A Decade of Grief with Sarah Smith Warren
This episode carries a trigger warning for infant loss and miscarriage with very graphic accounts of each. Please listen with care. Burying a baby you have carried for nine months is unfathomable and to lose another seems like a cruel twist of fate. Today’s guest has experienced a world of unimaginable grief as she has lost three children in the past decade. Sarah Smith Warren and her husband were settling down to start a family when they lost their first child at 12 weeks and you can imagine their apprehensive joy when they fell pregnant again and carried that child to term. In this episode, Sarah shares the most incredibly inspirational journey of the loss of her stillborn child Boyd, the birth of her one surviving son Milo, and her second miscarriage. She paints the picture of her experiences through the lens of her journal entries and shares potentially the triggering and emotional realities of grief and loss. We discuss the difficulties associated with watching your partner grieve when you feel helpless to assist them, how people can educate themselves, learn, and ask questions to comfort people who have experienced loss, how grief brain affects you, and the incredible way children process death. Sarah also tells us about her amazing business, Soul Space Work, and why she is dedicated to encouraging people to accept their colleagues; warts and all. This is an emotional and uplifting episode that will inspire anyone who has experienced loss to come alive again and will educate people on how to interact with someone who is grieving. You do not want to miss this one!
Key Points From This Episode:
• A brief overview of today’s guest, Sarah Smith Warren.
• How Sarah’s dreams have changed over the last decade.
• TW: For listeners who wish to avoid the story of Sarah’s stillborn, please skip audio between [00:08:03] and [00:13:35].
• Sarah tells us about the incredible nurse who held space for her after her son was stillborn.
• The isolation Sarah and her husband Jake experienced when they went home with no baby.
• The difficulties of watching your partner go through the hardest time of their life.
• Why seeing people again for the first time after the loss of her baby was so difficult for Sarah.
• Why we must learn how to help people who’ve experienced loss by asking what they need.
• What inspired Sarah to start Soul Space Work.
• The fog you experience during grief: grief brain.
• What pregnancy was like for her after the stillbirth and the fear of losing her son after birth.
• TW: For listeners who wish to avoid Sarah’s account of her second miscarriage, please skip audio between [00:45:35] and [00:46:22].
• How children are able to process and understand grief in such a special way.
• Why Sarah loves it when people keep Boyd and Luna’s existence alive.
• Sarah tells us about her business, Soul Space Work.
• The importance of accepting all the parts of colleagues; even the ‘broken bits’.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
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