Perinatal Child Loss and Grieving

Perinatal Child Loss and Grieving is a central, continuing force in Peter and Eva’s lives after the death of their daughter, Lieve. The loss does not resolve into a shared or orderly process: Eva’s insistence on remembering and Peter’s attempts to resume daily life pull them in different directions, while both remain bound to the child they had hoped to raise.

The Loss and Its Return

The memory of Lieve’s death is anchored in the emergency of 22 July. A year later, while Eva speaks at the grave, Peter is suddenly overtaken by the recollection of her waking him in panic, blood on her body, and their frantic journey to the hospital. He remembers losing time while searching for the car keys, then driving through red lights and over pavements and cycle paths to get past traffic. The past returns with sharp physical particulars: blood soaking a towel and dripping from a rubbish bag onto the car’s beige upholstery, Eva silent and rigid with fear. The anniversary does not merely commemorate what happened; it brings the event back into the present with startling clarity.

At the hospital, the long struggle to have a child ends in the sight of Lieve, tiny, purple, and still. Eva holds her and touches her face, while Peter’s mind turns at once to the future consequences of the loss and to his own perceived failures. They choose to take Lieve home and bury her in a place Eva can visit. That decision gives grief a location, but it does not contain it: for a year Eva goes to the grave every day, sometimes twice, and once a passerby finds her lying there in tears and worries that she may be dead.

A Grave, a Photograph, and a Continuing Bond

Lieve’s grave is both a memorial and a difficult place for Peter to face. It lies in the children’s section of the cemetery beneath a white stone, surrounded by forget-me-nots. Bright flower beds, stuffed animals, and garden ornaments cannot dispel the sorrow there; the nearby sports fields make the sound of lively children an especially painful contrast. Eva tends the grave, while Peter stays away after the funeral, seeing the place as a monument to his failure. When he eventually comes, he lays a white rose against the stone and finds that he feels guilt rather than the love he thinks he ought to feel for a child he never had the chance to know.

Eva’s grief is sustained through intimate acts of remembrance. She keeps a photograph of Lieve, lights a candle beside it, kisses the image, and presses her forehead to the cool glass. The picture matters because it records a daughter she carried and loves, not merely a dead baby. Eva fears that a period without thinking of Lieve might mean forgetting her, and resists the advice from Peter, Hetty, and family members to let go. Her attachment is not simply a refusal to move forward: she understands herself as a mother whose child has died, and sees remembering as part of that identity.

Hetty offers Eva a spiritual way to understand the death, describing Lieve as a Star Child whose soul had a higher purpose and who watches over her. Eva can take comfort in this belief, though Peter cannot. The difference remains visible at the grave: Eva places a small stone angel among the flowers, saying it will watch over Lieve when she is absent, while Peter admires her capacity for belief without sharing it. Their separate responses make the memorial a site of connection and estrangement at once.

Unequal Grief and the Marriage

The loss also becomes the narrow subject around which Peter and Eva’s marriage turns. In an early conversation over coffee on the Grote Markt, Eva thanks Peter for acknowledging how much their daughter’s death matters to him. She has felt as though she alone is grieving. Peter wants to express admiration for her strength, but instead says that he, too, wanted to become a father. Their talk has become so dominated by childlessness and Lieve’s death that other subjects feel forbidden, and silence settles between them as a sign of exhaustion rather than peace.

Peter later tells Hetty that the grief has worn down: he is no longer occupied by it day and night, and he and Eva seem to have found a new equilibrium through new friends, music, and riding his motorcycle. Yet the therapy sessions return him to the suffering he has tried to leave behind. Hetty interprets his restraint as suppression: he believes Eva suffers more and has more right to grieve, so he hides not only the loss of Lieve but also the lost hope of having another child. Her image of an ignored wound that grows more painful gives language to the contradiction in Peter’s apparent recovery. He can resume activities and still carry grief that has not been resolved.

At the grave, Peter recognizes the shameful edge of his response: he is jealous of a dead baby because Eva’s grief is so intense and so plainly hers. He strokes her back and holds her hand while she struggles to speak. The gesture is care, but it does not erase his envy or make their experiences identical. The book presents neither parent’s response as a simple measure of love: Eva’s visible mourning and Peter’s avoidance express different relations to the same loss, and each creates further distance between them.

Continuing Life Without Forgetting

A year after Lieve’s death, Eva tells the child that her parents must go on, but that she will not be abandoned: Lieve remains in their hearts, Eva will continue to think of her, and she will remain her mother. The farewell is accompanied by a kiss on the gravestone and the placement of the stone angel. Its movement toward life is deliberately not a renunciation of the child. Eva can leave the cemetery without accepting that motherhood or attachment has ended.

Later, the possibility of pregnancy brings grief into the ordinary details of Eva’s days. Returning to work with young children distracts her from her body, but she notices tense breasts and nausea at the smell of coffee. She avoids running, cycling, and bumpy roads despite knowing that the chance of pregnancy is very small; hope becomes a fragile interpretation of bodily sensations rather than a certainty. On mornings when fear leaves her unable to get out of bed, she takes comfort from a photograph of Lieve in a knitted sweater and the quilt Eva made. The children at work, with their noise and vitality, do not overwhelm her. Their liveliness instead sharpens her awareness of what it means to have seen a dead child.

Grieving therefore unfolds as repeated movement between remembrance and daily life, not as a clean progression from pain to acceptance. The grave, the photograph, the anniversary memory, work, and the possibility of another pregnancy each bring the loss into a different present. Peter and Eva may try to carry on, but continuing does not require them to stop being Lieve’s parents.