"Someone who has lost a child has lost who they love most and needs to talk about it"

Barcelona"We all carry death behind us and no one is aware of it. From the moment you are born, they are giving you life and they are giving you death. Fortunately, not so many children die or not so many sons die, but it happens," reflects Paula Miras. She is the creator of the podcast Un dia més, focused on grief and its management, a personal project created from her experience as the mother of a son, Blai, who died when he was two years and five months old. "He died in September 2024 suddenly and totally unexpectedly due to a common virus. He was diagnosed on a Wednesday, due to a very high fever spike, and his viral condition worsened day after day. And even though we took him to the hospital on repeated occasions in a very short period of days, the doctors' hypothesis all along was that it was a viral condition and that everything that was happening to him was within normal limits. On Sunday he went into cardiac arrest at home and died suddenly," recalls this teacher by profession.

Three weeks after Blai died, Paula and her husband learned they were expecting another child, Bruna, who is now 13 months old. "Two months before Bruna was born, I needed to stop and then I started going to a grief group. Meeting other families and, above all, meeting young mothers who had also lost young children made me feel very accompanied, it was key to find a space among equals," says Miras, who points out that both she and her husband started therapy a week after the death of her son.

She explains that one of the things that surprised her the most was discovering that in her group there were people who came from all over Catalonia, from Torredembarra to Puigcerdà, because where they lived there was no such resource, neither publicly nor privately. With the idea of offering a tool for support and sharing experiences with other families, Miras launched the podcast, which she financed through a crowdfunding. For now, she has published eleven episodes, but she has twenty-seven recorded.

Living death so closely, she explains, has taught her that "people are not prepared to listen, to talk, to accompany." "Mistakenly, many people think that the best thing to do when someone loses a loved one is to not touch the subject, not talk about it much. It's done with the intention of not stirring things up or causing pain to the other person, but it's the opposite. In the end, someone who has lost a child has lost their dearest one in life and what they need is not to not talk about it, it's just the opposite," she reflects.

Miras assures that the best way to help someone going through grief is presence. "You don't have to offer any solution, because what has happened to them is so immense that there is no possible solution. You have to accompany them through presence, and that can range from visiting them once a week to sending a message saying 'I'm here.' And above all, don't try to rush to stop being sad because sadness will stay with you for a long time and in a very different way," she emphasizes.

Another of her recommendations is to be careful with comments. She considers it preferable to say nothing rather than say something that, despite good intentions, might hurt. "I know mothers who have lost babies during childbirth or mid-pregnancy, who receive comments like 'you'll have another one.' Tell me you're very sorry, but don't tell me I'll have another one because, even if that's true, I wanted this one too."

Miras emphasizes that each person manages grief in their own way, but that the best thing one can do to start a healthy grieving process is to go through what hurts. "From minute one, we said 'we have to immerse ourselves in this that hurts us.' If I take everything that belonged to my son and keep it all in a place so I don't see it and forget what hurts, in a way I'm denying his existence. It's unbearable pain, but it's a pain you have to go through to know how to walk through life with it."