Naming and honouring angels...

A lone flower among the lilypads

One of the few friends I can (and do) speak quite openly to about Poppy and Pipkin commented recently that she thinks it is so cute that I call my lost babies by those names.

Poppy is so named because the day I downloaded all the pregnancy Apps for my iPhone, at all of 4 weeks pregnant, the What To Expect App told me 'The baby is as big as a... Poppyseed".   And it stuck.  It is useful to have a nickname to speak about the new life growing inside you.

Pipkin was named after the smallest rabbit in the book Watership Down, which Mr Duncan was reading aloud to me at bedtime around the time that Pipkin was conceived.

I have read a fair amount of information on loss and grieving since my first miscarriage and many suggest you name your lost babies to formally include them in your family and have a rite of passage, such as a funeral or memorial ceremony to acknowledge their loss.    

While I had certainly been looking at baby names prior to my losses, we had nothing like a short list.  In fact it is unmanageably long.  Maybe if they were older when we lost them, we would have had more of an idea, but part of me feels it is too early to decide before the baby is born and I actually get to meet him or her in person.

When I was in my 20s a close friend had his first baby and excitedly sent out the birth announcement to his friends that his firstborn was named Alexander.  Several days later we received another email, from his wife, saying that after a few days of living with him, it was clear that their son was not an Alexander after all, in fact he was a William.

So they remain Poppy and Pipkin, but I am so glad they both already had their names before I lost them.

Mr Duncan and I want to have some sort of ceremony for them before we leave to live in Australia (still crossing my fingers for the visa) - because they will of course be staying here.  It would be nice to plant a tree or rosebush or something in our garden, but we're in rented accommodation so thats not really a possibility.  I'll have to think about what would work for us...

L.
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