The thing about grief

Over Christmas, at 12 weeks, as we were planning to share happy news with friends and family, we found out that we lost our little one. I’m sharing this because I’m not ashamed and I want other women who have lost to know that you are not alone. I’m here and I see you and I feel your pain. So if it is relevant to anyone, I’ve written my feelings on loss and grief below. If it helps no one, at least I have gone through my healing process of writing.

The thing about grief

The thing about grief is that it’s a different story for all of us. So different in fact, that it barely warrants a definition in the dictionary. It’d be like defining the color blue or the way you feel when you fall in love. And from the outside grief seems finite. Something happens, someone dies, but then after a period of time we must move on. But from the inside of grief, I find this most daunting; that there will be one day when I am in utter shambles and then one day when I am fine, because it begs the question, when? And what the hell are we supposed to do in the meantime when we sit in darkness?

Four days before Christmas, I went in to the doctors to once again see my unborn baby. My beautiful little astronaut, as we called him, who just weeks before, I saw floating in utter peace with a heartbeat that I could hear and even see. And it was just a few months before that on Halloween night when we laughed and cried at the joy of finding out about our little one... But that day we came to the doctors to hear a deafening silence.

What came next was just a bad collage of unwanted memories. Overwhelming feelings of fear and uncertainty; the nurse calling in a doctor to say “We’re just not seeing what we want to see,” (which now I know is a nicely worded sentence for the baby is dead); the poking and prodding and feeling and looking for something that I knew was no longer there. And finally an image, with no sound, of our little one laying lifeless inside of me.

I could write a whole novel on miscarriage. How horrible it is, what a D&E procedure is like, how it feels to carry a lifeless body in your own, and how it feels to actively lose it all over again. But the miscarriage was a finite thing. A horrible thing, but finite. The grief and the healing are far from being finite.

I just have a few things to say about miscarriage itself. The first is that I was an idiot before about anyone who suffered this trauma and loss. Logistically I understood why miscarriage would be painful but I really had no idea. I didn’t understand that not only do you feel the loss of a person whom you loved, but that feeling of loss is immediately coupled with the complete destruction of an entire life’s worth of expectations of joy and happiness. Not to mention your body’s own participation in such a destructive process. I have worked with a lot of individuals with trauma in my past career and all trauma is important and painful but I can fathom few things more painful than this combination of loss and grief and disappointment and complete and utter destruction and heartbreak. I think about the first week I came in for an appointment, for my first ultrasound. I was filled with nervous anticipation and excitement. I was well aware that miscarriage was a possibility but it was just a vague concept to me at the time and when I finally saw my baby for the first time I was so elated, I didn’t give it much greater thought at the time. After all, at that point all statistics (except that nasty little 5% after 8 weeks) was in my favor. So I remember sitting in the waiting room of the ultrasound tech and there was a woman in the room, alone, crying a little. I was so wrapped up in myself and my nerves about this vague idea of my own chances of miscarriage that I looked at her big belly and assumed she had some personal issue and I actually thought “Lady, what is your problem, just be happy your are already so pregnant.” It had not even crossed my mind that this office was a place of life and miracles but also a place of death and darkness. At least not until I sat in the darkness, crying while expecting mothers joyfully strolled past me. I think if I had a time machine the only one thing I would go back and do with my life, is go back to that waiting room and sit with her, and hold her, and cry with her, as my husband did for me. The second thing I will say about miscarriage is that I am so so so so sorry. For all who have lost. Whether it was a few weeks or several months. I am so sorry. This is so painful and so difficult and just really hard for those who have not directly experienced it to show genuine compassion and empathy. I’m sorry I didn’t understand before. But I am here now for you if you have ever experienced loss or ever will. I’ll be right here and I will never forget this pain so I will always be here to empathize and just sit with you in your pain.

So about that pain and back to my original question, which relates to all loss and grief, of what the hell do we do now?

I wanted to write this before I knew there would be a happy ending. Because I have read (and certainly value) dozens of posts of women who recount their loss but can say that “ it was worth it all through the tears and pain because now I am writing this while holding my beautiful 10 month old boy.” Well I’m not holding anything. I have nothing to say that this is worth it. I have no reassurance and certainly no reason to feel hopeful. In fact I’m writing this while I am still cramping and bleeding from my loss. I’m sorry to say that this story, in this exact moment doesn’t have a happy “but” to it. But that is exactly my point. That those of us who are sitting in the deepest depths of grief cannot hold on to the hope that one day time will heal all wounds because today is not that day and no matter what you do, today will not become that day.

The ironic shining light for me has been this exact feeling of pure hopelessness. I thought I felt hopeless before but I didn’t even know the feeling of hopelessness. Now that I do, here it is. Because having hope is also sometimes having the illusion of having control. I believe we have control over some things in our lives, that we can design our own destinies... to an extent. I went to school with my own money, I worked hard for my grades and my jobs so sure, that sort of control you can have (after a certain level of growing up in a privileged situation of having supportive family). But of our actual lives and those around us, there is no control. We are all sailing on our own little boats on the ocean. And some people feel that because they have ridden some waves and come out on top, that they have control over the ocean and the tides. But those people have never truly weathered a storm that was directed by the ocean.

For me, my wave happened to be the shock of miscarriage. All of my dreams and ideas hopes for this new life I was creating were literally swept away. And I am now, underwater, looking up. I haven’t even come up for air yet because I’m not even sure how it will feel to inhale again. Or maybe I think that others won’t notice that I have been swept under if I just stay down below the surface, at least I won’t have to confront anything. I’m just floating, watching the remains of my tattered ship drift away from me, and deciding if it’s worth it to see the damage or if the sun has come out again.

When I get to the surface - and hear me my friends, it’s okay to stay under for a while if you are there - I only have one thing to do. I must accept that I am a little ship floating on the waves that go in and out. That I will always have to roll in with the tide and be thrown over by storms. That I cannot control the waves... but that I can control my little boat. And to borrow from the wise (and handsome) Kenny Chesney: all I can do now, is build a better boat.