How Our Village Showed Up

Our village mobilized after we sent the update that Nathan had died.

Some members of our extended family were especially shocked. They had not known that Nathan had been born and were still preparing to attend my baby shower. They learned about his arrival and death at the same time.

One cousin sent an email almost immediately. I do not remember every word people sent in those first hours, but I remember the feelings of receiving them, and her note made me feel a sense of reverence and relief:

You gave him everything; your voices, your presence, your touch, your prayers, your love and your courage. He knew you completely. He felt you. He was wrapped completely in the safety and devotion of his parents every moment he was here. What a beautiful, powerful love you gave your son. We will remember him with you. We will speak his name. We will hold space for every part of this—your love for him, your grief, your strength, your joy when it comes, and your sorrow when it returns. You both are so tended to by Nathan in another place. I feel his love for you from here as I write this and it is immense.

Something I worried about, and have since heard other bereaved moms worry about, was that people would forget my baby. Her message reassured me that this would not be the case. Nathan had been here. His life had reached beyond the NICU room, and our people were already showing us that he mattered to them.

Within 12 hours, bouquets began arriving from my high school friends and Jordan’s work. Within 24 hours, we had heard from most of our people. Soon, we had visitors lined up for the next several weeks.

We were open to having people around us. We also still needed rest, privacy and the ability to change our minds depending on what each day brought, and we were fortunate enough to set our visiting hours and trust our friends and family to respect them.

One of the best things our friends did happened behind the scenes. Our closest couple friends created group messages with the men and women, excluding us, so they could update the group on how we were doing, share our preferences, and coordinate who would visit on which day.

In the women's chat, my girlfriend became the main point of contact. She would ask me the minimum number of questions necessary and then give everyone else direction. She later told me that having this practical role helped her get through the early days too. My other girlfriends have since told both of us that they appreciated having someone they could ask instead of directing every question to me.

Two groups of girlfriends from different times in my life used chats like this to arrange support for me: my high school friends and my chosen family friends who came into my life through Jordan. Their coordination showed up as flowers, groceries, meals and gifts for my first Mother’s Day: a beautiful poster showing the night sky when we met Nathan and a luxurious spa facial to absolutely spoil me.

The biggest impact of their thoughtfulness was that they reduced the work and communication required from me. Many people could support us without making us organize our own support or respond separately to everyone who wanted to help.

That coordination may have been hidden to me in the moment, but the effect was not. We felt directly loved, held, and supported without needing to manage all the ways people were there for us.

People also remembered that I was not only grieving, but also recovering from pregnancy, birth and major abdominal surgery. My closest friend from elementary school did her research on C-section postpartum needs and brought me high-waisted underwear and silicone strips for my recovery. I laughed about how there are really no more boundaries after you give birth and your private parts become less private. Her gift was personal and practical and reminded me that my body had gone through something significant, even though the reason for that recovery had been eclipsed by our loss.

It wasn’t just the people we saw regularly who made sure we felt their support. A woman from Jordan’s company whom I had never met and who had never worked directly with him sent Frida postpartum supplies, a huge candle, and aromatherapy products because she wanted me to feel pampered and cared for. She also shared that someone close to her had experienced a similar loss and left her contact information in case I needed someone to connect with. I appreciated her kindness and thoughtfulness so much. Because we shared Nathan’s life and death so openly, people often met us with openness of their own. They trusted us with personal stories, offered practical care, and found thoughtful ways to let us know that our loss had reached them.

My former team from the company I worked at before my loss sent a care package with candy, a blanket, tea from a brand they remembered I liked, and an eye mask. Jordan’s workplace invited people to contribute to a meal-delivery gift card. The response was so generous that their CEO joked that they raised enough money to send us to Vegas to blow off some steam instead.

The generosity was overwhelming, intimate, and deeply appreciated. It was not the quantity or variety of items that mattered; it was the personalization. People were paying attention to our bodies, our home, and the practical pieces of our lives when we had very little capacity to care for any of them ourselves.

Food was more complicated. One of the really specific things I told my girlfriends early on was that I did not want treats.

There were already so many flavours and scents that I associated with being pregnant and with the life we had expected to have with our baby. I have always connected tastes and smells strongly with memories, and I did not want more things I loved to become attached to the shock of Nathan’s death. I wanted things to remind me of Nathan, but I did not want the worst day of my life and the grieving that followed to override every favourite food, scent, and ordinary thing too.

I specified to my close girlfriend, the ringleader of the group chat and someone whose love language would ordinarily involve bringing me mountains of special homemade treats, that I needed food to be simple and familiar in those first days. Being that detailed felt vulnerable. I did not want to seem picky or demanding while people were trying to care for us, but I was grateful to have enough trust in our friendship to tell her what would help and what would make an already overwhelming experience more complicated.

The afternoon before Nathan died, my sister-in-law had gifted me postpartum items, onesies for Nathan, and my favourite snacks. After his death, I hid the snacks away. I did not want to associate them with that afternoon when we still thought he would be coming home. Eventually, I opened the snacks and shared them with our visitors. I could have those treats when there was some lightness on a good grief day, with our friends, even though I knew why they were visiting.

During one of those visits, one couple brought us all the ingredients for an easy spring salad, complete with a recipe card. About a week after Nathan died, Jordan began putting away some of the baby things. I felt inspired to be productive too, or at least to find something my hands could do. I followed the recipe and made the salad. I was soothed by the chopping and by making something for us. For a moment, I felt calm-hearted. I could chop vegetables, follow simple instructions, and make something that would care for us.

That salad was new to me. It carried no memories of pregnancy or life before Nathan died. I began calling it “Nathan’s salad” in my head. I have made it several times since, and my friend told me that she now calls it that too. There is something so special about knowing this little boy has aunties and uncles thinking about him even though he did not have enough time earthside with our village. A simple salad is now one of the many small places where his name continues to live.

The weather also became part of how our friends remembered him. We had an uncharacteristically sunny April after Nathan died. It had been rainy the day Nathan died, then sunny every day afterward until we picked up his ashes. It became cloudy that afternoon, then rained through the night and into the next day at his funeral. Some of our friends began calling the bright weather “Nathan’s sunshine.”

One of my friends messaged almost every other day about the beautiful weather he was sending us. She told me that she loved the three of us and regularly included our son when she said she was checking in and thinking about us: “you, Jordan and Nathan.” Even our friend in Toronto talked about Nathan when the sun was shining there.

Jordan and I joked that everyone was giving our baby far too much credit, but there was something magical about that unusual April sunshine and about our friends noticing it with us. Our friends were looking for him. As his Mom, it means everything to me that Nathan continues to be remembered and associated with good, special, and joyful things in our friends’ lives.

The messages that were easiest to receive followed a similar pattern. They said Nathan’s name. They did not require me to do a ton of soul-searching in my response. They told us that we were loved, recognized all three of us, or shared something concrete they had noticed. These were the messages I could respond to, continue a conversation with or, at minimum, acknowledge with an emoji. Perfect words were not required, and low-pressure words were most helpful.

Because our parents, extended family, and many of their friends share our religious beliefs, we expected that they would connect with us by telling us that we were in their prayers, making donations to their church in Nathan’s name, and having Catholic Masses offered for him.

My friends understand that these traditions are part of my life, and many of them also grew up going to Catholic church, since many of us met in Catholic elementary or high school. Even though talking about faith and religion is not really part of my everyday friendships now, it meant a lot to me when some friends included faith in the words they shared when they reached out to Jordan and me. They didn’t use generic religious platitudes or send a Bible verse because they did not know what else to say; they knew me well enough to understand what I believed and what might bring me comfort. A few high school friends talked about how Nathan is loved and under God’s protection now, and that even though God might feel far away from us right now, we are being watched over and cared for and held. Knowing that our friends reached back to our shared childhood faith to find words of peace for me touched my heart.

Another girlfriend who is spiritual, but no longer describes herself as religious, asked if I was willing to share the readings we chose for Nathan’s funeral. Later, she texted back to say how beautiful our selections were. It meant so much to me that she took the time to step into that part of our experience. Her beliefs now look different than how they did when she was brought up in the church, but she still wanted to know what we had chosen, looked up the passages, and understood the intention behind the words we chose to give our family some comfort.

I also received some well-intentioned messages that were harder to hold while grieving.

When everything first happened, I had a very difficult time accepting the words “bereaved mom.” I did not want that title. I did not want that life. Only a few weeks after the first and only time I held my baby, I learned that May 3rd was Bereaved Mother’s Day. I understood that the day was intended to honour the ongoing motherhood of people whose babies had died. Still fresh with my grief at that point, the label felt like a life sentence I had not agreed to.

I received a screenshot from a friend of an Instagram post explaining that it was Bereaved Mother’s Day and why the day mattered. But I knew why it mattered. Bereaved Mother’s Day had become every day for me.

I also could not meet the energy of casual, open-ended messages like:

“How are you doing!”

“Hiyeee, how you doing?!”

“Happy Friday!”

Or:

“How are you spending your time these days?”

In my mind, the answers were:

Bad. Sad. Is it Friday? I’m not working, so this means nothing to me, and I’m definitely not happy. I guess I am spending my time under blankets, crying, or bedazzling to keep my hands busy and my mind distracted from feeling like I am going to throw up from my profound loss. Is that okay? Does that answer your question?

I did not have the capacity to translate my reality into a tidy, polite, comfortable answer.

Some of the people who seemed to understand what we needed had experienced deep grief themselves. There was something comforting, painful, and almost unspoken about recognizing where their knowledge may have come from. They understood that support was practical, quiet, and consistent.

Our best friends came to our house with all the ingredients needed to make breakfast and left the kitchen spotless. Others brought dinner in containers we did not have to return. Others arrived with the ingredients to make dinner, cooked in our kitchen, and saved leftovers for us afterwards. Our home became a place where care kept arriving, and we were held so tenderly.

One girlfriend made me laugh by warning her boyfriend that, if they arrived to find our house a mess, he would be stripping the bed and doing laundry. She understood that support would matter not only in the first days, but in the weeks and months as we learned to live alongside our grief.

Our friends did not expect us to host them. They came prepared to feed us, give us space to talk or cry, and let us be exactly as we were.

I also asked people to just come over without doing or bringing anything. The flowers, food, and practical help mattered, but so did their presence. When I said we didn’t need anything, they trusted that I meant it rather than treating my request as something to decode. I appreciated that our friendships could be honest and the people closest to us did not feel pressure to make their support performative or turn every visit into a grand gesture. The most meaningful thing they gave us was the laughter and familiar, comforting energy.

We did not need every visit to become a conversation about grief. Sometimes we needed to say Nathan’s name. Sometimes we needed to cry. Sometimes it was enough to sit with people who already knew what had happened and did not require us to pretend.

Soon, Jordan and I talked about wanting to spend time with friends without always getting the “sad eyes.” We wanted our friendships to hold space for us as Nathan’s parents while also allowing us to be ourselves, still recognizable within everything that had changed.

The quieter gestures helped make that possible. One friend knew that I was finding comfort in writing and brought me a notebook. Another made a donation in our name to the hospital where Nathan was born. Another thoughtfully chose a restaurant when we went out for dinner on a popular, busy food street. She avoided the loud bar restaurants, club-like music, and party atmosphere, choosing somewhere with delicious food and a relaxed setting instead.

These gestures didn’t draw attention, but I knew our friends were paying attention. They were considering how we were doing, what we could handle, and what might make it easiest to spend time together, especially out of the house.

Our village did not try to make the early days without Nathan less devastating. They listened, adapted, and worked together so we did not have to manage every detail alone. They made room for our grief, for our son, and for us to be exactly as we were.