Media

Spoiler alert: This writing references plot details from House of the Dragon, Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash and Modern Family.

My algorithms knew that I was pregnant. My searches were about pregnancy symptoms, baby names, baby clothes and raising babies. ChatGPT was doing research for me on baby gear and comparisons. Pinterest categorized my saved baby-shower themes, first-birthday ideas, nursery inspiration, and plans for when we would take our baby to Hawaii at six months old.

The internet kept pace with my life while pregnant, week by week. As new questions popped up, I searched them. Soon, every platform I used reflected the answers and the future I was preparing for.

Because I knew that I was going to turn my terracotta boho-chic home office into the nursery, Pinterest helped me save colours, textures and prints that would fit with what was already there. I pictured how easily I could add florals, pinks and yellows for a baby girl. For a baby boy, maybe I’d lean into a Highland cow theme. When Nathan was born and we chose a giraffe as his animal because his incubator in the NICU was called a Giraffe, I started envisioning going the safari decor route. I was confident that Pinterest would help me out either way.

I looked forward to sharing the music, movies, and stories I loved with my baby.

I had started working on a “Kiddo Playlist” on Spotify, filled with songs we could listen to together that were not nursery rhymes all day. One of those songs was “Rasputin,” a banger that Jordan and the boys always dance hard to at weddings. Our baby was clearly Jordan’s baby, kicking like crazy in my belly whenever Boney M played. We didn’t know yet that we were having a son, but he already seemed ready to be one of the boys.

My nephews have grown up listening to Queen, Stephen Wilson Jr. and Pentatonix because of their parents, so I figured my baby would have a varied taste in music too. It would not have to be Disney all day, although I was looking forward to that too.

I dreamed about sharing the wonder of my favourite childhood media with my baby. I pictured cozily watching the new Harry Potter HBO series, letting them take in the vibes long before they would understand the story.

The things I watched, read, saved, and listened to were becoming part of how I pictured myself as a Mom. 

ChatGPT knew when Nathan was born because I was searching for breastfeeding advice in the middle of my first night home. I was asking how to maximize what I could do to help my milk come in for my baby in the NICU. When Nathan died, I had to tell it in my subsequent searches that my baby was gone. It learned quickly because I used AI to accelerate my rabbit-hole spiralling while I searched for a reason to blame myself for my baby’s death.

It became a series of small, daily cuts: the internet still understood me as someone expecting a baby, while I was trying to understand how that baby could be gone.

When I went onto Amazon to order a diamond art kit to keep my hands busy in my grief, I had to face all the recently searched baby products and pinned searches. The completion discount from my baby registry was still sitting there, unused and no longer needed.

When I opened Pinterest, my entire homepage was wrecked. I had to retrain the algorithm by unfollowing boards, hiding pins, and repeatedly marking “not interested” on baby content. I was shown unsolicited advice for surviving childbirth, breastfeeding and getting through the first few days after bringing your baby home.

I had survived childbirth. My baby had not come home. I eventually deleted my “Nursery: Baby Boy” board completely. I knew I would never use a Highland-cow or safari theme for a future baby. Pinterest eventually stopped suggesting ideas for Hawaii too. We had cancelled the trip now that our baby was gone.

I do not use TikTok or Instagram, but I can only imagine how much more relentless and difficult it would be to retrain platforms that serve an endless stream of personalized content. The platforms I used adjusted because I kept correcting them. Every correction required me to state, in one small digital way, that the future I had been preparing for was no longer happening.

My Spotify account was affected too. Instead of adding to my “Kiddo Playlist,” I made “Nathan’s Playlist.”

I added songs that brought me comfort, helped release my tears and gave me some way to grieve my son. The playlist includes songs like: “Glitter” by Patrick Droney, “The Architect” by Kacey Musgraves, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” by Sara Bareilles, “When We Die (You Are Loved)” by Jason Mraz, the instrumental version of “It’s Quiet Uptown” from Hamilton, “Love’s Gonna Live Here” by Buddy Miller and Kacey Musgraves, and the acoustic version of “Come What May” that I walked down the aisle to at our wedding.

Music, like tastes and smells, connects me to memories. When I hear certain songs, I return to a particular time in my life and remember how I felt inside it.

I do not want to relive the devastating pain of the first month after Nathan’s death. I do want to remain connected to the person I was in those days: absolutely broken but held up by Jordan and our village, feeling as though nothing mattered but still finding a way to rise each morning. The playlist lets me approach those feelings and recognize that I endured, that I survived. Nathan became an inseparable part of me, even though we didn’t have enough time with him, and the playlist helps me stay close to the feelings associated with the music and the depth of that love.

One bereaved mom I have become friends with associates Ella Langley’s song “Broken” with the time of her termination for medical reasons and her grief for her son. Whenever I hear “Be Her” from the same album, I associate it with my own grief for mine. That song plays in my head on repeat whenever I see a mom with a young child, especially the friends I had expected to enter motherhood alongside: I want to be her. It’s a funny, not-funny association for me because that song was obviously never meant to hold that meaning, but I made that connection in my grief anyway.

I’ve also looked to media to give me language for my grief. In my reading, it stuck with me that other grieving people described words as inadequate. I searched for something that could capture the particular life I missed and found anemoia, a word used for nostalgia for a time or place you never personally experienced. I have kept this word in mind to describe my longing for the life we had prepared for. I miss more than Nathan’s future; I miss dreaming for that future with uncomplicated excitement.

In the first couple of months, I tried to read many grief books, but little of what I read stayed with me. I needed writing that did not rush toward healing, gratitude, or a better version of myself. I needed confirmation that grief looked devastating because something devastating had happened.

About two months after Nathan’s death, The Grief Handbook, a short book by Bridget McNulty about the sudden death of her mom, contained some of the first words that felt validating and relevant. It was straightforward and easy to digest without making grief feel theoretical.

About three months after Nathan’s death, I was more comfortable forming my own opinions about my grief: what it looked and felt like, how I wanted to integrate it into my life and how I intended to live alongside it. Megan Devine’s book It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand gave me language and validation for something I was beginning to understand.

I remember trying to find words around the exhausting, nonlinear nature of grief, and imagery from the show The Good Place came to mind. Its “Jeremy Bearimy afterlife timeline” is curving, overlapping, and completely nonsensical. Events do not move cleanly from one point to the next and different times can happen at once. The characters explain that the dot above the “i” contains Tuesdays, the month of July and the moment in time where nothing never occurs. It’s about as confusing and contradictory as grief has felt to me.

I’m not moving through my grief in a straightforward way. Jordan and I always talk about how we’ll survive because we can see that, overall, we are trending upwards, even when individual days plunge downward. It’s exhausting to go through the unpredictable nature of the feelings and waves that repeat, loop back, rise, and fall. A memory can make me happy and devastated at once. The past can feel more present than the moment I’m living in. A random Tuesday can contain the day Nathan died and every Tuesday that has passed since.

There were times when reading other people’s grief made me feel recognized but there were also times when taking in too many traumatic stories made the world feel increasingly dangerous and hopeless.

Reddit posts in the middle of the night during those early days helped me understand that I was not the only person this kind of loss had happened to. Soon, however, I needed to stop that spiral. I became overwhelmed by competing misery and anonymous, traumatic threads. I wasn’t ready for total optimism and hope yet, but I figured that reading more horror would not help me get there.

As long as it felt manageable for me, immersing myself in pregnancy and infant loss or general grief content did not automatically make me sadder. I felt seen listening to Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast. I devoured episodes about parents mourning their children, even when those children were older than Nathan or had died in completely different circumstances. The details of their stories did not need to match mine for me to recognize the shape of a parent’s grief, which is why I hope Calm-hearted can do the same for others.

After everything that happened, my brain became retuned, just like an algorithm.

I started noticing more baby boys and toddlers. I noticed fathers and sons everywhere since the sadness for Jordan and Nathan is always there. I started seeing everything through the filter of my loss. Every family and parent-child storyline could remind me of Nathan and what we were going through. 

While watching House of the Dragon, I felt completely understood by Rhaenyra’s response to learning that her son had died. Her anguish, shock, and numbness felt painfully recognizable, from the force of her initial reaction to the later scenes where she lay in bed wondering whether anything was worth continuing.

While watching Avatar: Fire and Ash, we had forgotten how heavily the previous film’s death of a son would carry into the story. The callbacks were difficult enough. To make it worse, there were scenes where another character struggled to breathe and had a near-death moment where he was begging his father to be spared. Those scenes brought me back to the NICU: the sounds of the team working on Nathan, their efforts to make his body breathe, and my own desperate begging that he would live. 

Not every difficult piece of media was about infant loss, but our experience and acute grief widened the range of things that could reach directly into my memories. These experiences threaten to undo me.

I became more aware that content does not always arrive neutrally. A commercial, thumbnail, or algorithmic recommendation can give someone a choice, or take that choice away. I was shocked by some pregnancy and infant loss websites. Organization names, stock photos of pregnant women, images of NICU babies, and close-ups of little baby feet could appear without warning. Even in spaces intended to support bereaved parents, the visual choices can ask me to confront an image before I’ve chosen whether or not I’m ready to see it.

We were binging Modern Family before Nathan died, and we continued watching it afterward. We exchanged looks when Haley gave birth to twins and the boy was named George, Nathan’s middle name, but otherwise, the show remained familiar when basically nothing else felt familiar. We were able to laugh and have something on while we got through another evening in those early days. 

Media, content, and algorithms have gradually adjusted, and so have we.

I am back to reading long fantasy books for escapism. I sometimes read grief books and have enjoyed reading fiction where someone is grieving, or not. I am back on Pinterest and Spotify without skipping too many beats.

We’re continuing to keep it light, choosing shows that make us laugh, like rewatching Arrested Development. Maybe in the future, I will always associate it with this liminal stretch between Nathan’s death and our attempt to return to something resembling ordinary life. Maybe not. If I do, it will not only remind me of grief. It will remind me of sitting beside Jordan, laughing and finding small ways to keep living inside a life that we never could have imagined.

Jordan and I have talked about how our life has split into an alternate timeline: the one where we have a son, named him Nathan, but Nathan died. We talk about this alternate timeline as the hot-dog-finger universe in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once for comic relief. Even that wildly different and unexpected universe contains tenderness, connection, and moments of joy. We can grieve that we are no longer living the timeline where Nathan came home with us while slowly accepting that this is the life we are in. We are remaining open to what this timeline may hold, knowing that Nathan will always be a part of it. 

My algorithms have eventually adjusted to this new life. Media helped me picture a future with my baby. Now, it gives me language for my grief, offers moments of escape, and sometimes catches me off guard as I continue loving and remembering Nathan.