I lost my newborn daughter – my grief made me a social outcast

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Thursday 25 September 2025, 4:40pm. That was when my beautiful 33-day-old baby left me. For me, it will always be my moment of death, too.

It has been a year since I lost my daughter, Noor (meaning “light”), after going into emergency preterm labour at 23 weeks and six days. I hadn’t even known my waters were breaking slowly all day, but the trickling sensation still haunts me.

Noor was delivered breech, in nine minutes, and immediately placed into an incubator. I never even heard her cry. My husband, Basel, took a photograph of her so I could at least see her face after delivery. There she was, our perfect little angel, weighing less than a bag of sugar.

She was transferred to a specialist neonatal facility where we spent a month, incubator-side, as she relied on a vine of medical tubes for milk, breathing and medication. We watched her fight for her life and almost lose countless times, until her tiny body, which was smaller than my hand, fatigued from the battle.

The flashbacks are still vivid: running to the hospital at 2am not knowing if she’d live another hour, crying myself to sleep over brain bleeds and collapsed lungs and the swarm of doctors trying to bring her back.

There are memories I treasure, too: Noor’s full-fledged attitude whenever nurses disturbed her, and her eyes flickering instantly at the sound of my voice.

Most precious of all, I held her twice. Both times almost broke me, because for those brief moments, I was just her Mum.

There’s nothing poetic about loss. The worst part is what follows, the transition to “normal” life. You’re forced to pack your child’s existence into a box as you desperately cling to a blanket, your only tangible reminder they were real. Then, you’re expected to reintegrate with people who no longer recognise you.

I never imagined, in my most hellish nightmares, I’d be a grieving mother at 27. I went from being a vibrant, optimistic twentysomething, to a shell of myself, buried in the same white coffin I carried Noor out of the hospital in.

Friends checked in at first, but weekly “How are you” messages dissolved into monthly “Let me know if you need me” texts, until they faded into silence. Dinners and promises of distraction turned into pivots from my grief to their life developments.

It was then the real disconnect set in. Friends talked so casually about engagements, marriages and house moves, it was as though they were in a parallel universe. I had become withdrawn and exhausted with a façade that reminded me who I once was. That is when I realised I’d been aged out of my 20s. In one ear, I could hear their lives ticking on – and in the other, I could still hear Noor’s heart monitor.

I remember one conversation where a friend asked how I was. It had only been four months since Noor died. For the first time, I told her the truth: “I’m suffocating.” She gave me a sympathetic half-smile: “You’re strong, you’ll be okay.” That was it.

In that moment, the internal rage hit. I wasn’t strong at all, I was burning alive, one foot over the ledge. Now I was no longer sugar-coating my feelings, I had become uncomfortable to be around.

It is an impossible conflict, resenting the people you love for quietly expecting you to perform as your pre-loss self. How do you tell them she is never coming back? You can’t. Instead, I’ve embraced the silence, letting the gaping distance grow. Friends haven’t done anything to the contrary. Perhaps they are afraid to say the wrong thing – but what is friendship if it can’t survive an event you have no control over?

The grief becomes multiplied. You grieve the child that will never call you “Mum”. You grieve the person you worked tirelessly to become. Finally, you grieve the friendships that could not stand who grief turned you into.

They say time heals all things. That is a lie. Time does, however, give you space to let the pain in so you can learn to pull it alongside you rather than weighed down by it.

There are times I’m transported back to the hospital floor I collapsed on during Noor’s final breaths, and times I feel the sting of losing people I considered family. There is no cure. The only path that remains is acceptance, acceptance of what it means to be a mother without her child and acceptance of starting again at 28. I’m not sure what that looks like but I know one step at a time is what Noor would want. That is enough for me.

Baby Loss Awareness Week runs from Friday 9 to Thursday 15 October. Details: babyloss-awareness.org

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