Mental Health Moment: Why Is It So Hard to Believe My Baby is Gone?

One of the hardest parts in the aftermath of losing a baby are constant reminders of them. Empty nurseries. Phantom kicks. A saved pregnancy test on the counter. Baby showers to cancel. Encroaching due dates. Exciting news that was never given a chance to be shared.  Bodies that remind us they were once creating life, but now are not.

These reminders proclaim that there once was something to celebrate, but now they are not here, and they won’t be coming back.

(Mama, if you need to pause with that last statement and cry your eyes out, go right ahead. Death is worth shedding tears over (John 11:35).)

Our Hope Babies’ absence is not only painful, it’s also hard to actually comprehend. Especially early in loss, our brains have such a hard time accepting our new reality.

So, even though we cognitively know they have passed, why is it so hard to believe? Why can’t we just accept they are gone? Wouldn’t that make grief easier to manage?

How the Mind Adjusts to Absence

To understand the disconnect in grief, let’s take a look at God’s design for our brains. The human brain loves patterns, consistency, and predictability; it takes effort to learn something new, so our minds prefer for life to follow its normal rhythm and expectations. When something that is normally present is gone, the brain shifts gears as it reaches for an explanation for the unexpected absence.

For example, say one morning you drive to the coffee shop you visit every day at 7 am, but find it is inexplicably gone. In its place are grass and trees, as if the building had never existed, while the rest of the world carries on as usual.

Your brain wouldn’t be able to gloss over this sudden disappearance and would immediately start searching for explanations: Where did the building go? How could it just vanish? When did this happen—and how did these trees grow up so fast?

As your brain is working out these details over the next few days, you might even still find yourself driving to that same coffeeshop on autopilot. Your brain holds onto its old map of reality, so for a time it still expects the shop to be there (due to a type of brain neuron called object-trace cells). Gradually, though, after daily seeing the empty lot, your brain adjusts to the truth—the coffee shop is gone.

If our brain would have to work this hard for a missing coffee shop, how much more must it struggle to comprehend the death of our precious, beloved babies?

The Impossibility of Loss

Ecclesiastes 3:11 says: God has put eternity into man’s heart. We were made to live forever, and to know and love each other for eternity. In grieving the loss of a baby, our brains are required to do something they were never meant to—accept and adapt to a life without them.

Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor explains further the brain’s trouble in grief:

Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve. The idea that a person does not exist anymore does not follow the rules the brain has learned over time…it is not a logical answer to their absence.

The unlikely situation that they are not [found in the dimensions of space and time], the alarm and confusion that this causes, is one reason grief overwhelms us. (The Grieving Brain)

Just as your brain would work hard to comprehend the vanished coffee shop, it expends enormous energy trying work out where your baby is. While your baby should be in your belly or in your arms, the concept that they are nowhere is impossible for your brain to conceive, at least initially.

So, for a time, your mind assumes your baby is somewhere else on earth and will be found later (like autopiloting to the coffee shop). While it’s working things out, sometimes our subconscious brains try to fill our babies back into our lives—we “see”, “hear”, and “feel” them even though they are not physically there. Our brain is trying to do what it was wired to do, yet it wasn’t wired to easily comprehend the idea of death.

When Jesus died, I wonder how His closest friends experienced this disconnect between their lives before the cross and their new reality. Their Rabbi, who they spent every day with for three years, was gone. Not preaching in another town, not praying alone on His favorite mountain, not asleep on a boat. Just gone. They were probably rattled when His voice didn’t resound in their prayer time. Maybe the nights were devastatingly quiet without His quiet snore. They probably yearned to hear the sound of his laughter and melted when all they could hear was each other weeping.

Even though He prepared them on numerous occasions that His death was coming, can anyone actually be prepared for how death affects us? 

This is so hard, mamas. Sometimes I really wish grief didn’t work this way.

God’s Gift of Time, Place and Presence

While grief can feel overwhelming enough to send our minds reeling, God has given us what we need to steady us on this side of Heaven.

First, God has given us the gift of time. As we courageously step into each new day without our precious babies, our minds slowly begin to register their absence. Time alone doesn’t heal, but God can use time to gently help our hearts and minds adjust to a reality we never would have chosen or imagined.

You may notice that a Hope Mom who is over a year out from her loss doesn’t experience the same intensity of grief reactions as a mom who lost her baby just a few weeks ago. Over time, her mind has gradually adapted, making the reality of life without her baby more familiar.

But this adjustment in no way diminishes a Hope Mom’s love or longing for her baby. Even as our minds learn to live within a new reality, our hearts do not grow smaller—they continue to love just as deeply.

The second gift of God is the assurance that our babies are somewhere. They have not vanished into thin air but fully exist in a very real place. Through His death and resurrection, Jesus won for us and our babies a Home with Him, Heaven and then the New Earth. We have never been to this place, so it’s difficult for our minds to place our babies there. (But, can you imagine how hard it would be for our minds to adjust to loss if we didn’t believe in Jesus and Heaven?)

Although God has given us the gifts of time and the hope of Heaven, our minds slowly realize we are “walking through two worlds at the same time”—our Hope Babies are no longer with us here, and yet they are not gone from us forever (O’Connor).

Walking between these two realities is no small task, one you probably have not asked for, or may even be willing to take on.

But God has given you another gift: His enduring presence. The very last words Jesus spoke to His friends before he ascended into heaven were: And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:30).

Mama, He will never, ever leave you. He will walk with you in this exceedingly difficult task of life without your Hope Baby. He is with you while your brain adapts, while you move through the phantom cries and the phantom kicks. He is with you upon those first tragic moments every morning when you wake up to realize the nightmare of yesterday has followed you to today. He is with you while you yearn for that which you cannot have. He is with you as you inch each day closer to being with Him face-to-face, and with your beloved baby.

Our grief-brains are not the end of the story. He is.

Because He Lives, I Hope,

Kelly

Since time is an element of healing, why not spend time with others who know your pain and will walk with you on this road of grief? One way is to join a Hope Group. Summer Hope Groups (June 15 – July13) are open for registration now until June 14! Register here: https://hopemommies.org/hope-groups

Resources:

If you want to see brain cells actively learning: watch here.

O’Connor, Mary-Frances, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. (HarperCollins: New York) 2022.