Fiona: 'Capture Your Grief' Photography Project

The Capture Your Grief project was started on the Carly Marie Project Heal website to raise awareness of pregnancy and infant loss during October’s month of awareness. It is also a creative tool that can by used by those going through the journey of grief after the loss of a child to express, heal and share feelings. Each day has a theme and photos are shared as privately or publicly as people want.

I decided to take part for a number of reasons… I haven’t done a creative project for a while or used the lovely camera my husband bought me for our first (and much sadder than it should have been) wedding anniversary.  I’m reaching the end of the house renovation project that has kept me busy for the last 4 months and I am reaching the 6 month anniversary of the death and birth of our firstborn son Max.  I put death and birth in that order as that was how they happened. At 39 weeks and 1 day pregnant, my baby stopped moving because his little heart had stopped beating and 3 days later I gave birth to him.

At the moment my grief is capturing me, it is enveloping me in shroud of sadness and tears that are beyond my control or management, it is leaving me crumpled and broken on a daily basis.  Capturing some of these feelings in photographs and sharing them has been a mixed experience.  It has given me the opportunity to take more time to think and look back at Max’s story.  Getting out all the cards that we received and reading again people's kind words was a powerful reminder of how loved we are, but also that I have not heard from many of those people since and that I don’t really want to.

I had very little to add to the “what not to say” day as we have been so fortunate to have such lovely people around us.  Even our neighbours have managed to say the right things at the right time.  Lighting our candles together on the 15^th October brought home to me how much closer my Mum and I have become and how much I need her. But at the project goes on I am realising how near the beginning of my grief I am.

I have so many plans of things I’d like to do to remember him but have had time to do so few.  Sadly I know that I have the rest of my life to do these things and trying to rush through them is neither going to bring him back or take me to some imaginary end of grieving.

So maybe each October I will be able to add a picture or two to the album as I make more memorials and get through more milestones, and maybe one day I’ll feel that I have captured my grief and, whilst always being part of me, it will no longer define me.