Every Christmas, Kylee Beard, her husband and their three children hang four ornaments on the tree to remember the lost ones.
Beard’s oldest son was 18 months old when she found out she was pregnant again. She went to the first ultrasound at nine weeks and saw signs of life, such as a little twitch, like the kind made by a sleeping puppy. They told all their friends. They didn’t expect anything but a healthy baby at the end.
Then she began bleeding two weeks later. The next ultrasound showed no movement at all. They named him Joah.
What followed was the hardest 14 months of Beard’s life. She got pregnant again, with a little boy named Kodi, but lost him too. She had her third miscarriage, Gabby, named after the nurse who guided her through it. They later found out he was a boy and changed his name to Gabriel.
Beard was grateful for the chances: She found hope in the fact that she could conceive so easily, and she found solace in a support group offered by 3Hopeful Hearts, a Fort Collins-based nonprofit that provides free grief support for those who have lost a baby or child. But each loss was devastating and confusing, especially because her first pregnancy was so easy. Her doctor didn’t find anything wrong and eventually told her, with a sigh, that she had “really shitty luck.”
She got pregnant again, but she lost that one too. In that 14-month span, she’d lost four babies, and because it all had become so draining, she and her husband didn’t have the energy to think of a name. They simply called the lost child “Baby.”
While Beard’s experience isn’t particularly common, miscarriages are not unusual. As many as one in four pregnancies in the U.S. end in miscarriage, experts say. Yet for many, they remain difficult to discuss and excruciating to weather. Often close friends and family either don’t know what to say or end up saying the wrong thing.
However, Beard doesn’t mind talking about it because that’s what helped her through the pain. She eventually led a support group for 3Hopeful Hearts. Her story, even with all that grief, is one of hope.
No one has to grieve alone
When Sarah Saltee lost her baby 25 years ago, some assumed she’d be happy about it.
They would tell her that she already had her hands full, or that everything happens for a reason, or that she could have another baby when the time was right. It would have been her second baby, and she was 17 when she had her first.
But the circumstances didn’t matter.
“It was an unplanned pregnancy, but we’d gotten very excited about it,” Saltee says. “We were just past the surprise when it happened.”
Today those phrases make her shudder.
“At the time there wasn’t a lot of awareness and support around it,” she says. “It felt, to me, like it was sort of swept under the rug, that I should just move on.”
Now she’s the executive director for 3Hopeful Hearts. Mothers, fathers, siblings and grandparents can find support there, even if they don’t think they need it, thanks in part to mothers like Saltee who have devoted part of their lives to it.
As a society, things are better now. The emotional support is there, along with resources to help women and families through the pain. Still, miscarriages remain prevalent, and no one knows exactly why. Growing a human and giving birth is a difficult thing to do, and up to a million times a year in the U.S., things go terribly wrong. Despite how common it is, many women feel like failures when it happens, and fathers can feel as if they let their partner down.
“We know they shouldn’t feel guilty or feel like they failed,” Saltee says. “But we are so much kinder to others than we are to ourselves.”
Plus, those statistics aren’t always comforting to mothers who lose babies.
“I do think it helps for women not to feel alone,” says Emery Erhart, who offers counseling for those who have lost children, especially babies and infants, at her Loveland business, Pregnancy, Postpartum and Fertility Counseling of Northern Colorado. “But the problem is when they have recurring miscarriages, stats no longer feel safe.”
3Hopeful Hearts provides counseling for those who have lost a child at any age, not just infants and unborn babies. Saltee discovered the organization after she lost her 21-year-old. They offer free services through a network of volunteers who lead support groups for many different circumstances.
“We want to make sure no one grieves alone,” says Danielle Stenger, development director for 3Hopeful Hearts.
Acknowledging someone’s grief means recognizing that losing a loved one can happen to them as well, Saltee says, so many people still avoid the topic. Losing a baby can be especially difficult to discuss with others because there’s a lack of memories, Erhart says. Memories help parents talk about their loss.
“No one can remember the time spent with them or look at a beautiful picture,” Erhart says. “There’s not that shared connection.”
Yet people should try to talk about it, Erhart says. She believes that, as a society, normalizing miscarriages could really help, and having open conversations about it would benefit everyone.
Saltee does see a cultural shift from when she lost her child two decades ago. This gives her hope.
“It really makes me happy that now there are so many more resources available and understanding,” she says.
Ways to grieve
Two months into her third pregnancy, in 2019, Autumn Martinez lost her daughter. She named her Miracle. Martinez had two children, Aaliyah, now 14, and Jesus, now 8. But it didn’t matter that she already had two children. She still mourned the loss of the third.
Her husband, Jose, worked through his sadness by building a back porch on their Evans home. She didn’t have a back porch to build. She lost her faith in God. She tried acupuncture. She found it hard to function until she found a support group through the Community Grief Center in Greeley.
“It was lifesaving to have people who understood what I was going through,” she says.
UCHealth works to find support for mothers who may not reach out themselves, as Martinez did. Deb Blum and Kelly Bernatow work as women’s and children’s nurse navigators with UCHealth, and part of their job is to follow up with mothers who lost their babies. They do follow-up calls with patients either in house or after they’ve been discharged and act on referrals from others, such as grandparents, friends or even their military commanders and co-workers.
The idea is to present them with resources, support groups and the message that there is help out there when they need it. Mothers often take them up on their offers.
“More times than not, it’s harder for them to reach out on their own,” says Bernatow, who also serves on the board of directors for the Colorado Perinatal Care Quality Collaborative, which works to improve outcomes in maternal and infant health and ensure that care reaches anyone who needs it.
UCHealth can also help families plan next steps after a miscarriage, such as funerals or ways to honor the lost baby.
“Sometimes they are so overwhelmed by everything, it feels like another step,” Bernatow says. “It’s hard to wrap your brain around things that need to happen.”
One of the many things that makes Blum proud is the way UCHealth supports memory-making, she says. These can include bereavement photos from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a portrait studio that photographs families experiencing the death of a baby, in addition to hand and footprint clay molds, burial service clothing (obtained through an angel gown program), matching bracelets, locks of hair and a cuddle cot, a baby bassinet with a cooling mechanism that allows parents to stay in the room longer with their lost child.
“We encourage the family to partake in memory-making,” Blum says. “This is tangible proof that the baby is a part of their family.”
Martinez now leads her own group at the grief center. She did have a third child, Matteo, who is now 3 years old. She admits she still has an easier time talking about her participants’ grief than her own, but talking about it was vital to her healing.
“I never thought I’d want to talk about death,” Martinez says, “but I’ve become aware of how important that is instead of keeping everything in.”
A family’s struggle
Many husbands and partners of birth mothers have similar feelings of inadequacy, failure and sorrow, even if they are for different reasons.
“There’s a different responsibility women take on,” Erhart says. “Men feel helpless.”
Men struggle with their sense of place in the loss, Erhart says, in large part because people generally ask the mother how she’s doing and forget about the husband. This is also true of unmarried partners and wives of the mother.
“It’s rare when someone comes up to them and says, ‘How are you?’” Erhart says. “I think it would be lovely if people asked the partner if they are OK.”
3Hopeful Hearts offers support for fathers and siblings as well as mothers. Siblings can even attend a grief camp: There’s one for kids ages 5-11 and one for teens. It doesn’t have to be for a sibling loss; it can be a loss of any kind. There are also retreats for dads, mothers and families, where they can get away and decompress.
“Men do have some specific needs in that process,” Stenger says. “Feeling like they can grieve in a safe space is a big one, where they have the ability to express their grief in whatever way they need to. Those are great ways we can connect people and make sure that feeling of isolation doesn’t include them.”
Celebrating rainbow babies
A pregnancy after a loss can mean joy and hope and even a little redemption, but it can also cause anxiety, even when the pregnancy exceeds the time when the parents lost the other child.
“People do think that everything will be OK if they can just get past that eight weeks,” Erhart says. “But once they hit that goalpost, [the anxiety] can still be there.”
Erhart recommends writing a letter to the baby, and maybe the lost baby as well. It’s comforting, she says, to put those fearful thoughts on paper.
For families experiencing a pregnancy after loss, UCHealth tries to help women delivering so-called rainbow babies, or babies after a miscarriage, avoid reminders of the loss to ease the anxiety of losing one again. Part of their job, Blum says, is to talk to them about their triggers. This can include avoiding the ER when they enter the hospital, not seeing the same nursing staff who helped them through the loss or not using the same birthing room, intensive care unit or operating room.
“If we know what’s making it hard for you,” Blum says, “we can mitigate it.”
Beard admits she was emotionally exhausted when she got pregnant for the fifth time following her first healthy baby. She didn’t even have the energy to get excited about it, she says. She found the ultrasounds every two weeks, an understandable precautionary measure, annoying.
She finally exhaled after 20 weeks, but she didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant, not even her closest friends or family, until she was 32 weeks along. Three years ago, she delivered the baby, and a year after that, she delivered another one.
The experience not only gave her two more healthy children, but it also gave her a new career. She started working as a miscarriage and bereavement doula five years ago, and for the past three years, she’s worked as a birth doula, helping up to a half-dozen mothers through childbirth every month.
“I learned so much through that journey that I thought I might as well put it to use,” Beard says. “I was just going to do it for the rainbow moms, and I fell in love with it.”
All this keeps her busy, but she still finds time to pause and pay tribute to the ones she lost. This comes at Christmas, of course, when she and her family hang four birds on the tree. It also comes at Walk to Remember, an annual event hosted by 3Hopeful Hearts, where she and her husband light a candle and walk together to mourn the ones they lost and celebrate the little ones at their side.
How to Help
Helping someone grieve a lost baby is difficult. Here are some tips from local experts to help you help them through it.
1. Remember that compassion doesn’t require understanding how they feel.
2. Allowing them to grieve, rather than saying platitudes, such as “things happen for a reason,” is a gift.
3. Acknowledge that grief isn’t any less painful for those who experience the miscarriage of a baby that was only a few weeks along. The time spent in a pregnancy doesn’t matter.
4. Practical support, such as meals, offering to fold laundry or taking their dog for a walk, can really help.
5. Check out the extensive literature on grief offered by 3Hopeful Hearts and the Community Grief Center as well as their support groups and counseling services. Reading up on what to say, and what they’re feeling, may help you talk to them.
6. Call UCHealth, a grief agency or a support group on someone else’s behalf and have an expert follow up with them.
7. Encourage them to remember the lost baby, and acknowledge the baby yourself. Ask the baby’s name and call them that when you speak about them.
