A loss is a loss, and a life is a life-no matter how small.
When a baby dies through miscarriage or stillbirth, parents lose more than a pregnancy. They lose hopes, plans, dreams, and a future they had already begun to imagine.
Yet pregnancy loss is often misunderstood. Grieving parents may hear that it was "too early" to be attached, that they can "just try again," or that they should somehow move on. Those words can deepen an already profound sense of loss.
In No Matter How Small, Patrick and Kristen Riecke bring together their own experience with pregnancy loss, years of supporting grieving families, and powerful stories that give voice to the complicated realities of miscarriage and stillbirth.
With honesty, compassion, and practical wisdom, they explore the grief of mothers and fathers, very early miscarriage, faith and doubt, insensitive comments, difficult emotions, memory-making, funerals and memorials, supportive community, and finding meaning after loss.
No Matter How Small is for anyone who has lost a baby-and for the family members, friends, clergy, counselors, healthcare professionals, and others who want to better understand how to walk beside someone who has.
Because however brief a child's life may have been, that life mattered.
And so does the grief of the people who loved that child.