“He’s gone”: living with grief two decades after the stillbirth of my son

Virginia Williams’ son’s stillbirth shattered her world. Now, 22 years later, during Baby Loss Awareness Week, she reveals how her grief has evolved over time to become an inextricable part of her.

Baby footprints. Golden fingerprint or stamp texture artwork of kids. Top view. Close up.

Published: October 13, 2026 at 10:28 AM

Save

It’s been 22 years since my second child, Ben, was stillborn three days before his due date, after a textbook perfect pregnancy. On the morning of 30 December 2003, I went to my regular prenatal check, and my doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. He sent me off for an emergency ultrasound, and after a few minutes, another doctor entered the room and asked me how I was feeling.

Ad

“I’m feeling pretty scared right now,” I replied.

“I’m sorry to tell you,” she said, holding my hand, “but he’s gone.”

My family’s world shattered that morning and we joined a club we didn’t know existed – a club that increases by nearly 2 million families around the world every year, and nearly 3,000 in the UK alone.

I delivered Ben on New Year’s Eve morning with my husband holding my hand, and we sobbed when the doctor said, “He had a knot in his umbilical cord.” He must have twisted around in utero months earlier, forming a loop in the cord, and the night before pulled it tight while I slept.

“Did it hurt him?” I asked. The doctor reassured me he wouldn’t have felt a thing.

I’ve had nearly 23 years now to learn to live without him; 20 months later I gave birth to his healthy, beautiful little brother.

In those early days, while parenting my three-year-old daughter, I didn’t see a way out of grief. I wanted a map with clear directions to follow, or some kind of timeline detailing precisely how much less it would hurt in two months, or six, or 12.

I cried everywhere: sobbing in the grocery store, in the car, at my daughter’s preschool, noticing the whispers of the other mums, the surreptitious looks at my now flat stomach.

I walked through the world cracked and bleeding, physically and mentally, and asked everyone I trusted how I was going to survive.

There is no real answer to that question. Nothing can prepare you for this kind of loss, and the best I could do was keep breathing in each moment, surrendering to the tears when they came.

I don’t really believe you survive it or find closure in the way society believes we do—the way society wants us to, expecting us to move on and stop grieving, stop missing, stop wanting this most precious thing.

00370-benjamin (1)

Grief, I have learned, is something you carry with you every day, though it changes through the years. It is never not a part of who you are.

The first year after Ben’s death, I was conscious of every passing moment, marking how many days, weeks, months, since his death, marking every first: the first Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, then the first, dreadful anniversary of his death.

I had to mourn every missed moment and potential milestone: the smiles, the giggles, rolling over and crawling. When the second year arrived, I thought I would feel more relief but realised that now I had to learn how to spend the rest of my life without him, which was almost worse. And as my tears lessened, I worried that not crying meant I was losing him all over again: my tears connected me to him in a way I couldn’t quite understand.

If I stopped crying, did it mean I would stop loving him?

In those early days, I would sometimes cry and rage and scream at the world, throw things, beg someone to bring him back. Some days I sobbed on people’s shoulders and some days I was relieved to talk to a friend about the price of real estate or how cold it was outside, just to have 20 minutes filled with something resembling normal life.

Most people would avoid talking about Ben because they didn’t want to make me cry, or to remind me, not realizing that he was with me every moment and the tears were always there.

My friends who talked to me about him, said his name, asked me how we were doing, who understood that he existed and would not forget my boy, were – and still are – a great gift.

In the first year we wondered, over and over, 'why us?'. Until the answer became obvious: why not us? We are no more special or lucky than anyone else: terrible things happen, and this terrible thing happened to us. There was no higher plan, and no purpose. If someone had a magic wand and told me they could erase his existence and the pain his death brought into our lives, I would say no.

Loving Ben brought so much joy to my life – why would I want to lose that?

Someone wise told me that one day, the fact of Ben’s death would be a part of me, like the fact that my eyes are blue. I held on to this as a small sign of hope that the agony of grief would not last forever and that I could find a way to live again.

She was right: my child’s death is an inextricable part of who I am, but it is not all of who I am. I still cry every year on his birthday but also light a special candle to mark the day.

Sometimes I talk to him and tell him how much I love and miss him, and that brings me some comfort.

Every year my husband and I send money to a children’s charity in his memory, grateful that we can do something for someone else’s child that we can’t do for one of our own. It’s imperfect and sad but it helps us make his life mean something.

baby picture

Ad

There’s a framed picture in our house of Ben’s hand and feet prints the hospital made for us, and I wear a bracelet with all of my children’s birthstones in it. He is still with us, not how we wanted, but there is life outside of grief.

If you or someone you know has expeirenced stillbirth, you can find help and support at one of the following baby loss charities: Sands, Tommy's, Petals, The Lullaby Trust and Aching Arms. 

Authors

Virginia Williams

Ad

Ad

Loading...

Ad

Loading...