I FELT very “triggered” by social media last week. I wasn’t alone in that, but my pain didn’t come just because I was reminded of the gut-wrenching agony of the death of my baby boy Conor. It came because I had to watch whilst another woman was trolled on social media by a Scottish journalist and was horrifically judged on Loose Women on ITV, denigrated and criticised on a gossipy morning magazine show as four women picked over how and when she should grieve and what that grief should or should not look like, having her pain and agony and choices judged in the worst moments of her life.

Those of us watching with empathy heard that judgement and absorbed the message to keep our grief silent.

Actress and model Chrissy Teigen and her husband singer John Legend have been documenting her third pregnancy with love and hope. Famously open and honest on social media, Teigen has shared the warts-and-all realties of a difficult pregnancy with her social media followers. That honesty took a very sad turn on Saturday when the couple shared a sad and upsetting and raw photo of Teigen in a hospital bed having been told that their baby boy Jack had died.

Teigen and Legend have been criticised for oversharing and capitalising on a “trauma trend”. As a bereaved mother myself I felt incredibly grateful to her for using her high profile in a way that helps to end the silence around the death of a baby.

Silence is a word that I forever associate with the death of Conor.

It started as a normal day in an everyday world. Well, as normal as any day can be when you are eight months pregnant and you know that soon the waiting will be over and your life will change forever.

And change it did, although not in the way I had expected. Twenty-eight years later and you might think I would be over it – whatever “over it” means. But I’m not. I know I never will be.

I still remember being thrust into another world, a world of machines in the neonatal intensive care unit. I still wake in the middle of the night haunted by the tones and beeps; the fluorescent lighting; warning sounds; the symbols; the unfamiliar language of the ever-vigilant doctors checking and rechecking; overhead heaters and monitors; ambient oxygen analysers and IV drips; flexible gastric tubes and power supply cables; the ventilator monitors on which all the flashing lights and numbers that you stare at unknowingly, numbly, beseechingly, are displayed. And then there was silence.

There is nothing worse than a baby screaming and crying, other than one who remains silent.

I remember the cruel torture of leaving my baby boy in the neonatal intensive care unit and going down to the maternity ward to sleep where all the other women were holding or feeding bundles of joy surrounded by balloons and cards and happy husbands with cameras. Lying there clutching my now empty tummy and holding myself with my even emptier arms was an indescribable pain.

My baby died four days before Christmas. So little was known about how to support a woman through this trauma, that when I returned home my family and friends had, well meaningly, already whisked away almost everything, the crib and layette and soft toys and baby’s first Christmas presents that I had collected for Conor.

All I have of him is the little cuddly elephant that he was clutching, his hospital name tag, two fading polaroid pictures taken by the nurses and my memories. I don’t want to be silent about those. They are all I have.

Just eight weeks after Conor’s birth, I met a friend from work in Glasgow’s Byres Road. She waved me down excitedly: “What did you have?”

I cried and walked, almost ran, away from her. I had nothing to say; no words, only silence. In the years since I have been asked at almost every single social and sometimes even business occasion if I have kids and how many.

It’s the kind of ‘‘harmless’’ sort of social chit-chat that is often used as getting-to-know-you small talk.

I try either try, usually unsuccesfully, to change the subject or I lie and pretend that I only have two children, which hurts in a way I will never be able to explain to anyone who doesn’t also live it.

Not only do I have to live without my son, the taboos around baby death are so strong that I feel obliged to deny he ever existed.

Either I edit my life and edit my baby out of that life, or I remain silent. There is absolutely nothing that I can say that won’t make the other person feel absolutely awful and if I do tell the truth the awkwardness and silence after I speak is palpable. I now never ever talk about my experience of pregnancy or birth to other women.

No-one wants to contemplate what happened to me happening to them. On the odd occasion that I have opened up, I can literally feel them back away. It’s too awful to contemplate. So I am complicit in perpetuating the silence.

EVERY single woman goes into a maternity hospital expecting to come home with a new baby and Chrissy Teigen was no different. She could have stayed silent, she could have hidden her distressing news, she could have pretended that the loss of her baby boy was something to be hidden from the paparazzi and gossip sites. She and Legend decided to use their fame to raise awareness and break the silence.

It’s been almost 30 years since my son’s death. I have often wanted to talk of my little boy and include him in my life story. Teigen talking about the pain of leaving the hospital without her baby in her arms was real and brave, no matter how uncomfortable it makes anyone watching.

The truth of the matter is that baby death is not particularly rare. Almost eight babies die every day in the UK, either stillborn or in the first few weeks of their life. One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage and yet so many women feel alone and obliged to stay silent.

Just last week Nadia El-Nakla and her partner Humza Yousaf spoke honestly about their miscarriages. Shona Robison did the same last week. My friend Rhiannon Spear has suffered online abuse for speaking about the miscarriage of her longed-for baby around the time of the SNP conference two years ago and Nicola Sturgeon paved the way by talking about her miscarriage frankly and honestly. In sharing their pain all these women are helping to break the silence. It’s baby loss awareness month and I am adding my story – mine and Conor’s – to theirs.

I am strengthened in some ways by the death of my child. Nothing will ever or could ever hurt that much again.

Pregnancy and birth are such times of joy and excitement, but after baby loss the silence that replaces that joy is brutal and bewildering at a time when you desperately want to talk about your child. I hope that those who do speak will change societal attitudes.

I am forever changed by what happened to me. I’m strong. I had to be, there was no choice. I like being strong. I don’t like being silent.

I was only 23 when my baby died and I went on in later years to give birth to two beautiful and healthy daughters and I got to hear the doctor say “you can take your baby home”.

Sadly, the doctor doesn’t say that to all new families. For some, those first few moments or photographs or memories will be all that they take home. We need to respect how any woman chooses to grieve that most unbearable of losses and support those who choose to speak and break the silence.

A child who loses parents is an orphan. A woman who loses her husband is a widow. There are no words for a woman who loses her child. There are no words. There is only silence.