by Tara Shafer posted in Parenting

It has been more than a decade since I started writing about baby loss and bereavement following the stillbirth of my son in 2005. I started because a friend of mine asked me to write the story of my loss down. I was sad and defeated and I said something along the lines of "why, who would ever read it"" and she said that she would.
And so I did write it down. And I gave it to her to read. I see now that in sharing my story, I was preserving it.
In the decade since I've been writing about baby loss, I have witnessed a remarkable shift in transparency about how families cope with loss. Stigma has given way to the intention of "shattering the silence" around baby loss. Now, it is relatively acceptable to talk about loss. It may be that people still feel frustrated and unsupported when they talk about loss, but this is all part of the evolution of learning to talk about it. In fact, we talk about baby loss more and to better ends than we have ever done before.
The ability to share stories digitally has created communities where there were none. When I first wrote my story, Facebook was still in the infancy stages. There were far fewer places to put down the stories of loss that many have carried but few had shared. Hospital support groups existed, but for those of us who don?t always like to physically be th people when coping with heady things, this delivery of services had limitations.
Innovations in technology hav...