Chrissy Teigen will never forget the conversations she had with kids Luna and Miles following her pregnancy loss.
The cookbook author looked back at her heartbreaking discussions with her 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son during a recent interview with Scary Mommy.
"They saw the experience of the home ultrasounds and the nervousness of 'This isn't going well,'" she recalled. "Or it was me going to the bathroom, and Luna would be at the door when I came out, and she would say, 'Are you bleeding still?' She knew everything. So there was going to be no escaping it, even if I wanted to."
In September 2020, Teigen and her husband, John Legend, shared that they'd lost their son, who'd they'd named Jack, 20 weeks into her pregnancy. But the Lip Sync Battle host said it wasn't until they received the baby's ashes that the kids "started to be able to say, 'OK, this happened. Here he is now. He didn't make it.'"
"It was something for them to be able to put a story to, where we could say, 'OK, Jack is in here and he is going to stay with us. And maybe one day we might release him. And he loves that we still think about him, and he loves that we're still emotional about him, but more than anything, he loves that we talk about him. That makes him really excited and really happy,'" Teigen explained. "So they know that he's still very much a part of our lives."
Tiegen said she doesn't think Luna and Miles have fully grasped the situation—and neither has she.
"I don't think they'll ever quite understand why he didn't make it, in the way that I don't understand," she continued. "I had a placental abruption, and I keep having to ask my doctor, 'OK, but why? Why wasn't it able to work? Why didn't we just keep going?' And they were like, 'We physically would've run out of blood in the hospital. Were we going to do that for 20 weeks in the hospital?' That's still something that I'm coming to terms with, why we gave up. Honestly, the [kids] still catch me in a funk some days. And the first thing they go to is, 'Is it baby Jack?'"
Still, Teigen, Legend, Luna and Miles continue to keep Jack's memory alive. "At school when they draw things, they draw him as an angel," she shared with Scary Mommy. "We talk about it a lot. What felt comfortable for our family was him always being around. Whether we go on a vacation or something, they always say, 'Don't forget baby Jack.' And then I have to pack him up. And then we get to where we're going, they're like, 'Oh my gosh, he must be thirsty.' This might sound crazy to people, but they'll put a little glass of water next to his little box of ashes. And they really love being a part of it."
As Teigen noted in a recent Instagram post, she threw herself into writing her latest cookbook Cravings: All Together: Recipes to Love, which she dedicated to Jack, after the pregnancy loss "to distract from the trauma, the pain, the grief." But once she finished, she decided to take time to heal. She stopped drinking and started to attend therapy.
In September, on National Sons Day, Teigen paid tribute to "the son we almost had."
"A year ago you gave me the greatest pain I could ever imagine to show me I could survive anything, even if I didn't want to," she wrote on Instagram. "I didn't get to take care of you but you came and went to get me to love myself and take care of myself because our bodies are precious and life is a miracle. They told me it would get easier but yeah, that hasn't started yet. Mom and dad love you forever."