A grief that is harder to share

What has happened to Gordon and Sarah Brown is cruel beyond words. In the past few days the public has seen the unguarded warmth that sudden personal happiness and joy can bring to the most serious and single-minded of men. Now we can only imagine the depth of unhappiness which the saddest of deaths can bring to a couple who delayed the enjoyment of personal happiness until late in hard-working, public-spirited lives. I can't imagine what kind of person would not feel compassion for their situation, a pain which can only be worse for this private and discreet couple for being so publicly proclaimed, suffered and endured.

The death of a baby is an agony out of all proportion to the length of the life that is lost. People who don't have children might assume that, sad as it is, the death of a tiny child who has never had a chance to develop into a fully rounded person is survivable in time. They are wrong. The death of a baby is a loss that reverberates for a lifetime, all the more painful and lingering for the fact that it must often be kept deep inside.

When people die later in life the mourning is shared in a different way. It is more public. The life, even the life of a child, has been lived. It has touched other lives. There are memories, photographs, traces. There will be other people who can share these memories, validate that person's existence, recall their personalities and give some comfort to the parents.

In the case of a baby who has barely survived a few days, the loss is harder for people beyond its immediate family to understand. This is true also for pregnancies lost in miscarriage and for stillbirths. Attitudes are becoming more sensitive, but many a shocked and grieving parent has been told by well-meaning doctors and nurses that they'll have another baby in due course, even as they stare bewildered into space unable to comprehend that this one, who has been the intense focus of their longings and desires, has gone. In the case of older parents like the Browns even this cheap comfort may not be available.

When I say that attitudes are changing, I mean that there is more official acknowledgment of the depth of this particular loss. Where the shocked parents of a dead baby might once have been brusquely told, and simply handed a bundle of baby clothes on the way out of hospital, now they are more likely to be given the baby to hold and say goodbye to, even offered a photograph.

Devastated parents will testify that this much acknowledgement of their baby's existence and their loss has been a comfort which has given them some consolation and helped with the grieving process. Why should the loss of a baby be so uniquely painful? It is partly because the joy of having a baby is so uniquely intense. It is not a joy that parents automatically allow themselves to feel all at once. Some obstetrician once said that pregnant women went through three stages: missing a period, being pregnant and expecting a baby. However secretly excited the willingly pregnant woman may be, she will be very superstitious about celebrating too early. She may begin to share the news after the first three months and to allow herself publicly to talk about names and think about baby clothes only as the date grows nearer.

In private her world has been in a secret turmoil since the pregnancy test. The way she looks at the world is irrevocably altered. She has dreams and plans she may not even share with her partner, who will be excited but not in the same consuming way. The baby is real to her in a way it is not quite to him. There is already a private internal dialogue between mother and child, especially once it starts moving inside her. Once she feels safe, she can allow herself to be happy.

Even the loss of a pregnancy is a grievous one. Mothers who miscarry and go on to have healthy children can still remember the loss all their lives, more poignantly for often being the only ones who carry this memory. The baby who is actually born is a sudden public explosion and sharing of joy, a moment of biological, emotional and social triumph. Its sudden extinction at the point of celebration is brutal.

The friends and family of the Browns have an essential job of talking, grieving and giving comfort. The lives led by the Browns are fast-moving, intensely public, hugely demanding. It is traditional and acceptable for men to mask and recover from private disappointment and sorrow by hurling themselves into their work. The incessant activity, the mental challenge, the public affirmation of their worth is a potent anaesthetic for a bleeding heart. This path is immediately open to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

However, it won't help a devastated mother to lose her husband to his job at a time when more than anything in the world she needs to be held and know that one other person, the most important in her life, sees, shares and acknowledges the awful thing that has happened to them. What the Browns both need is a pause in their lives, private time when they can share the knowledge that Jennifer Jane was a real person who, however briefly, brought them intense happiness and who will never be forgotten.