Losing a baby shortly after birth is undoubtedly one of the most difficult losses a parent can experience. However the impact of grief on the surviving siblings is often overlooked. If you are a parent who has lost a baby and you have other children or you are a surviving sibling yourself, it is time to begin to recognize the pain, trauma and grief of this experience for yourself or your surviving children.
Where Today's Culture Fails in Processing Grief
It is no surprise that adults who lost siblings while they were in the NICU shortly after birth report that communication between parents and children about the actual events was poor or secretive. Perhaps the sadness or grief was quickly covered up and children were not permitted or encouraged to talk about their feelings. Somehow we have come to believe in our culture that if we just don't face the crisis, it will go away. Grief does not work that way. We cannot pretend it is not there and it will disappear. Refusing to talk about or processing grief has consequences.
The Consequences of Not Processing Grief
The truth is that surviving siblings need to grieve and when there is no safe place for them to do that, the consequences can be life-long. When interviewed, these survivors say that they continue to suffer from anxiety about the health of their mothers and their own future pregnancies into adulthood. Even adults who were not born at the time that their parents lost another baby were at risk for needing psychological support.
Encouraging Grief for the Loss of a Sibling
Surviving siblings can benefit from talking, looking at photos and participating in family rituals in order to process through their own grief. Parents who have lost a baby need to do everything possible to answer questions and communicate with their surviving children so that their grief can be expressed and not repressed. The good news is that even adults who are surviving siblings can benefit from processing through this grief even if they were not given the opportunity to do so as children.
Though the infant's life may have been a brief one, the impact of repressed grief on the surviving siblings can be life-long. If parents recognize the need for their surviving children to grieve over the loss of their sibling, it may go a very long way to prevent mental health issues later in life.
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