“Just Try Again” – What No One Tells You About Grief After Pregnancy Loss In Singapore

ICF-Certified Pregnancy Loss Coach Vernessa Chuah tells her story of pregnancy loss, grief, and tips on how Mamas can start to heal.

When I lost my first pregnancy, I was told: “You’re still young.”

When I lost the second: “At least you know you can get pregnant.” And then, almost in the same breath, “Just try again.”

When I lost the third, the questions shifted. Maybe you were too active. Maybe you worked too much. Maybe the stress caused it. Maybe you exercised too much. Everything I did became a possible reason. Everything I was became a possible fault.

And then came the one I will never forget, the question that arrives dressed as concern but lands like an accusation: “Why did it happen?”

I, of all people, would have given anything for that answer. But when they asked me, it didn’t feel like care. It felt like implication. Like I must have known. Like somewhere, somehow, I had caused it.

I wonder if anyone has ever asked a cancer patient: “Why did your cancer happen?” The answer is unknown, and somehow, that is enough. The question is never asked. The silence is respected.

But with pregnancy loss, the question comes easily. Repeatedly. Without a second thought.

After a while, the world expected me to move on. Grief that lingered past a few months became uncomfortable for the people around me. Still speaking about my babies became unwelcome. “Just try again,” they said. “You’ll be okay once you have another one.”

So I wrote a script. The same words, copied and pasted, every time someone asked how I was. I learned to perform what the world requires—present, polite, appropriate.

Read more: I Suffered Three Pregnancy Losses and Found My Calling in My Grief

I smiled. I nodded. And I quietly fell apart alone.

It is not weakness to feel what you feel. The anger, the injustice, the grief with no neat edges—these are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs that you loved, deeply and completely, someone the world barely acknowledged.

If you are reading this after losing a baby—whether to miscarriage, stillbirth, termination for medical reasons (TFMR), IVF, or fertility-related loss—I want you to know:
Your grief is real. And it deserves a caring home.

Pregnancy loss grief feels isolating: “The world carries on as though nothing happened.”

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with pregnancy loss. It is a grief that often has no funeral, no compassionate leave, no acknowledgement. In Singapore especially, many losses happen before anyone even knew you were pregnant. You return to the MRT, the office, the family dinner table—still hurting, still in disbelief—and the world carries on as though nothing happened. But something enormous happened. You lost not just a pregnancy. You lost a future you had already begun to imagine. A name you may have whispered. A due date circled quietly in your heart.

Around 25% of pregnancies in Singapore end in loss, and 80% of those are beyond our control, caused by chromosomal abnormalities that no amount of rest, caution, or “doing everything right” could have prevented. Yet most parents leave the hospital with little to no emotional support, seven out of ten describe feeling emotionally abandoned the moment they walk out those doors.

That invisibility does not make the grief disappear. It just forces it underground, where it resurfaces as anxiety at every subsequent scan, tension in the body that never fully releases, a quiet fear of letting yourself hope again, or feeling easily frustrated and agitated that you cannot explain.

Why “just try again” makes everything harder

Singapore is a warm, family-centred culture, and that warmth is genuine. When people say “just try again,” they mean well. They want to offer hope.

But what that phrase does is skip straight over the loss itself. And grief that is not acknowledged does not heal, it hides.

I have sat with women who lost their babies one month ago, five years ago, even twenty years ago. The message they absorbed, however unintentionally, was that their loss did not quite count. That something must be wrong with them for still hurting after so long. Sometimes they were even told: “You didn’t have the baby long enough to grieve this way.”

Nothing is wrong with you. Your love for that baby was real. And love does not resolve on a timeline.

Read more: How to Help a Grieving Mama Who’s Experienced Stillbirth or Pregnancy Loss

What actually helps

Healing from pregnancy loss is not about moving on. It is about learning to carry your love and your grief at the same time, without being consumed by either.

Give your baby a name, and give your loss a place.
Whether you were four weeks along or 28, whether this was a medical loss or a devastating choice made under impossible circumstances, that baby was yours. You are allowed to grieve them fully, without apology and without a deadline.

Let the page hold what you cannot say out loud.
There is something quietly powerful about putting grief into words, not to explain it, not to make sense of it, but simply to give it somewhere to live outside of you. Journaling creates a private space where there is no need to perform okayness, no one to reassure, no right or wrong thing to write or draw.

You might write a letter to your baby — your tears, your dreams, the things you never got to say. You might scrawl anger across the page. You might draw. Whatever comes, it is enough. When you put emotion into words on paper, you begin to process it rather than carry it sealed inside.

I created the Pregnancy Loss Journal (SGD$25, with free delivery within Singapore) specifically for this—a guided space structured around three chapters: Release, Heal, and Moving Forward. Blank pages for words, drawings, poems and memories. No prompts that feel clinical. Just room for your grief, and room for you.

Find one space where you do not have to perform “okay.”
This might be a trusted friend, a grief coach, or a support circle. Somewhere you can say: I miss them. I am feeling angry. I am feeling scared. I am feeling jealous when I see a pregnancy announcement. And be met with presence, not platitudes. A small and important reframe: you are feeling anger / fear / anxiety — it is not who you are. Emotions are passing weather. They do not define you. You are not anger or fear itself.

Come back to your body.
After loss, many women feel deeply disconnected from their bodies, uncertain how to trust them, uncertain of their own identity. Gentle somatic practices like Tension Release Exercises (TRE®), EFT tapping, and mindfulness can help your nervous system slowly find safety again. Movement also matters more than we think: a 10-minute walk, gentle stretching, swimming, gardening, dance—anything that gets the body moving helps discharge the emotional energy that grief stores in our muscles and tissues. The goal is not to outrun your pain. It is to build the strength to carry it.

Let grief move at its own pace—with the right support.
Grief is not a wall you push through. It is a river, moving differently for each person and each loss. Time alone does not heal, it is what you do with that time. A garden left full of weeds does not recover on its own. The Grief Recovery Method®, an evidence-based programme used globally for over 40 years, is one of the most effective tools I have seen for helping bereaved parents truly process what they carry.

Separate guilt from grief—they are not the same thing.
TFMR, IVF loss, recurrent miscarriage, these losses often carry layers of guilt and shame that other grief does not. Many parents I work with come to me feeling guilty. But when I define what guilt actually means–“the intention to harm, or misaligned with your own values”—something usually shifts. You did not intend harm. You made the best decision you could with the knowledge, resources, and capacity you had at that moment. That is not guilt. That is love doing its very hardest work.

Read more: “No Heartbeat”: The Grief of Losing My Unborn Baby

A free space to be heard

My three pregnancy losses, including a TFMR, taught me that grief does not make us weaker. When it is held with the right support, it becomes the very thing that cracks us open to a deeper capacity for love, presence, and resilience.

If you are in the thick of it right now—perhaps just days out of hospital, or years on and still carrying something heavy that no one around you quite understands—an open door is available to you:

Holding Space: Pregnancy & Infant Loss Circle
Complimentary and bi-monthly Pregnancy & Infant Loss Circle in Singapore, open to any bereaved parent who has experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, TFMR, infant loss, IVF, or fertility-related loss. No cost. No pressure to share. Just a warm, safe space to be seen and heard, with others who truly understand. Find out more here.

Wave of Light: Honouring Your Baby in Singapore
Every year in October, something quietly remarkable happens around the world. Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Week is observed from October 9 to 15, and on October 15 at 7pm, in every time zone, one after another, bereaved parents light a candle and keep it burning for one hour. As each time zone passes the flame to the next, it creates a continuous Wave of Light circling the globe for 24 hours: a collective act of remembrance for all the babies who were loved and lost.

If you would like to be notified when the next Pregnancy Loss & Infant Circle, or Wave of Light Singapore gathering is announced, you are warmly welcome to reach out to [email protected] (Tel:) +65 9783 7313.