05/05/2026
Make space for your grief and join hundreds of others who can relate at the annual Baby Steps 5K Kalamazoo 2026. 🩵🏃🏼♀️🏃🏽🩷
"What's wrong with you?"
"Why are you still so sad?"
"Have you seen a therapist?
"Are you taking anything tor that?”
These are the questions we hear.
Not once. Not twice.
Over and over - like echoes in a hollow
room.
Thrown at grieving parents like bandaids on bullet wounds.
You think you're helping.
But you're not.
Because this kind of grief?
It doesn't fit inside your tidy boxes ot advice.
It doesn't disappear with time or therapy or a handful of pills.
This is not just sadness.
This is obliteration.
I speak about the stigma of pregnancy and infant loss for a reason - Because no one else wants to.
Because it's easier for the world to turn away than to tace the silent screams of parents
who have buried their children before the world even saw them breathe.
Therapists don't always know how to hold this pain.
Doctors don't always know how to honor it. Friends don't always know what to say -so they say the wrong things.
Or worse... they say nothing at all.
It someone you love has lost a baby, you need to understand something:
They didn't just lose a pregnancy.
They didn't just lose a few weeks or months. They lost their child.
Their future. Their heartbeat.
Their entire world.
And that kind of loss?
lt splits a soul wide open.
It rips through the center of who you are and leaves you standing in the ruins of everything you thought you knew. But that's not the whole story.
Because the loss of their baby is just the beginning.
There are secondary losses -
and they hit like aftershocks that never stop coming.
Loss of hope.
Loss of trust - in their body, in life, in taith.
Loss of innocence.
Loss ot control.
Loss of identity, of intimacy, of safety
in the world.
They don't get to grieve just once.
They grieve again and again and again.
Each layer. Each loss. Each shattered
dream.
So when you say.
"Why aren't you better yet?"
What you're really saying is,
"Your pain makes me uncomfortable."
And let me tell you something -
They are not "getting over it."
They are surviving it.They are clawing
their way through a darkness
you couldn't begin to imagine.
They are building themselves back from the ashes of a life that should
have been.
And yes, depression may be
sitting beside their grief,
but don't confuse the two.
Grief is not a disorder.
It's a response to love that has
nowhere to go. So next time,
Don't try to fix them.
Don't diagnose their devastation.
Don't shrink their sorrow to fit your comfort zone.
Just show up.
Say their baby's name.
Hold space for their story.
Listen without trying to rescue them.
Because they are already fighting a war
just to stay standing.
A war you are lucky you don't have to understand.
- Hailey Ricks
