When Tamarin Norwood buried her son, Gabriel, the coffin was so light that it was lowered to the ground with lengths of ribbon that she had chosen herself. She writes: “In the ribbon I saw a dull possibility: looped around his box, it would have to stay with him in the soil, and there lay some comfort. I unspooled its length into my arms and tried to kiss it all the way along, from end to end and on both sides, and pressed these handfuls of looping, folding ribbon against the wet of my eyes, held it in my arms, rocked it at my shoulder. These kisses were another last hope, sent down to his poor bones to meet them one day perhaps.”
Gabriel lived for 72 minutes, all spent in his mother’s arms. Norwood had known that her baby boy would die. The Song of the Whole Wide World, her memoir of her pregnancy, his death, and a maternity leave spent without a newborn, has just been published. It is a gut-wrenching tale of motherhood and loss, its sentences so pure and precise in their grief that the force of them verges on the sublime.
Norwood is not religious, yet the effect of her words feels spiritual. The book asks the question: in the absence of societal or religious rituals, how do you mourn, and mark, a life scarcely lived?
“Human beings need stories; we use stories to make sense of ourselves,” Norwood told me when we spoke last week. “But when a baby dies or a pregnancy is lost, so many of the stories that we usually depend upon to make sense of death are just not there. Normally when somebody dies we are allowed to all gather together and share stories and memories about that person.”
Norwood notes that in this situation there isn’t the same sense of the child having had a social place in the community: often people may not even have known you were pregnant. “So you’re all alone without those stories. You don’t have those social scripts or cultural narratives of funerals and condolence cards and bereavement leave, and sometimes not even a birth and death certificate – all these things that help tell the story of the fact that somebody’s died.
“There’s so much that’s missing. And so what you can find is that you’re going through this terrible grief, but all around you, there are no signs that you should be sad.” On top of this, family and friends often minimise the loss, saying that you can always have another one, or at least you have other children (Norwood points out that people would never say, “You can get married again” to someone who has just lost their husband). “And because you didn’t know the baby you’ve lost, you don’t know who you’re missing. This is why grieving families often create these amazing rituals and myths in order to remember their baby. They have to write their own stories to make sense of their grief.”
Since Gabriel’s death, Norwood has devoted herself to researching these mourning rituals, and working with baby-loss charities to help support parents. People often get tattoos, so a baby called “peanut” in the womb might be remembered by the picture of a peanut on a parent’s body. Butterflies and birds are frequent motifs. Special headstones in the shape of teddy bears or angels, decorated with toys and wind chimes, can be seen in cemeteries; these talismans are a sort of continuation, a need to give a lost baby the markers of a childhood that they won’t see.
Siblings, too, will have their rituals. Some of the most affecting parts of Norwood’s book detail how the then four-year-old Anatole, Gabriel’s big brother, tries to process his death through play, acting out the ultrasound scans and later the funeral, incorporating the objects, the baby’s blankets and anklets, in his memory box, and blowing kisses from his skylight towards the church where his brother has been buried.
Such scenes are unlike any I have read before, yet Anatole is not the first young sibling of an unborn or newly born baby who has had to grieve that loss. That Norwood shares these private rituals with us, where in previous years to speak of such things has been so taboo, feels like an act of supreme generosity.
Attitudes to baby loss are slowly shifting. Other writers are also exploring the issue, with the memoir Strange Bodies by Tom de Freston and the anthology No One Talks About This Stuff forthcoming. Parents who have lost babies before 24 weeks of pregnancy can now apply for a certificate to mark that loss. Spending time with a baby after he or she has died, holding them, dressing them, taking casts of their hands and feet, is becoming an increasingly common practice and there are dedicated suites with refrigerated “cuddle cots” and specialised bereavement midwives for this purpose. It is a marked shift from how previous generations were discouraged from holding or even looking at their deceased child. So many older people, Norwood says, tell her that their child was taken away before they could see them, and then scarcely spoken of again.
These days, there are charities and initiatives that can help parents in creating their rituals. Dresses for Angels makes outfits for babies “born sleeping” (the term the charity uses) from donated wedding and bridesmaid gowns, which are given to families free of charge. Norwood has worked with Held in our Hearts to create notelets for parents to write down their memories. Rituals can spring up organically, too. On the Parkland Walk near my house, there is a baby-loss tree with hanging ribbons and tags that bear the names of babies who have died.
There is still lots of work to do in terms of supporting bereaved families. Norwood has just embarked on a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, interviewing parents about their rituals. Her work and writing is a way of keeping her son, who “was love itself, squirming and pushing and kicking to take up its place in the world”, with her. “To me it feels like a very small story of a very small life,” she says. “And people are reading about it and word of mouth is spreading. You don’t want a tiny life like this to just stop. It’s just growing and growing.”
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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