Lily Allen hasn’t recovered from her absolutely heartbreaking stillbirth in 2010, but now she’s willing to speak out about her depression that came from losing her baby boy when she was six months pregnant.
“It was horrendous and something I would not wish on my worst enemy,” Lily tells The Sun. “It’s something that I still haven’t dealt with. I never will get over it. I have dealt with it, you know, as being at one with it. But it’s not something that you get over. I held my child and it was really horrific and painful—one of the hardest things that can happen to a person.”
Lily’s husband, Sam Cooper, stood by her side after their loss and after her septicemia scare days later, which is a blood poisoning infection that can often be fatal. Lily had also suffered a miscarriage in 2008.
“I was overwhelmed by what an incredibly unlucky thing it was to happen. But I had this man standing by my side, who I knew was going to be with me for the rest of my life. I nearly died. But I was numb and I didn’t care. I’d just lost my baby and that is a reflection of how numb I was,” Lily says.
After undergoing an operation, Lily and Sam are now parents to Ethel and Marnie.
“I just think that he’s a part of my eldest really. If he hadn’t died, it wouldn’t have physically been possible for our eldest to be alive because I got pregnant with her so quickly. We’ve got a little stone in our garden with his name on. And lots of different things that I do, rituals, I have him in my mind,” Lily says. “My husband and I shared this horrible thing together but it kind of brought us closer.”
And even after going through all of that pain, Lily and Sam still had miles to go, since Ethel had complications when she was born in 2011.
“My oldest kid was quite sick. She had two operations in the first two months. And then she was tube-fed until she was about seven months old. And as her mum and especially what had happened to me in the past, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It was mentally exhausting. Then she couldn’t gain weight,” Lily says. “I just felt exhausted. My husband said, ‘You just need to get out of the house for a few hours’. I don’t really know anything else so I started writing songs. It wasn’t like, ‘Right, I want to go back to being a pop star and make a new album.’ It was just about claiming back a bit of my life and reconnecting myself really.”
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