Metaphor and Neonatal Death: How Stories Can Help When a Baby Dies at Birth

Abstract

The death of a baby at birth is uniquely unsupported by the rituals and cultural scripts we depend upon to make sense of death. Left out of these shared narratives, the grief of parents bereaved at birth is often minimised and unassimilated into the parents’ social world, leading to isolation and disenfranchisement that contributes to a higher rate of pathological grief patterns in this group. Building on the insights of narrative palliative therapy, material culture in death studies, and my own maternal experience of neonatal loss, this autobiographical essay identifies strategies from life writing – specifically esoteric meaning-making through metaphor – that can redress this lack of narrative on an individual level. It makes a case for metaphor as a precision instrument for probing, magnifying and capturing the precious and fleeting sensations, thoughts and experiences of parenthood cut short, and making these tiny moments robust enough to withstand being brought out into the social world. Finally, it argues that the stories we tell ourselves when a baby dies can be a first step towards a re-enfranchised experience of mourning, which continues rather than relinquishes bonds after death, and contributes to the wider project of releasing neonatal death from social taboo.