Capture Your Grief - Day Five - Empathy

What does empathy look like for you. What do you wish people would have said to you? How could they have helped you better?

Empathy for me looks like this:
- A friend who came over and brought food, flowers, magazines and her time.  Her enormous hug.  Sitting with me and talking.
- A friend who left a note at our door immediately after learning what had happened
- A friend who baked for us
- People willing to drop everything and come from out of town to be with us and help us look after Jules and Taavi whilst Steve and I were going through the process of having Luca
- Brothers who called and skyped from far away
- A gift of a book 
- A poem and card written by my parents to commemorate Luca
- Parents calling every day to find out how I am and how our family is doing
- A whole class of mums getting together a gift certificate for me to go to the spa
- A friend who came from out of town with her new baby so she could look after me and keep me company
- My children drawing pictures of Luca and talking about him with me whenever we feel like it

I am very grateful to have family and friends who take such good care of us, and I don't think there was anything I missed out on..  



What I'm finding now that it has been two months since we lost Luca is that I still want to talk about him.  I'm still in the period where I would have been pregnant and I think about that a lot - what I would have been doing, how many weeks along I would have been.  I want to talk about this with friends and family, and not necessarily in a grieving way, just in a normal way.  I don't want them to feel like every time I mention it they have to be so sad or in tears for me.  Talking about Luca is a way of keeping him alive in my memory, and acknowledging his presence, however short, in our lives.  He affected us, and affects us still.  

Empathy for me at this point looks like joining in the conversation about Luca and helping me to not feel awkward if I mention that, eg, plans have changed for our Christmas holidays since I'm no longer pregnant.  Jules and Taavi are awesome at this.  They will just mention randomly, "I really wish that our baby hadn't died."  And then I agree, and we might or might not talk about him further.  They are so matter of fact, and Luca is just another presence in our family. 

Empathy for me also looks like hugs.  I love it when people I might not usually hug , just come up and give me a hug and say they've heard the news and they are sorry.