Why won't you talk to us?

I spent some time with an old, good friend today. She did exactly what I needed... talked to me. We talked about Aurora, and I answered some of the questions she had. It was exactly what I needed, and exactly what i'll always need.

I'm so tired of people not knowing how to talk to me, or any of my family to be exact. They're afraid to talk to me because they're afraid to make me cry. They don't know what to bring up, or what to talk about, because they're afraid. I understand. They're trying to help. But with the huge elephant in the room, it's kind of hard to miss.

I'm going to cry anyways. I'm going to always be sad. The elephant, it's always going to be there, it doesn't matter if you talk about it or not.

In a book i currently read, the author writes a chapter about this. I'd like to share some of it.

Weddings and live-baby births are easy. The world is perfectly set up to handle them, and everyone knows exactly what to do. There are zillions of cards and invitations designed specifically to announce that this person is marrying that person, or baby-blah-blah was born. There are clear-cut, template ways to behave and converse about such things, and a preapproved set of gifts that are socially appropriate to give and recieve. Even funerals aren't anything new; they happen everyday, on TV, in real life. We know what they are; we understand them.

Stillbirth, on the other hand, is unchartered territory for everyone.

As my grief group has mentioned. We become the teachers now. We are here to let everyone know that talking to us is what we need!

Do not feel like you need to leave us out of something because you are afraid of hurting us - you can't hurt us any worse than we already are.

Do not feel like you can talk to us about certain subjects because you're afraid to make us cry - I cry anyways, what you say or do not say doesn't matter.

We will be ok. Let us determine what is "too much" and what isn't! We'll let you know. We understand you're trying to help, but what you are doing is not helping. It makes us feel like aliens, like we have some sort of contaigous disease. We need you to treat us like normal, because normal is something we're not feeling and normal is something we are craving.