40 Sympathy Messages for the Loss of a Baby: Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss

Use the baby's name, and call the baby a baby

Most people write around the baby. They write "your loss", "what you have been through", "this difficult time". The parents notice every swerve. If the baby had a name, write the name. If there was no name, write "your son" or "your daughter" or "your baby". Not "your pregnancy". Not "what happened".

The fear behind the swerve is that saying the name will remind them, and that reminding them will hurt. They have not forgotten. There is no hour of the day when they have forgotten. What the name does is tell them that one more person on earth knows the baby was real, which is the thing they are most afraid of losing.

Keep the card to about three sentences. Say you are sorry, say the name, offer one concrete thing you will do or one thing you will not ask for. Do not ask what happened, and keep out any theory, any percentage, and anything your sister's midwife once said. The general guidance on what to say when someone loses a child covers the death of an older child. This page stays with pregnancy and infant loss, which the people standing around it tend to treat as a smaller thing in proportion to how little of the baby they saw.

Early miscarriage

Early loss gets weighed in weeks, as though nine is a smaller grief than nineteen. It is not smaller. The parents had a due date, a rough picture of what the following autumn looked like, and often a name they had not said out loud to anyone yet. Write to that. Never mention how far along she was.

• I am so sorry about your baby.
• I heard. I am so sorry. Nothing I can say is the right size for this.
• You lost a baby. I know some people are going to call it something smaller. I am not.
• I am so sorry. I am not going to ask you anything about it. I am just going to keep turning up, including in a month or two when everyone else has gone quiet and you are still in the middle of it.
• Thinking of you both. No reply needed, now or ever.
• There is food on your step and I have already gone. I love you. I am so sorry.

Late miscarriage and stillbirth

Past a certain point she gives birth. That is the part almost nobody writing a card has thought about. There was labour, or surgery, and a ward, and a bracelet with her name on it, and days later her milk comes in for a baby who is not there. She is recovering physically from a birth while everybody around her treats the whole thing as a piece of bad news. A card that acknowledges the body as well as the loss is rarer than it should be.

There may also be a funeral, photographs, a set of footprints, a blanket. If the parents show you any of it, look properly, and say the baby's name back to them.

• I am so sorry. I am thinking of you and of Elin.
• You gave birth to your daughter and she died, and I am so sorry. I am not going to pretend either half of that sentence is easier than it is.
• I keep thinking about you. I know your body is going through this too, and that nobody is asking about that part. I am asking.
• Elin was here. I will not forget her name and I will not stop saying it.
• I am so sorry about your son. I am around all week, and I do not need you to talk.

When the baby lived for hours, or days

A baby who lived six hours lived. The parents were parents for all six of them, and they have a birthday and a death day that may be the same date on the calendar.

These families often have more than people expect. Photographs, a name band, a nurse who was kind, a few hours of being an ordinary family in a room that was not ordinary at all. Refer to the baby in the past tense, as a person who was here, because that is what he was. Do not ask about machines, scans, decisions, or odds.

• I am so sorry. Teddy was your son and he always will be.
• Two days is a whole life and you gave him all of it.
• I am so sorry about Amara. I would love to see a photograph one day, whenever you want to show one, and never if you do not.
• You are his parents. That did not stop.

Termination for medical reasons

These are parents who wanted the baby and ended the pregnancy after a diagnosis. Usually the diagnosis was fatal, or close to it. They chose, in a hospital corridor, under a clock, with less information than anyone would want, and then most of them went through labour like anyone else, sometimes on a ward within earshot of other people's newborns, often in a city that is not the one they live in.

The grief here has a second thing bolted onto it that no other loss on this page carries. They are braced for judgement. Many of them have told nobody the full story, which means the cards arriving through the door are written by people who do not know, and each one has to be read while wondering whether it would have been sent at all if the sender did.

So do not congratulate them on a brave decision. Do not write that they did the right thing, because a person who can rule that way could have ruled the other way, and they will hear the second possibility sitting inside the first. Do not ask what the diagnosis was. Do not tell them what you would have done. Do not use the word termination unless they used it first. If they say they lost her, then she was lost, and that is the word you use.

I said up there to keep it to about three sentences. Here, do not. These parents get fewer cards than anyone else on this page and often none at all, because the people around them are frightened of the politics of it and decide silence is safer. Write the long one. Write it slowly, name the baby, and say plainly that you know they wanted her.

• I am so sorry about Nadia. You wanted her and you loved her, and that is the whole of what I know about this, and it is enough for me.
• You made a decision nobody should ever have to make, and you made it out of love, and I am not going to say another word about the decision. I want to talk about your daughter.
• I am so sorry. I am not asking you anything.
• You are her mother and her father. Nothing about how this ended changes that, and I will say her name any time you want to hear it out loud.

For the father, and the partner who did not give birth

"Everyone asked how she was. Nobody asked me anything at all." That is close to a direct quote from a man I worked with, said flatly at a leaving do a long time afterwards, before he changed the subject himself.

Rowena's daughter was stillborn at thirty-six weeks, and Rowena came back to work in the spring. Her partner Malachy went back after four days. A card went round the office for Rowena, twice. In the whole stretch between the birth and her return, Malachy got one, from his brother. He was the baby's father. He had held her. Nobody thought to write to him, and I was one of the people who did not think to.

Write to him separately. Not a line added to the bottom of her card. His own card, with his name on the envelope, naming his daughter or his son.

• I am so sorry about Isla. She was your daughter too.
• I know most of the cards this month have your wife's name on them. This one has yours.
• You do not have to hold anyone up. Not for one day of this.
• I am so sorry about your son. I am not going to ask how she is doing. I am asking how you are doing, and I am going to keep asking.
• Pint on Thursday. No talking about it required, and nothing else off limits either.

The colleague you barely know, and the friend you love

For a colleague you do not know well you will be missing most of the facts. You may not know whether there was a name, or how far along she was, or whether it was a miscarriage or something else entirely. Do not guess and do not go looking. Write short, name only what you have actually been told, and use the word baby. The register for near-strangers at work is covered properly in the piece on sympathy cards for people you only know through work, and it holds here with one change. Do not write "your loss" when you could write "your baby".

• So sorry to hear. Thinking of you.
• I do not know you well and I did not want this to go past without saying something. I am sorry about your baby.
• Thinking of you this week. Nothing here is urgent and none of it needs you.
• I am so sorry about your daughter. We have only ever talked about the coffee machine and the parking, and I would still rather say the wrong thing to you than nothing at all.

With a close friend, do the opposite of everything about brevity further up. You are allowed to be specific. You knew about the pregnancy, you were told the name, you may have had a hand on her stomach in a kitchen in March. Say all of that. Be the one who says the baby's name first, so they do not have to spend what little they have giving everyone else permission.

• I loved her before she got here and I am so sorry.
• You told me his name in the car park in February and I have thought about it every day since. Casper. I am so sorry.
• I am not going anywhere. Not in a fortnight when the messages stop, not in June, not on the due date, which is in my calendar.
• I am so sorry. I have no idea what I am doing here and I would rather be clumsy in front of you than careful and far away.

The due date, the anniversary, and a pregnancy after

The due date is the hardest day of that first year and it is the one date nobody else has written down. Write it down. Then the anniversary, and the birthday if there was one, and the first Christmas. There is more on the shape of those dates in what to say on the anniversary of a death, and nearly all of it transfers.

A pregnancy after a loss is not a repair job. Telling them everything will be fine this time is a promise you have no way of keeping, and they have already learned that it might not be. The word rainbow belongs to them, so wait until they use it. Ask them once what they want from you, then do that and stop offering.

• Today would have been the day. I have been thinking about her since I woke up.
• One year. I have not forgotten and I never will. No reply needed.
• Happy birthday to Teddy, and love to you both today.
• I know this pregnancy is a completely different thing to be inside of than the last one was. I am here for all of it, the frightened parts included, and I am still thinking about Amara.

The lines to cross out

Every one of these has been sent to bereaved parents by somebody who meant well. Cross them out of your own draft, and cross them out of a group card you have been asked to sign if another signer has already put one in.

"At least it was early." Weeks are not a unit of grief. This is the most common thing said after a miscarriage and the most resented.

"At least you know you can get pregnant." Turns a dead baby into a positive test result.

"Everything happens for a reason." Assigns a purpose to something that has none available, and asks the parents to agree with you about it.

"It wasn't meant to be." The same move, quieter. It tells them the baby was never going to be theirs, which is not a comfort. It is a correction.

"She's an angel now." They wanted a daughter, not an angel. Skip the whole category, stars and butterflies and anything with wings included.

"You can always have another." No future baby is this baby.

"At least you have your other children." The other children are grieving as well, and the line quietly asks them to fill a gap they did not make.

"Time heals." It does not, and to a parent in week two it reads as a request to be quieter sooner.

"Be strong." Prescribes the shape the grief is allowed to take. It is sent to fathers more than to anyone else, on top of a pressure that is already sitting there.

"God has a plan." Even inside a shared faith this lands as theology nobody asked for. If you go to the same church, write one specific sentence out of it instead of the slogan.

"Let me know if you need anything." It hands the work back to them. Swap it for something closed and small. Food on Tuesday. The dog walked. The car moved off the drive. The phone answered for an afternoon.

Two more, which are habits rather than phrases. Do not ask what happened. Not in the card, not in the follow-up text, not gently, not once. If they want you to know, they will tell you. And do not offer a medical opinion, your own or one you are passing on, about causes, tests, next time, or what somebody should have caught. There is a version of that sentence that is meant kindly and there is no version of it that helps.

Turn it into a group card

A workplace or a wider circle usually ends up sending one card between them, which is the right instinct as long as somebody takes charge of the tone. If you are organising it, seed the first message yourself so the others have something to match, take off any prompt asking people to add a smiling photo, and do not put the baby's name on the front unless the parents have used it publicly. Schedule the delivery for two or three weeks out rather than the day after, when there is already a pile on the hall table.

A group sympathy card suits this because everyone signs separately and nobody has to walk a clipboard past the desk. You can create a card, send the link round, and brief the signers in one sentence: short, sincere, the baby's name if you know it, nothing that starts with the words at least. Very short lines are hard to write well, and there is a whole file of them at short condolence messages if you are stuck.

• So sorry. Thinking of you both.
• I am so sorry about your baby. The work is nothing. Take the time.
• Thinking of you and of Elin. No reply needed.
• I am so sorry. Sending love to you and to your husband, who I know is going through it too.

I sent Malachy something in the end. It was months late and I said so in the first line, which is the only decent way to send a late one.

If you are still sitting there with the pen in your hand: write the name, write that you are sorry, write the one thing you will actually do and the day you will do it, and post it. Then put the due date and the anniversary in your calendar, and write again on both.