I Had a Miscarriage by Jessica Zucker (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

half, would she be like seven or something? How old was I when that happened?”

His love. His memory. It stays strong.

I hope conversations like these continue until the end of time. I hope that lines of communication remain open between us—about life, death, and these liminal spaces—always.

14

“Sometimes, a witness is precisely what we need.”

A friend recently asked me how to get “past” grief. Her miscarriage had occurred less than a week before and she was desperate to know how to navigate the emotional muck. She wanted a compass. Decisive directions. A roadmap that would adequately pinpoint any potential roadblocks, cliffs, detours, or “works in progress.” Go due north for about a mile, then when you get to the bend, head west: you will have arrived. If only.

I understood this desire too well: To obtain information or a time frame of future grieflessness. To have some concrete knowledge, at least, of what lay ahead. “Swim in it,” I said with a tinge of trepidation, wishing there was a better answer. “We fear we might drown if we lean into grief. But you won’t. You might feel like you are, but we won’t let you.” There was a significant silence—an empty thought bubble hovered between us as she digested my words. And then, almost immediately, tears of acknowledgment dripped from her eyes in reverie. Sometimes, a witness is precisely what we need.

As humans, we are prone to trying to rush through the tough stuff—be it mild psychological discomfort or a more extreme situation, like trauma or tragedy. And this makes complete sense, of course. Why would we want to be psychologically uncomfortable, for any amount of time? It simply doesn’t feel good. As a result, we sometimes attempt to skirt the issue at hand and skim the surface of pain because we want to get back to feeling good. As much as we’d prefer to skip difficulties entirely though, we all know that life doesn’t really afford us this opportunity. This evanescent luxury. It can’t and it won’t. And beyond this impossibility lies what we would lose if we were capable of sidestepping trauma, hardship, death, loss, pain, grief. Because when we attempt to stave off our personal truths, including the ones that hurt, we often inadvertently stymie our capacity for growth and resilience. We might, by the very nature of trying to fend off some of our feelings (i.e., the unpleasant ones), unwittingly clamp down on the juicy ones as well, feelings like joy and love and peace. And as a result, we are likely to find ourselves living a little smaller, loving a little less freely—out of fear born of self-preservation—with the sincere hope of staying safe.

It’s intuitive and distinctly mammalian—this survival instinct. This is not necessarily a conscious decision, of course, or by design. Sometimes surviving is the best we can do. But sometimes, we can do more. In time. I’ve had the distinct privilege of witnessing basic survival evolve into a state of full-fledged thriving, time and time again, in a micro sense in the context of my practice and on a macro level online. It’s why I do what I do—in my practice and in digital communities. It is an honor. A privilege. To be present in this revelatory season with women. By digging into challenging feelings, facing pain head-on—stumbling across enlightening epiphanies along the way and quite possibly some pitfalls too—we can be carried from elemental survival to a sturdier state of mind.

This brings me to the concept of healing—a word I hesitate to use too often when it comes to pregnancy and infant loss, as it by definition might hem us in or accidently diagnose a problem where there isn’t one (or, at least needn’t have a solution). It might imply that there is something unhealthy or damaged (or that we are damaged), and that something (or someone) requires fixing. Must we be “fixed”? Should grief have a time frame we must adhere to? And if we don’t adhere to it, then we are somehow seen as an outlier, a renegade who is not healing? I don’t think so.

Healing is defined as “the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.”23 The concept has also been described as “the process of the restoration of health from an unbalanced, diseased, damaged or unvitalized organism.”24 Grief surely doesn’t fit neatly into any of these descriptions, nor should it. It’s one thing to talk about healing in the context of physical ailments. We can, for example, literally watch a scrape or a bruise heal in real time in a matter of days. Emotional healing, however, is anything but linear, and isn’t best described as “diseased.” Far from it.

Grief is natural. It is normal. A birthright. It’s subjective and relative. And as any element of healing comes about, it does so slowly, and not steadily in the slightest—particularly when it comes to miscarriage, stillbirth, infant loss, or any other form of reproductive trauma. In fact, there may never be a getting-over of what happened to us, either by chance or out of necessity. We move forward, rather, with the pain inscribed in our psyches. Must we work to get rid of memory altogether to become “healthy” again? I think not. The weight of our losses might feel heavy one day and markedly lighter the next, but the memory remains. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Neither is indicative of being more or less “healed” or “healthy.” Neither is right or wrong. There’s not necessarily a linear path that leads us out of our discomfort and into an unaffected state.

We might also compassionately absolve ourselves of the inclination to search for a silver lining. There might not actually be one, and that’s okay. We need not feel pressured into finding bright spots when we just landed in the dark ones, and we mustn’t succumb to this binary vision of adversity. Sometimes things don’t “happen for a reason” and sometimes there isn’t a cheerful way to