The pain of losing a child during the pregnancy or infancy stage is absolutely heartbreaking.

No one will understand the hurt you feel until or unless they go through it themselves in their own life.

Here’s a roundup of some of the most thoughtful, heartfelt, and insightful messages, quotes, and words of encouragement from people around the world.

The almost of it all

“It’s not that motherhood is out of reach, it’s that it’s just out of reach. It’s not that motherhood didn’t happen, it’s that it almost did and, in fact, still could. The difference between the grief of infertility and other reasons for mourning – the loss of a spouse, for example – is in that promise of ‘just,’ in ‘almost,’ in ‘still could.”

‍― Alexandra Kimball, The Seed: Infertility is a Feminist Issue

Commonalities

“A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven’t. Most don’t mention it. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she’ll know.”

— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Love and grief

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets an empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

—Jamie Anderson

Grieving forever

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”

―David Kessler and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross