Communicating Baby Loss

In our first session after his funeral, our grief counsellor asked us to think through the decisions we had made for Nathan as his parents up to that point. That wording stuck with me. We’re his parents, but the decisions we’ve had to make for him are not the ones we thought we would be making. Most of our decisions for our son have literally been about life and death.

When Nathan was born, my sister-in-law suggested that we ask one of our best friends to be our designated update person. We could tell him what was happening in the NICU, and he could share the updates about Nathan with the rest of our group.

When Nathan died, we briefly wondered if we could call on this friend to spread the word about his death and what had happened. We quickly decided that, for us, it had to come from us. Asking our friend to carry the news felt too heavy, and we wanted to be the ones to tell people about our son’s arrival and passing.

Friends were messaging that evening to ask how Nathan was doing, but we couldn’t say anything until we had reached Jordan’s parents first, since they were on vacation in France. We could not keep telling people one at a time that our baby had died, so we decided to create a one-way WhatsApp group to send the update. The group had announcement-only settings so that no one could respond, they could only react with an emoji on the message. It was the decision that made sense for us at the time: reaching as many people as possible at once through one channel without having to repeat ourselves through individual messages.

Since I couldn’t sleep the night after Nathan died, I started writing. Waking up at 1 am, 2 am, and 3 am, I honed the message by adding to it between short stretches of sleep. In a very us moment, Jordan and I reviewed it together when we woke up in the morning and agreed that the most devastating message of our lives said what we needed it to say and how we wanted to say it.

My brother-in-law calls it our “press release”.

It was deliberately detailed. I described our three days of joy and heartbreak with Nathan and what his final few hours had looked like. Putting it into words forced me to face the reality of our son’s death. It also gave the people around us enough information to understand that we were entering a life we had never imagined and did not know how to navigate.

It was a cruel juxtaposition to use the same list we had prepared for our baby-shower communication to share the news of our baby’s death. The list represented the people who had been invited to celebrate our baby. Now, it became the list of people we would tell that he had died.

One by one, Jordan read names aloud, and I typed them in. I remember that we were almost done, but the page refreshed and we had to do it all over again. We ended up with 86 people on our list. It was a wide collection of people: close friends, fringe friends, former colleagues I considered friends, my current colleagues who had learned of Nathan’s birth only days earlier, and others who were part of my pregnancy experience. Even though we could not message everyone personally, each person was included intentionally because we trusted them with something deeply personal.

Jordan wrote a pared-down version for his leadership team and peers at work. I wrote an adjusted version for close family members who had not yet heard that Nathan had been born and were planning to attend my baby shower in a few weeks.

Because so many of our friends were expecting babies and celebrating milestones like weddings and big moves in 2026, it was important to us to acknowledge both the happy and the sad that we would be facing, so we said:

We ask you to please help us remember this: We want to both keep him in our hearts AND stay strong as we return to a new normal, we want to be told of and included in celebrations for our village’s happy news this year AND recognize that things will be incredibly difficult for an undetermined amount of time, and we want to talk about everything we’ve gone through with Nathan AND there will be days where the shock and sadness is too consuming.

We wanted to be clear: We’re still us AND we are Nathan’s parents. I did not want us to be the “tragic couple” even though we had experienced tragedy. We still wanted to be part of the village and celebrate our friends’ lives, even when their happiness also reminded us of what we had lost.

Our close friends know us as planners and doers: the people who organize, bring people together, and look ahead to think about what will happen next. In this message, we admitted that we had no idea what to do now. We shared our vulnerability upfront and asked for help:

There are no words now to navigate our pain and grief. We’re back to how we started with Nathan’s sudden arrival into this world, taking things one hour at a time. We were so prepared to bring Nathan home and cherish new adventures as a family. We can’t comprehend what our healing will look like and how to move forward without our baby physically here with us.

Even though we knew we’d need to lean on our village, we asked for grace and space. The announcement-only format and our disclaimer that we might not reply right away allowed people to receive our news without forcing us to manage their immediate reactions. When follow-up messages began arriving separately, we could heart-react or send an emoji instead of feeling obligated to begin a conversation with every person.

Almost everyone understood instinctively how sensitive this update was. As the news travelled beyond the WhatsApp group, relatives and friends often asked before forwarding the full message to their parents, church friends, or other people who cared about us.

We had asked people to share the news, so I was not upset that others learned what had happened. We wanted Nathan’s life and death to be acknowledged. We also hoped that the people who loved us could comfort one another and help support us in the difficult days ahead.

I feel honoured to know that Nathan’s too-short life affected so many people. Our friends have told us exactly where they were when they read the message: at work, at home, or beside their partners as they tried to take in what had happened.

It was heartbreaking to know that our village was hurting with us, but their reaction showed me how loved Nathan was, how loved he would have been throughout his life, and how he will continue to be loved now. It also made me deeply grateful for how much Jordan and I are loved. Our close people did not turn away from what had happened. They allowed themselves to hurt with us, and that helped us feel less alone.

Outreach from our people helped carry us through those first days. It meant everything when people used Nathan’s name, said they were gutted, or told us they were grieving alongside us. 

Beyond our immediate village, sharing openly also invited others to be incredibly generous with their own stories of loss and love. People began trusting us with stories about babies, pregnancies, and loved ones they continue to remember.

Sharing also helped me find bereaved moms who could offer the kind of understanding I needed. I admitted early that I needed support from people who truly understood something about this horror, and my openness made it possible for those connections to begin.

As Nathan’s Mom, it is a privilege to keep sharing his life in ways that invite other people to speak about the babies they remember. Looking back, I can see that this first message shaped how I would continue communicating about loss, grief, trust, and support. This all began with sharing our son’s life with the people who loved us and telling them what we needed to help us through the first days without him.