Holidays After Losing a Baby: Making Room for Them at Home

There is usually one moment in the fall when it registers. A display goes up in a store aisle, or someone asks what you are doing for Thanksgiving, and you understand that the whole season is coming and you will have to be somewhere inside it.

If your baby died this year, the holidays are not one difficult day you can brace for and get past. They are weeks of them, strung together, in a season built almost entirely around families and children and the counting up of the year. Everyone else appears to be gathering. You are trying to work out how to sit at a table.

This is for the mother somewhere in her first year after loss, looking ahead at November and December with something close to dread. There is no version of these months that will not hurt. But there is a great deal you can decide about them, more than it may feel like right now, and deciding some of it early tends to be easier than deciding it in the moment with a room full of people watching your face.

The season asks a lot of you, and you get to decide how much you give it

Most holiday obligation runs on momentum. You went last year, so you are going this year. You always host, so you are hosting. Invitations arrive assuming a yes, and it takes real effort to say anything else.

You are allowed to say something else. You can go to one thing instead of four. You can go for an hour. You can stay home entirely. You can accept an invitation now and change your mind on the day, and the people who love you will manage.

A few sentences worth having ready, so you are not building them from scratch while someone waits on the other end of a phone:

• “We are keeping things small this year.”
• “I would love to come, and I may need to leave early.”
• “Can I let you know closer to the day?”
• “This year is a hard one for us. Thank you for understanding.”

None of these ask you to explain your grief to someone who has not earned the explanation. A short answer given warmly tends to close a conversation faster than a long one.

What to do about the decorating

This is the question that stops a lot of mothers in early November, standing in front of a closet with boxes in it.

There is no correct answer here, and no answer you owe anyone. Some women find that putting things out is steadying, that a familiar task gives the hands something to do while the mind is elsewhere. Others open the box, see last year’s ornaments sitting there, and cannot go any further. Both of those are simply information about where you are this year.

Some middle paths other mothers have taken:

• Doing a small amount. A wreath on the door and nothing else counts.
• Doing it in pieces across a week instead of in one long afternoon.
• Doing it alone and quietly, rather than as a family event with music on.
• Asking someone else to do it while you are out of the house.
• Leaving the boxes closed this year.

Whatever you choose is a decision about this year only. It commits you to nothing in the years that come after it.

Making a place for your baby in the season

A good deal of the pain of the holidays after loss comes from the sense that your child has been left outside of something the rest of the family is inside of. Giving them a place, even a very small one, can take some of the edge off that.

Things mothers do:

• An ornament with their name on it, hung wherever you want it. Some hang it at the front. Some hang it around the back where only they know it is there.
• A stocking, if stockings are part of your traditions. Some families slip a note inside it each year.
• A candle lit at the start of the meal and left burning through it, with no announcement at all if you would rather not make one.
• Their name on the holiday card, or a small mark somewhere on it that means them to you.
• A gift bought in their name and given away. Some mothers choose the age their baby would have been and buy for a child that age through a local toy drive or a children’s hospital.
• A donation to a perinatal loss organization, made quietly in the week before everyone gathers.

If you have already made a remembrance space at home, this season is a natural time to add something to it. A sprig of evergreen. A card you would have written. A small light you leave on in the evenings through December.

When the gathering is at someone else’s house

Your own home gives you a door you can close. Someone else’s does not, which is part of why the gatherings you travel to are so often the harder ones.

• Drive separately, or arrange your own way home, so that leaving stays yours to decide.
• Settle on your exit before you arrive, even loosely. “We will stay through the meal” is enough of a plan to lean on.
• Tell one person in the house what is going on, and ask them either to come find you if you disappear for a while or to leave you be, whichever you would actually want.
• Locate the quiet room early. Knowing where you would go makes it less likely you will need it.
• Carry something small of your baby’s in a pocket. A great many mothers do this and never mention it to a soul.

The questions that come up around a holiday table

Holiday tables produce a specific kind of question. How many children do you have. Is this your first. Are you two thinking about trying again. They come from people who are usually being friendly and who have no idea what they are handling.

It helps to have settled in advance on what you want to say, because the deciding is the exhausting part, not the saying. Your answer is allowed to be different depending on who is asking, and different on Thursday than it was on Tuesday. There is no version of it you have to stay consistent about. If you are still working out what feels bearable in your mouth, finding your answer to that question is worth some thought before the season starts.

You are also allowed not to answer. “We are keeping that to ourselves right now” is a complete sentence, and it works more often than you would think.

When no one says their name

There is a particular loneliness in a room full of family where your child goes unmentioned all evening. Often the people in that room are not avoiding your baby because they have forgotten. They are avoiding the subject because they are frightened of making you cry at the dinner table, and they have decided, wrongly, that silence is the kinder option.

If you want their name said out loud, you may have to be the one who asks for it. One person is enough. A quiet word beforehand with a sister or a friend, something as plain as “it would mean a lot to me if you said his name at some point today,” hands someone permission they were waiting for. Most people are relieved to be told what to do. The silence that grows around a baby who died is rarely about not caring.

The evenings are long in this season

Winter afternoons end early. The gathering finishes, the guests go, and the house is quiet by five o’clock. For a lot of grieving mothers the hardest hours are not the ones with people in them, but the ones afterward, when there is nothing left holding the day up. If the evenings are when your grief arrives hardest, you are in very ordinary company.

Small things give an evening some shape. A walk after dark. A bath. A candle you light at the same time each night. One person you text. A book you read a few pages of whether or not any of it goes in. None of that fixes the hour. It gives the hour edges, which some nights is the whole of what you need.

If the whole season feels unbearable

Some years there is no arranging that makes it work. If you are finding that you cannot get through the days, that you are not eating or sleeping, or that the grief has flattened into something heavy that will not lift at all, please tell a doctor, a therapist, or a bereavement counselor. Grief and depression can look very similar from the inside, and someone trained to tell them apart can do it far more easily than you can do it for yourself.

Support groups run right through the season, including online ones you can join from your own sofa without getting dressed for anybody. Share Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support lists groups by state, and the UK charity Tommy’s has gathered advice from bereaved parents about getting through Christmas, which is worth reading if only for the proof that other people have stood exactly where you are standing.

Whatever you end up doing this year, it will not be a performance of getting through it well. It will be a few hours that are alright and a few that are not, a plate of food you may or may not eat, a moment in a hallway you did not see coming. That is what the first ones look like, and nobody manages them gracefully.

Your baby belongs to this season as much as anyone sitting at the table does. Wherever you decide to put them, whether that is an ornament everyone can see or a candle nobody asks about or only their name held quietly in your head while the plates go around, they are counted. You will not be the only mother lighting something small this winter.