universities held services of remembrance during the week, many ending with the Wave of Light on the Thursday evening.

In Ireland the week reached its 24th year. In Cork, the Pregnancy Loss Research Group at University College Cork organised a study day for maternity staff, a multi-denominational service of remembrance and an exhibition on termination of pregnancy for fetal anomaly. Cork University Maternity Hospital was lit in blue and pink on the evening of 15 October. The national health service (HSE) also launched a new e-learning programme for maternity staff on supporting people after pregnancy and infant loss.

France: journée mondiale de sensibilisation au deuil périnatal

In France, maternity units and associations mark the day with gatherings for families and staff. Last year, for example, the Centre Hospitalier Sud Essonne held a morning workshop for its teams on caring for families after perinatal loss, followed by an afternoon of remembrance with speeches, songs, the planting of flower bulbs and a support group for parents. Associations such as AGAPA, SPAMA and Nos Tout-Petits organise ceremonies and groups in many regions.

Italy: BabyLoss Awareness Day

In Italy, the association CiaoLapo has organised the day since 2007, with free events in dozens of cities and an Onda di Luce, a wave of light, at 7 pm. In recent years, monuments such as the Porta Praetoria in Aosta have been lit in pink and blue.

Germany and Austria: Sternenkinder

In German-speaking countries, babies who die before or around birth are often called Sternenkinder, star children. Hospital chaplaincies and parishes hold services around 15 October. In Regensburg, for example, a service for parents and families took place on 15 October 2026 at 5 pm in the hospital church of St. Hedwig. Many families in Germany and Austria also take part in the Worldwide Candle Lighting on the second Sunday of December.

Taking part, wherever you are

You can mark the day in a simple way: light a candle at 7 pm, write your baby’s name, visit a place that matters to you, or join a local service. If you would like your baby’s name to be part of a shared place of remembrance, you can plant a flower in the MIMATIS memorial garden. For support and practical information in your country, see Find Help, including our full guides for Spain, France and Austria.

In 1960, the writer C.S. Lewis lost his wife Joy Davidman to cancer. They had been married for only four years — a late and unexpected love that transformed both of them. What followed her death was not what Lewis anticipated.

He had written extensively about suffering from a philosophical distance. He had theorised about grief, explained it, made it comprehensible in the abstract. Then Joy died, and he found that none of it applied.

Grief felt like fear

In the raw private journals he kept in the weeks after her death — later published as A Grief Observed — Lewis described an experience that contradicted everything he had expected. The most striking observation, and the one that has resonated with bereaved people for decades since, was this: grief did not feel like sadness. It felt like fear.

He described an inability to concentrate, a sense of unreality, the feeling of a door slamming shut. He described how the world continued indifferently around him — people shopping, talking, making plans — while he moved through it as though behind glass.

He was not writing for publication. He was writing to survive. The notebooks were a private act of making sense of something that refused to make sense.

What this means for bereaved parents today

Bereaved parents who describe their experience in the days and weeks after a pregnancy or infant loss often reach for similar language. Not sadness — that word is too quiet, too contained. Something more physical. A hollowness. A constant low-level alarm. The sense that the ground is not quite solid.

What Lewis described in 1960 fits what researchers have since found. Research on grief suggests that it switches on the body’s stress response, the same system that reacts to danger. The body responds to the absence of someone it was ready to protect and love almost as if to a threat that cannot be located or addressed.

This is why bereaved parents so often describe feeling unable to eat, unable to sleep properly, unable to concentrate. These are not signs of weakness or of grief going wrong. They are the body responding to something real and enormous, in the only way it knows.

Grief is not linear — and Lewis knew it

One of the most honest things about A Grief Observed is that it does not resolve neatly. Lewis goes through periods of relative calm only to be ambushed again. He observes himself with something close to detachment — noting the contradictions, the regressions, the unexpected moments when grief returns with full force from a direction he did not see coming.

This is the experience that bereaved parents describe at due dates, at anniversaries, at the sight of something ordinary — a certain quality of afternoon light, a song on the radio, someone else's baby in a supermarket. Grief does not follow a path. It circles.

What Lewis gave those who came after him was not a solution. It was permission — to feel what they actually felt, to describe it accurately, and to trust that the chaos of grief was not a sign that they were grieving wrongly.

When a baby dies, there is very little that can be held. The pregnancy was real. The baby was real. But in the days after a loss, there is so often an absence of tangible things — a room that was being prepared but was never used, a name that was chosen but rarely spoken aloud.

A memory box changes that. It gives grief something to hold.

What a memory box actually is

A memory box is a container — usually a small wooden or cardboard box — in which parents keep objects connected to their baby. It might be given to them by a hospital bereavement team. It might be something they put together themselves. The contents vary entirely, because the point is not the objects themselves but what they represent: acknowledgement that this baby was here, that they mattered, and that their parents remember them.

Many hospitals now offer memory boxes as part of bereavement care. In the UK, Sands provides memory boxes to many maternity units, and in the United States Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (NILMDTS) offers free remembrance photography. But a memory box does not need to come from anywhere official. It can be assembled quietly, over time, by parents who are finding their way through.

What parents put inside them

There are no rules. These are some of the things parents most commonly include — not as a checklist, but as a gentle guide for those who are not sure where to begin.

Why memory boxes help — what the research shows

Studies of parents after stillbirth find that many value the time they spent with their baby and the keepsakes they took home, and that few regret seeing and holding their baby. The evidence is not the same for every family, which is why these choices should always be offered and never pressed.

The evidence suggests that the act of acknowledgement — the hospital offering a memory box, a midwife asking if the parent would like photographs, a family member sitting with them as they carefully place objects inside — communicates something that words cannot always reach: your baby was real, your loss is real, and you are not grieving alone.

When you cannot make one straight away

Not every parent is ready to think about a memory box in the first days. Some find that the hospital provided one before they were able to receive it properly. Some find that they created one instinctively without knowing that was what it was called.

There is no correct time. A memory box can be started the day after a loss or a year later. Objects can be added over time — a pressed flower from the garden on an anniversary, a letter written on what would have been a birthday. A memory box is not a finished object. It is a living one.

There is something many bereaved parents notice in the days and weeks after a loss. An unexpected pull toward water. A river they walk to without planning to. A beach they find themselves at in the middle of winter. The bath, running long after it has gone cold.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not sentimental. There is an emerging body of research on what happens to the human nervous system when it encounters natural water — and it helps explain something that grieving people have known instinctively for a very long time.

What research on blue space tells us

The term “blue space” refers to natural water environments — rivers, lakes, coastlines, ponds, streams. Research on how these environments affect human psychology and physiology has grown significantly over the past decade, building on work in environmental psychology and neuroscience.

Studies link time near natural water with better mood and lower stress. Researchers at the University of Exeter found, for example, that people in England who live closer to the coast report better health and wellbeing, even after taking income and other factors into account.

The reasons are not fully understood, but several explanations have been proposed. The steady sound of moving water and the view of an open horizon may help the body move out of alert and into rest, the work of the parasympathetic nervous system. The absence of visual complexity that characterises most natural water environments may reduce the cognitive load on a brain that is already working very hard.

Grief and the threat response

The body in acute grief is on high alert. Grief switches on the stress response, the same system that reacts to danger. This is why bereaved parents describe the physical symptoms of grief — the racing heart, the inability to eat, the constant low-level anxiety — that so closely resemble fear.

The parasympathetic nervous system, which time near water may help to engage, works against this state. It is not a cure for grief. But it is a relief from the constant physical burden of it. This may explain why so many bereaved parents describe feeling, for the first time in weeks, able to breathe properly when they are near water.

The Japanese practice of forest bathing

Related to the research on blue space is the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku — forest bathing — which involves spending time slowly and attentively in a forest environment. Studies on shinrin-yoku published in peer-reviewed journals including Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine have shown measurable reductions in cortisol, blood pressure, and activity in the prefrontal cortex — the area of the brain most active during rumination and worry.

Shinrin-yoku is not about exercise or achieving anything. It is about presence — moving slowly, engaging the senses, allowing the environment to do what environments do when we are not too busy to notice them. For bereaved parents who feel unable to rest but also unable to act, this quality of gentle, purposeful presence can be easier to access than formal meditation or therapy.

What this means in practice

None of this is to suggest that a walk by a river will resolve grief. Grief cannot be resolved — it can only be carried more gently over time. But the research does suggest that the instinct many bereaved people have toward water and nature is a sound one, and that following it is not avoidance or escapism but a genuine act of physiological care.

If you find yourself drawn to water in the weeks and months after a loss — a particular stretch of canal, a specific beach, the sound of rain — trust that instinct. Your nervous system may know something your mind is still working out.

Charles Darwin was fifty-nine when he published On the Origin of Species. He was forty-two when his daughter Annie died. The two events were a decade apart, but those who have studied Darwin's life closely have observed that they were not unconnected.

Anne Elizabeth Darwin died in April 1851 at the age of ten, after a prolonged illness. She was, by all accounts, Darwin's favourite child — bright, affectionate, deeply loved. Her death devastated him in a way that he never fully recovered from, and that he rarely spoke about in public for the rest of his life.

What the private letters reveal

What Darwin could not say publicly, he wrote privately. In letters to friends and family in the weeks after Annie's death, he described his grief with a directness that was unusual for a Victorian man of his position and reserve. He wrote of Annie's qualities in detail — her joyfulness, her curiosity, her tenderness — as though by describing her precisely he could hold on to something that was slipping away.

He also wrote what biographers have described as a “memorial essay” — a private document, never published in his lifetime, in which he recorded his memories of Annie in careful, loving detail. It reads not like a scientific document but like what it was: a bereaved father writing in the only way he knew how, trying to make something permanent out of something that had been taken.

Grief at the edge of belief

Darwin had been moving away from religious belief for years before Annie's death. Her death completed that movement. He could not reconcile the death of a beloved, innocent child with a benevolent creator. The loss did not make him angry at God — it made God, for him, simply unthinkable. This is a response that many bereaved parents recognise.

What replaced religious comfort, for Darwin, was something more personal and harder to name. An intensification of his commitment to his work. A deepened tenderness toward his remaining children. A profound attention to the natural world that was both his vocation and, it seems, his solace.

What his grief made possible

This is not an inspirational story in the easy sense. Darwin did not “overcome” his grief or “turn it into something positive.” He carried it for the rest of his life. His wife Emma — who coped through her own religious faith — and Darwin grieved differently and sometimes at a distance, as bereaved couples so often do.

But his grief deepened him. The man who published On the Origin of Species in 1859 had been living with the knowledge of how much could be lost, how quickly, and how little reason there was for it. That knowledge is present, some historians argue, in the way he wrote about nature — with an unflinching attention to suffering and death as intrinsic to life, not as aberrations or punishments.

Annie is buried in Malvern, Worcestershire. Darwin rarely returned to visit her grave. But her name appears in his correspondence until the end of his life.

Grief is not only emotional. It lives in the body. Bereaved parents consistently describe physical symptoms in the weeks and months after loss — disrupted sleep, changes in appetite, persistent low-level anxiety, an inability to concentrate, a heaviness that does not lift. These are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are the body responding to something real and enormous.

Up to 60 percent of bereaved parents show symptoms of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress after a pregnancy or infant loss. A peer-reviewed scoping review in the journal Trauma Care (2022) reports this figure.

Why grief feels like fear

The neuroscience helps explain what bereaved parents often struggle to describe. Research on grief suggests that it switches on the body’s stress response, the same system that reacts to danger. The body responds to the absence of someone it was ready to protect and love almost as if to a threat that cannot be located or addressed.

This is why the physical symptoms of grief so closely resemble fear. The racing heart, the inability to eat, the constant vigilance — these are not psychological weakness. They are a neurological response to genuine loss.

What this means for bereaved parents

Understanding that grief is physical as well as emotional can be genuinely relieving. The exhaustion is real. The inability to concentrate is real. The way certain sounds or smells or qualities of light can trigger a wave of grief months after a loss — this is the nervous system doing what nervous systems do when they have experienced something traumatic.

It also means that physical care — sleep, food, time in nature, gentle movement — is not a distraction from grief. It is part of tending to it. And it means that if the symptoms of acute grief persist for months without improvement, that is a signal to seek professional support, not a sign of personal failure.

Every year on the first and second of November, cemeteries across Mexico fill with light. Families carry marigolds whose colour and scent are said to guide the dead back to the living. They build ofrendas — elaborate altars with photographs, favourite foods, personal objects, water for the journey. They sit through the night with their dead.

Día de los Muertos is perhaps the most recognised grief tradition in the world, and also one of the most misunderstood. Its popular image has spread globally in ways that strip it of its depth. The tradition is not a celebration of death. It is a continuation of relationship. The dead are not being mourned as absent. They are being welcomed back, however briefly, as present.

What the ofrenda actually means

The altar is built to receive someone specific. It holds the particular details of a particular person — their photograph, the food they loved, the things that made them themselves. It is an act of radical specificity against the abstraction of loss.

For bereaved parents, this specificity is deeply resonant. The loss of a baby is often minimised by the wider world. The ofrenda tradition offers a different understanding: that even a short life has a specific presence worth honouring, worth returning to, worth keeping visible.

Día de los Muertos has pre-Columbian roots in Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures. When Spanish colonisers arrived in the 16th century, they merged indigenous practices with Catholic All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. The result is a tradition that is syncretic, layered, and deeply local.

What persists across these variations is the insistence that remembrance is active, not passive. You do not only grieve in private. You make something. You bring objects. You speak names aloud. You stay through the night.