After Loss: What Recording Means When a Baby Has Died

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Recording feels impossible right now. Or you want to record but don't know what to write. Or you want to delete the records that are already there.

Each of these is a different state. And each sits somewhere on a natural path that follows the same loss.

This article addresses two questions: what recording might mean after the death of a baby or child, and what the research on grief says. It is not a set of instructions for feeling better. But sometimes knowing something — having a fact where before there was only the dark — helps, even a little.

How common this is, and why it still feels so solitary

The numbers first.

Miscarriage (spontaneous pregnancy loss) occurs in approximately 15–20% of clinically confirmed pregnancies [1]. Globally, an estimated 23 million miscarriages occur each year — roughly 44 every minute [1]. The Lancet review by Quenby and colleagues (2021) describes miscarriage as "one of the most common pregnancy complications worldwide" and documents its physical, psychological, and economic costs systematically — a framing that itself represents progress, since for decades the subject was treated as too private or too clinical for public discussion [1]. Japan's national vital statistics count as stillbirths all fetal deaths delivered from 12 completed weeks of gestation: in 2024 there were 15,323, a rate of 21.8 per 1,000 total births (live births plus stillbirths). That figure includes induced as well as spontaneous stillbirths [2]. The WHO definition used for international comparison counts stillbirths from 28 weeks; by that definition, an estimated 1.9 million babies were stillborn worldwide in 2023 [3]. Because the gestational cut-off differs between these statistics, the numbers cannot be compared directly.

These numbers mean that loss in pregnancy is among the most common serious events in reproductive life. And yet many people who have experienced it feel alone in it. In a US national survey of 1,084 adults, 55% of respondents believed miscarriage occurs in 5% or fewer of pregnancies — far below the actual figure. Among respondents who had experienced a miscarriage, 41% reported feeling alone and 47% felt guilty [4]. When miscarriage is widely believed to be rare, large numbers of people carry the experience in the belief that it was unusual, or that their loss was too early, or too quiet, to name.

That isolation is not the same thing as the loss itself. But it acts on the loss in a specific way: it narrows the space in which grief is permitted. "It was too early in the pregnancy to make a big thing of it." "We have another child, so people will think we're fine." "It's not like we lost someone we knew." These forms of self-censorship drive grief inward, where it often intensifies. Social permission to grieve turns out to matter — not just emotionally but, as the research below will show, clinically.

Grief after pregnancy loss: what the research shows

Kersting and Wagner (2012) published a review of the literature on complicated grief following perinatal loss in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, documenting that miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death overlap substantially with PTSD symptoms, depression, and anxiety [5]. They identify specific risk factors for complicated grief: inadequate social support, existing relational difficulty, and an unexpected interruption of the pregnancy — including termination for fetal anomaly. Critically, the severity of the loss as others assess it (gestational age, length of acquaintance with the baby) does not reliably predict the severity of the grief response. A very early loss can be as devastating as a later one.

Complicated grief — listed in DSM-5-TR as Prolonged Grief Disorder — is characterized by intense longing, a sense of unreality, and a loss of meaning that persists for twelve months or more after the loss, significantly impairing social and occupational functioning. This is clinically distinct from grief that is deep but time-shifting; the prolonged form is a condition for which effective interventions exist [5]. Knowing that this distinction exists — that there is a difference between grief and Prolonged Grief Disorder — is useful not as a way of ranking one's own suffering but as a reason to reach for support when the timeline extends and the impairment does not lift.

Cacciatore (2010), in a paper on psychosocial care after stillbirth, argues that care should prioritize the individual over standardized protocols, and that the act of receiving someone's reality — not redirecting toward recovery — is itself therapeutic [6]. The formulation is deliberate: acknowledging where someone is comes before encouraging them to move. Care that rushes a bereaved parent toward "the next step," however well-intentioned, often produces the opposite of comfort.

What "recording" can look like

Recording is not only baby books and photographs.

In clinical perinatal bereavement care, some hospitals — particularly in the United Kingdom — offer families a "memory box": a small collection of physical keepsakes that may include handprints, footprints, photographs, or a lock of hair. Kingdon and colleagues (2015), in a systematic review of 23 studies on seeing and holding the baby after stillbirth, found that parents repeatedly reported that having tangible evidence of their baby's existence mattered to them in the processing of grief and the preservation of their child's memory [7].

There is an important qualification here. "Not wanting to" is an equally valid choice. The wish to not see, not hold, not keep — to have the experience recede rather than crystallize — must be respected with the same care. Cacciatore's principle of individual over standard applies here directly [6]. A practitioner's good intention can land as pressure. The decision belongs to the person who lived it.

Recording, in whatever form it takes, can include:

• Keeping keepsakes or photographs. Many parents who declined at the time have later said they wished they had them; many others feel no such wish. Both are real. Neither is wrong. Whether to keep, whether to look, whether to share — these choices belong entirely to the parent.
• Writing: letters or plain notes. Writing to a baby who died is documented in clinical literature as a form of narrative grief processing. There is no required format. Some people write once; some return to it years later.
• Choosing not to record at all. Wanting to erase, to not document, to let things blur rather than be fixed in writing — this is not avoidance in any pathological sense. The desire to control what remains of a memory is a natural psychological response.
• Beginning later. A need to write, or to look, or to put something down, can arrive months or years after the loss. There is no expiration date on that impulse.

For parents who were using an app like Memori to record a pregnancy or a child who died, the question of what to do with those records is real and difficult. Deleting is a valid choice. Keeping is a valid choice. Leaving the app closed for a long time and then deciding is also a valid choice. That decision belongs entirely to you.

When grief is not in sync between partners

It is common for partners who have shared the same loss to grieve in markedly different ways — different depth, different timing, different forms of expression. This is not evidence of who cared more. It reflects the simple fact that grief is fundamentally personal.

Kersting and Wagner (2012) identify relational conflict between partners as a risk factor for complicated grief [5]. "They're not crying." "They seem fine." "They went back to normal so quickly." These observations can be carried more lightly when there is a factual understanding that two people grieving the same loss are not expected to grieve in the same way, on the same schedule.

When to reach out for support

Professional support is not a sign of weakness. In Kersting and Wagner's review, grief interventions appeared effective when aimed at people at high risk or whose grief had already become complicated, while interventions aimed solely at preventing grief had inconsistent support; the authors nonetheless stress the importance of psychotherapeutic monitoring and support [5].

If you are uncertain whether to reach out, that uncertainty is itself a sufficient reason to make contact with one of the following:

• Tenshi no Tamago (NPO): a peer community for parents who have experienced perinatal loss (Japan)
• Grief Support Setagaya and local bereavement support groups: available in many regions; contact your local public health center for referrals
• Your obstetrician or pediatrician: follow-up care for the next pregnancy and emotional support can be requested together
• Mental Health Consultation Unified Dial: 0570-064-556 — connects to the psychiatric health and welfare center in each prefecture (Japan, available in Japanese)

Summary

Pregnancy loss and the death of a child are among the most common serious experiences in reproductive life — and among the most isolated [1,5,6,7]. The research points to three things: these losses generate complex psychological responses that deserve care; the form that care takes must fit the individual; and professional support can help, particularly when grief becomes prolonged or impairing.

There is no required word for what comes after this. Whether you record or don't record, whether you remember or try to put distance between yourself and what happened, your child existed. That doesn't change.

References

1. Quenby S, Gallos ID, Dhillon-Smith RK, et al. Miscarriage matters: the epidemiological, physical, psychological, and economic costs of early pregnancy loss. Lancet. 2021;397(10285):1658–1667. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00682-6. PMID: 33915094.
2. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Japan). Vital Statistics of Japan 2024 (final data): summary [令和6年（2024）人口動態統計（確定数）の概況]; in Japanese. 2025. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/kakutei24/index.html
3. United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME). Standing Up for Stillbirth: Current estimates and key interventions (UN IGME Stillbirth Report 2024). New York: UNICEF; 2025. https://data.unicef.org/resources/standing-up-for-stillbirth-report/
4. Bardos J, Hercz D, Friedenthal J, Missmer SA, Williams Z. A national survey on public perceptions of miscarriage. Obstet Gynecol. 2015;125(6):1313–1320. doi:10.1097/AOG.0000000000000859. PMID: 26000502.
5. Kersting A, Wagner B. Complicated grief after perinatal loss. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2012;14(2):187–194. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2012.14.2/akersting. PMID: 22754291.
6. Cacciatore J. Stillbirth: patient-centered psychosocial care. Clin Obstet Gynecol. 2010;53(3):691–699. doi:10.1097/GRF.0b013e3181eba1c6. PMID: 20661053.
7. Kingdon C, Givens JL, O'Donnell E, Turner M. Seeing and holding baby: systematic review of clinical management and parental outcomes after stillbirth. Birth. 2015;42(3):206–218. doi:10.1111/birt.12176. PMID: 26111120.