Tending community through thoughtful storytelling, with Rebecca Little and Colleen Long

How the authors of "I'm Sorry for My Loss" approached the task of telling 100 new stories about perinatal grief - including their own - in a country that is often "so bad at it"

Oct 04, 2024

– Rebecca Little

In the spring of 2023, a year after I lost my daughter-to-be in late pregnancy, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by a pair of journalists about the experience. Both loss parents themselves, Rebecca Little and Colleen Long had set out to write the definitive book on how pregnancy loss is viewed and experienced in America – and in their words, “Why we are so bad at it.”

I took Rebecca’s call on a walk through the same woods that I paced after receiving the life-altering news, during a routine anatomy scan, that my pregnancy had developed severe complications. Rebecca shared that she had also known the deafening silence of that room, the gut-wrenching choices that aren’t really choices, the grief for which no one prepared you. As a journalist myself, I found that I had as much curiosity about Rebecca’s story as she did about mine. (As you’ll read below, hers is as heart-rending as any other in her book.)

Rebecca and I spoke for almost two hours as I circled and circled under the bare-branched trees, remembering together the experiences we’d both had of feeling as though we’d been struck by lightning, our bark blown clean off. We also talked about what it felt like to be nurtured – or not – by the communities around us, from bosses who “got it” to close friends and family who surprisingly didn’t.

Now, the book is out on shelves, entitled I’m Sorry for My Loss. (Full disclosure: my story appears in it, albeit under a pseudonym.) Recently I had the pleasure of catching up with Rebecca and Colleen about how the book came together. Below, we talk about compassion — both the kind they wish they would have received for their own losses, and the kind they hope to cultivate via the stories they tell, many of which, they promise, “will make your heart flip inside out.”

Where did you grow up? What else grows there? What was it like for you to grow there?

Rebecca: Flossmoor, a south suburb of Chicago. Colleen and I met in the fourth grade, and we rode our bikes all over the place. I really loved growing up there, and was lucky to live in a house that my parents made a hub for all of our family and friends.

Colleen: Before Flossmoor, I lived in Crown Point, Indiana with my grandmother, mom and some of her 11 (!) siblings. My mom has a specialty food store right in downtown Flossmoor called Dunning’s Market. I just took my kids recently to the Flossmoor Public Library which was probably my favorite place in all of childhood.

What is your earliest memory of tending another being?

R: My brother is 3 ½ years younger than me, and I tended to him so ferociously that I stunted his development. He literally didn’t learn to talk because I just did all of his talking for him. He would grunt and point, and I would say “You want this? This? This?” My parents eventually would separate us so he would be forced to speak. (He learned. He’s a grown man now, talking like a pro.)

C: My first memories are being tended to, by a whole bunch of family members at my grandmother’s house. Everywhere I looked, someone was looking out for me. It gave me a lot of confidence, and the ability to walk into just about any room unafraid.

What or whom have you loved tending since?

R: I have a large, Irish Catholic family, so there were just always babies and toddlers around. I was shocked when my husband told me, well into our 20s, that he had never held a baby—I probably first held a baby when I was four. I was also a champion babysitter.

I definitely have oldest daughter syndrome, so in a way I feel like I’m always tending to everyone, but only because my ideas and advice are above reproach and everyone would be happier if they just listened to me. My younger siblings want to live their own lives and make their own choices, which is very annoying. (I’m mostly kidding. Mostly. Sort of.)

C: I also have a younger brother and sister, though mine are 9 and 10 years younger, and I spent a lot of time babysitting them, as well as some of my 40 cousins, and countless neighbor kids.

I also have oldest daughter syndrome, and it worms its way into my professional life, too, where I sometimes find myself solving a lot of problems – some of which I’m sure aren’t really mine to solve.

Relatedly, you’ve written an incredibly well-researched and generous book about perinatal loss in America. Both of you, like me, have experienced this level of loss and so know it intimately. So, before we talk about the ways in which you’ve compassionately held others’ stories, can we take a moment to hold you in yours? What, if anything, would you like to share about your own path to family-building?

R: Oh, boy. I got pregnant with my first two sons pretty easily, and other than having C-sections, I had uneventful pregnancies and births. It was trying to have a third where things got complicated.

In 2014, I had an 8 week missed miscarriage, followed by a painful uterine infection and a D&C. Then I got pregnant again almost immediately. We waited until 16 weeks to tell anyone that we were having our third boy, thinking that after all the genetic screenings, we were in the clear. (Ha.) At 19 weeks, I realized that I hadn’t felt him move in a bit. The day of my 20 week ultrasound, the screen showed an unmoving fetus, no heart flicker.

I was immediately whisked upstairs through a back stairway to labor and delivery, and was induced. I needed to make decisions fairly quickly: Did I want to see the baby? Hold the baby? Bury the baby? I was both devastated and completely numb. I chose to hold him until we checked out. We named him, and we buried him with my grandparents.

My oldest was in preschool then, and it felt like there were pregnant women and healthy babies everywhere I went. It was so hard to explain to my oldest son in particular why everyone else got babies and ours died. We did not know until I was researching the book and sent the old pathology report to Dr. Harvey Kliman, a name I heard from many of our stillbirth parent sources, that he had a genetic abnormality that resulted in his death.

I decided to try fertility treatment to increase the odds of a healthy pregnancy. We got embryos and had them genetically tested, thinking this was the best way to bowl with bumpers and avoid another loss. About 8 months after the death of our stillborn son, we transferred a genetically-tested healthy embryo, which split, resulting in identical twin boys. We were so excited, though shocked. We’d had two losses, and now we were having these two boys. (The part of me that was capable of thinking that way no longer exists.)

I went to my 19 week appointment with bile in my throat given our last experience. There were two heart flickers, they were kicking around…but the ultrasound tech was still silent. Any loss parent knows that silence is deadly.

The twins had hydrops, and some kind of infection that had caused heart problems. I was never sick, so this remains a mystery despite every test imaginable. We had to hope the infection cleared. The waiting, and feeling them kick in the meantime, was absolute torture. At 23 weeks 1 day, coming under the 24 week limit for termination in Illinois, the perinatal cardiologist brought the twins’ latest scans to a cardiology conference. Every expert in the nation happened to be in our city. None thought they had any chance at living. It was over. I was once again going to be induced and deliver doomed babies.

The delivery was slow, and it went badly, but no one was quite sure why. The same nurse who had been with me with my stillbirth suspected a uterine hemorrhage. She was right. At about 5 in the morning, the back wall of my uterus essentially exploded, taking my left ovary with it. My OB-gyn later said the only equivalent is a grenade going off in your stomach. I woke up after an emergency hysterectomy to doctors and nurses weeping in relief. Nobody thought I would survive.

We later found out that the hemorrhage was inevitable, though unforeseeable, due to a weak spot in my uterus created by the previous two D&Cs. Had the twins not been terminally ill, at some point as my belly grew, my uterus would have torn from stretching and I would have bled out at home. There was no universe where those twins and I got to both survive together. It’s still hard to comprehend, and I have stopped trying.

They weren’t able to save my uterus, though they did save my right ovary, so they staved off early menopause. My third son was born healthy via surrogate, and then we retired from the baby business.

C: I got pregnant before our wedding. My parents were teenagers when they had me, and I felt like I had to do everything in the right order, which meant wedding first, then baby. Five days after the wedding, we went in for an ultrasound and the baby had died. I was so ashamed and embarrassed about the pregnancy that I had hidden it from a lot of people outside my family, so no one understood why I was so down. I felt so guilty, thinking, if I hadn’t been so focused on the wedding, would I have been able to save him?

Our doctor told us we could wait to deliver, or I could go have a D&E – but these were only performed at proper abortion clinics. So I went there, because I felt like if I had to deliver a dead baby, I’d never get pregnant again. There were these old men protesters who screamed at me as I went into the clinic. But inside, the doctors were so kind. I sent them a thank you note after – Midwestern to the end.

A lot of people just kept telling me to have another baby. I stopped talking to friends after I could not take their pressure. When I did, the baby suddenly died at roughly 24 weeks. We did genetic testing but no one could tell us what happened.

We have two other kids, but it was really hard to be pregnant. I was an anxious mess. I wish we’d had a third baby, and I regret not doing it, but I was just so scared. It was like I had eked out two healthy ones while no one was looking.

I wish I would have taken this all more seriously, but I minimized it. Even now I think, “My god, what happened to Rebecca was horrible, and mine really wasn’t that bad.”

What kind of compassion did you feel you needed as a loss parent and did not necessarily get?

R: I was given much more compassionate care than Colleen was by my medical team, but my experiences in the wider world after my losses were less than ideal. I was almost treated like dead babies were a contagious disease. My oldest was in kindergarten when the twins died, and though his teachers were wonderful, not one parent in that class ever spoke to me again. Not even about something innocuous like the weather. It was so bizarre.

I also got a lot of “this is just your journey” mumbo jumbo that I cannot stand, as though every horrible experience is somehow worthwhile as long as you wrest some meaning out of it. I found that so dismissive.

C: There was virtually no compassion. No one recommended I see a therapist, or that I should wait to get pregnant, or even acknowledged that what had happened was kind of traumatic. I had zero answers on why, and that, too, created anxiety that no one was terribly interested in helping me through. The drumbeat was: Just have another.

Maybe no one knew what to do with me – not my colleagues, nor my family, nor friends. I just wish that people would have maybe just stopped me to say, “Oh gosh, I’m sorry for your loss.” Hence our title.

My oldest was in kindergarten when the twins died, and though his teachers were wonderful, not one parent in that class ever spoke to me again. Not even about something innocuous like the weather. It was so bizarre. – Rebecca Little

Could you now tell us a bit more about the path to building this book since then? How did it all start? And has the format or content changed at all from your original vision, since you began your reporting and writing process?

C: I was going to switch jobs but I wasn’t all that thrilled about the offer because it felt like I would be doing a version of the same thing. I told Rebecca I was going to turn down this job offer and instead take a sabbatical available to me at my current job, and that I wanted to write a proposal for this book. I didn’t think I could do it alone because it felt so monumental a task, with a full-time job and two kids. I just knew we could pull it off together, even though people say it’s hard to do with another person.

R: We were of one mind of what we wanted it to look like–deeply reported, with a lot of voices represented, but without ever veering into trauma porn territory. Not a memoir, not a grief book, but an exploration of why America is so bad at pregnancy loss.

What changed under our feet was the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court while we were working on the proposal, at which point we both knew the clock was ticking on Roe vs. Wade. The week we submitted our proposal to our agents, Roe was overturned. So of course that informed our reporting, because we had to incorporate the effects of post-Roe medicine and post-Roe loss.

The other change is that we initially planned to interview 50 birthing parents, and we had such a big response we interviewed 100. The book is so much richer for it. But overall, we were very true to our original vision.

The resulting book is not one you should read in the throes of grief. It’s the book you read six months out, or a year or longer, when you’re in the ‘what in the hell happened’ phase.

The week we submitted our proposal to our agents, Roe was overturned. So of course that informed our reporting, because we had to incorporate the effects of post-Roe medicine and post-Roe loss. — Rebecca Little

I imagine there were many powerful motivations to begin and then continue working on this project. One of the motivations you shared with me, during the writing process, was wanting for readers who had not known loss, or not known the specific kinds of loss that are most misunderstood in our culture, to have more compassion for people who have gone through this experience. Can you say more about how you’re thinking about this currently?

C: Part of the thing that frustrates me about daily journalism is that we often boil down these stories to their most basic details. But we really wanted to explore all the ways in which pregnancy loss is a very complicated gray area.

R: One thing we explore in the book is the “hierarchy of loss,” meaning which losses receive the most sympathy or which losses people seem to think “justify” grieving.

We have an example in the book where a loss mom shared that when she tells people that she lost a child who died after a few days, she gets much more sympathy and fewer dismissive comments than if she describes the loss as happening in her ninth month of pregnancy.

People also want the loss to be “faultless”—a stillbirth or miscarriage that occurs spontaneously for no clear reason—and they tend to have more understanding the longer the pregnancy progressed. So we discuss that difference, how these losses are perceived in our society and why.

We also talk about terminations for medical reasons, which are abortions that tend to garner at least some sympathy, even among people who are anti-choice, and how “good loss vs. bad loss” is a toxic dichotomy. We spoke with many loss parents who had a stillbirth or miscarriages who met TFMR parents in their grief groups, and felt so much sympathy and community in their shared experience that they became outspoken advocates for the whole umbrella of loss.

In the book, we maintain that everyone is worthy of empathy and these losses and decisions are made by people, not caricatures. And fleshing out full stories of people’s experiences as we do in the book makes that so clear. You can’t have sympathy for people whose stories you never hear, and it was so important to us to make these stories heard. And I can say with confidence there will be stories in this book that make your heart flip inside out.

“Fostering compassion” is not as common in nonfiction as other motivations – certainly not in our shared field of journalism. I’ve spoken to other journalist friends who feel that this needs to change. Some also feel that it is perhaps already changing. Do you feel that there’s a tension between your training as a journalist and your work as a mother-writer representing fellow loss parents? How do you work with, speak to, resolve or ignore that tension?

R: I’ve thought about this question a lot, and I think I don’t feel this tension. I don’t think it’s hard to be accurate, to check your facts, and to present things in the proper context in a way that also exhibits compassion, especially when the story dictates.

C: It’s my job to tell people’s stories, but that’s different from co-opting people’s stories, and I really do take that difference seriously. I do a lot of work talking to people about their traumas and so I’m used to this kind of thing. I think my compassion and empathy makes me a good journalist. It makes people feel comfortable enough to talk to me. I think what our own experiences did for us was give us some cred with groups of people who were not so psyched to be talking.

I think my compassion and empathy makes me a good journalist. It makes people feel comfortable enough to talk to me. – Colleen Long

I also imagine that over time, listening to so many loss stories became difficult. Did you ever feel a sense of compassion fatigue?

R: I don’t usually think you need to have a specific experience or expertise to report–journalists are trained to cultivate a beat. But in this case, it absolutely made a difference that Colleen and I were members of this terrible club. I think those we interviewed trusted that we weren’t going to say any of the usual platitudes, or ask insensitive questions, or recoil at any descriptions of a baby born too soon.

I did make a mistake early on of conducting too many interviews in one day, sometimes up to four. I am not a therapist, but these interviews were intense and personal and often emotional. So I scaled back down to do only two personal interviews a day, and that made a difference – both just to properly absorb the emotion of the stories, and to also have time to process what had been shared, to hone future questions or explore a new avenue in the book. For instance, the portion about work leave for pregnancy loss was added because it came up over and over in our interviews.

But I did not have compassion fatigue. These conversations were almost sacred. There were times I would call Colleen and say “You aren’t going to believe what happened to this woman,” or I’d be sad or angry and need to go for a walk to clear my head. But all of that just reinforced how badly this book was needed and how important it was for us to put these stories out into a world in a way that contextualized where America is making mistakes in this space.

C: I have spent 20 years in daily journalism, and more than half of that time was spent covering crime. Part of the reason I switched jobs and moved from our longtime home in New York to Washington, D.C. had to do with feeling like I’d suddenly had enough of the eyewitness view of human suffering and trauma. But I think what Rebecca said is right—we were both just so upset on behalf of the people we interviewed. Every interview only made us feel like this book was necessary.

After a long day of tending others’ stories, how do you approach self-tending?

R: I will be honest that I am still not great at this. I am trying to be better and have made an effort to do somatics every night before bed, and I like to take solo walks, but there are also days where it all slips away under a massive to-do list.

C: I’m terrible at this. I have a very demanding day job that takes up a lot of my time and energy, and then I come home to the second-shift work, where I make dinner and hang out with my family. I do try to get exercise three days a week and yoga and that helps, I am someone who needs to sweat out some anxiety. But I wish I was better at blocking off space, because everything tends to get smooshed together with no daylight left for me.

There were times I would call Colleen and say “You aren’t going to believe what happened to this woman,” or I’d be sad or angry and need to go for a walk to clear my head. But all of that just reinforced how badly this book was needed and how important it was for us to put these stories out into the world, in a way that contextualized where America is making mistakes in this space. – Rebecca Little

To what mentors, teachers or texts do you turn when you’re looking for inspiration?

R: I just try to read all the time, those that are new to me and those I loved. But I suppose Joan Didion, Barbara Ehrenreich and Nora Ephron are among those I re-visit the most often. I really can’t resist a wry essay.

C: Me too, I try to read everything I can. And I also love Nora Ephron. Her writing style and career path have always been things I’ve sought to emulate. “When Harry Met Sally” was the first movie that made me wonder who wrote it, because it was so funny and charming and weird. Also when it comes to non-fiction, Mary Roach has this very plain, humorous way of explaining horrible things to people. .

What communities or sanghas keep you sane?

C: We have a little group of friends in Capitol Hill who are excellent people, and I think I would also include the cops-and-courts journalism community in New York City, which still feels like home to me.

R: I don’t have a good answer for this one, but it makes me wonder if I need one.

What do you love most to create?

R: Well, any writer will tell you that the process of writing is torture, but having written is revelatory. So I love to write, but it also drives me crazy. I also really love to decorate. If I wasn’t a writer, I would probably be an interior decorator.

C: Here is where we diverge, and strongly. I hate decorating with the fire of a thousand suns. I just want someone to come to my home and wave a wand, and have everything look exactly how I want it.

I hate to write, because I always feel like the finished product doesn’t measure up to my expectations, but there are the rare occasions where I look at something I’ve done and think, “Oh this, was good.” I had a few moments like that re-reading our book where I’d say to Rebecca, “Wait, did we write this? It’s so good!”

I think beyond writing, I would say I love to sing and I wish I had kept doing it.

Are there other powerful fellow storytellers you’ve met during this process that you think do a good job of providing witnessing, comfort or advocacy for loss parents, via their books, podcasts, or something else?

I Had a Miscarriage by reproductive and maternal mental health psychologist Jessica Zucker; Bearing the Unbearable, by bereaved mother and Zen priest Dr. Joanne Cacciatore; It’s OK That You’re Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed by bereaved partner and therapist Megan Devine, The Prenatal Bombshell: Help and Hope When Continuing or Ending a Precious Pregnancy After an Abnormal Diagnosis by Prenatal Diagnosis Support Australia (PDSA) founder Sherokee Ilse, and Your Guide to Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss: Hope and Healing When You're No Longer Expecting, by miscarriage survivor and OB/GYN Kate White.

Where can people find you if they want to engage further with your work?

Folks can purchase the book via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop and Books a Million. They can also find us at @I’msorryformylossbook on Instagram and alittlelong.com.

In Tending

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