The story behind this powerful image of a grieving mum
A simple but powerful black and white photo of a woman crying in the shower has gone viral.
Shared online by photographer Brittany Latham, the photograph of a woman dealing with the grief of a miscarriage has touched women from all around the world.
Brittany, from Alabama, US, took the photo of her friend sitting on the floor and hugging herself in the shower, which accompanied a powerful post highlighting the strength of women.
“The response, simply put, has been overwhelming,” Brittany told Yahoo Be. “Woman from every corner of the earth have reached out to me to let me know how it touched them.
“I am glad to just know that a dark time in my own life was able to bring healing and light to someone else.”
In the post, that has since been shared over 400,000 times, with 68,000 comments, Brittany, a single mum of three, touched on how women hold on to so much as they need to be strong for others.
The post reads:
Brittany revealed she wrote the words for the post the week she lost her baby to miscarriage.
“I was honestly in a very sad place. I knew that my friend had also recently lost a pregnancy so when I decided that I needed an image to go with the writing,” she told Mamamia.
“I realised that I did not have one single girlfriend that had never had a good cry in the shower. My entire thought process was that when I was going through a pregnancy loss, I still had to be strong for my other three children. I thought to myself, ‘What are things that we all handle every single day as women without missing a beat for the sake of other people?’
“And so after talking with the women in my life and pulling from my own experiences I wanted something that most every women could find herself in if not more than one.”
She says she never expected the reaction from her post but the messages of support she received from women around the world, has helped her deal with her own loss and grief.
“I don’t think that anything will ever take away the sting of a pregnancy loss, but for me it has been months of very open conversation with other women and a general sense of not being alone in my battles,” the 30-year-old tells YahooBe.
“It doesn’t matter where we are born, how much money we have, what type of home that we live in – women from every country and every race deal with the same issues.
“I think that is why it reached as far as it did.”