What do you actually say when a baby dies?

I found this episode hard to prepare for. Not because I didn't want to talk about baby loss, but because I was frightened of asking something clumsy. Of making someone feel worse. Of being the person who says the thing they really wish you hadn't said.

That fear is familiar to Tanya Wilkinson. She's a grief coach and end-of-life doula, and her daughter Ngākau Raiona died following a termination for medical reasons. At a scan at 21 weeks, Tanya and her husband learned that their much-wanted baby had a condition she would not survive for long outside the womb, if she survived that far. They faced a devastating decision. Tanya speaks about her daughter with enormous love, and about how difficult other people can find it to meet that love without trying to make the loss disappear.

We want to fix something that cannot be fixed

There is a particular panic that happens when someone tells you something awful. You want to find the words that will help. You reach for a silver lining, a reason, something they can look forward to. It comes from kindness. It can also leave the person you wanted to comfort feeling very alone.

Tanya has been told she can try for another baby. Apart from the fact that infertility makes that far from a certainty, another baby would not be this baby. It is an answer to a question she hasn't asked. Her mother once wished aloud that she could wave a magic wand. Tanya explained that every attempt to do that created distance. What she needed wasn't a solution. It was her mum.

That is quite a hard thing to accept if being useful is how you show love. But sitting with someone, without improving the situation, is useful. Listening without turning their grief into a problem to solve is useful. You can be uncertain and still be present.

You are not reminding them of something they have forgotten

I asked Tanya about mentioning a baby's name. When is the right time? How often? Is there a point where bringing it up stops being thoughtful and starts being painful? Underneath those questions was an assumption: perhaps, by mentioning the baby, I would reopen something that had briefly closed.

For Tanya, the loss is already there. Her daughter is part of her everyday life. Avoiding her name doesn't protect Tanya from remembering; it can leave her carrying that remembering on her own. Hearing someone else say the name tells her that her daughter matters beyond the boundaries of her own grief.

Ngākau Raiona means lioness heart in Māori. Friends send Tanya photographs of lions, or messages about something they've seen that made them think of her daughter. One friend gave her a candle holder engraved with her daughter's name and birthday. Tanya can take it wherever she wants her daughter present, including the Christmas table. These aren't grand gestures. They are specific ones. They say: I remember who you love.

Not everybody will want the same thing. A gentle question about a baby's name, or whether someone would like to talk about them, leaves room for their answer. The point isn't to insist on a conversation. It is not to assume silence is automatically kinder.

Nobody wins the grief Olympics

Tanya calls our habit of ranking loss the grief Olympics. We compare how far along a pregnancy was, whether a baby had a name, what happened, how long someone had to prepare. As though enough information might allow us to calculate the correct amount of grief.

She still grieves an earlier miscarriage as well as her daughter. One does not cancel the other, and neither needs to qualify against someone else's experience. You don't have to demonstrate that your loss was sufficiently terrible before you are allowed to feel it.

Even two people grieving the same baby may need different things. Tanya describes processing through talking and emotion, while her husband is more inclined towards action. That difference doesn't mean one of them loves or misses their daughter less. It means she also needs friends who can meet her in the conversations he cannot always have. Expecting one person to hold everything puts a lot of pressure on both people.

The story people are afraid to tell

When Tanya first spoke publicly about her daughter, she noticed herself focusing on the stillbirth and moving quickly past the termination for medical reasons. She calls it a taboo on a taboo: the silence around baby loss, with another layer of judgement around how the pregnancy ended.

A decision made in devastating circumstances, about a deeply wanted baby, does not make someone's parenthood or grief less real. Leaving this experience out of conversations about loss tells people there is no place for their story, even when nobody intends that message.

Tanya is equally clear that speaking openly took time. Nobody owes the world their story before they feel ready to tell it. Making space for a conversation is different from asking someone to perform their grief for us.

I wanted to come away knowing what to say. What I came away with was a better understanding of what not to demand of myself: a perfect sentence that makes an unbearable thing bearable. There isn't one. But there can be a message, a remembered name, a willingness to listen again next week. Someone who doesn't disappear because they don't know how to make it better.