October is many things for different people. For me, it is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. It is the Month where we who have suffered the pain of losing a child in pregnancy or infancy raise our voices to bring awareness to the prevalence of this grief as well as and maybe most importantly REMEMBER our babies gone too soon. 1 in every 4 pregnant women lose their child. I am 1 in 4.
As I have been sitting with REMEMBERANCE this month, I feel numb. I feel numb from integrated grief. Just this year 2024 alone, there has been so much death in the world and closer home in Kenya. So many wailing mothers, so many piercing screams have rended the skies. In Kenya alone, we have had children die from draught, then floods, killed on the streets, die in school fire, die in road accidents. The pain is too much. Too many fresh graves. Young lives snuffed in their primes. Children dead from negligence, wanton greed and absolute disrespect of human life!
I am a mother of five. My first two, Baby and Thayu Kiheo died through miscarriages. My last three are alive with me. I know first hand the physical, emotional, mental and social pain of losing pregnancy. Everytime I hear that very distinct, very shattering scream from a Mother, it runs through my entire body; my body remembers, my body identifies with that pain. A human body can only bear so much grief, before it collapses.
As a collective, as a nation, we have been in a loop of grief in 2024. No breaks, just grief upon grief. And there doesn’t look like an end in sight. Looking outside ourselves as Kenya to our neighbours, the Motherland Africa and the world as a whole compounds that grief. We can only helplessly witness so much death, dying and destruction before we go numb.
So this October 2024, I am integrating my grief. As I REMEMBER babies gone to soon through pregnancy loss and in infancy, I also grieve all the death around me. As I perfom rituals to ensure the grief stays outside of my body – scream, journal, plant, move, light candles, pray, earth, speak the unspoken – I include all the grief that enjoins itself to my personal grief.
