I Had a Miscarriage

by Jessica Zucker

  Liev knew some of this already; because of my work, we’d discussed it. But the specific situation of my loss was one I’d been waiting to share. Partially, I didn’t want to burden him, and wanted to be sure that he was mature enough to handle something this complex. Also, a part of me worried he might inadvertently blurt the facts of my loss in his sister’s face, telling her before I had the chance to do it myself. I didn’t know the best way, how to broach it or how far to take it. Sharing any of these details and the resulting grief with my son felt deeply disconcerting and somehow also intrinsically sacred at the same time. In time, I will share—when the time is right, I thought to myself, trusting that I’d rise to the occasion if it came up. I would pick and choose carefully what to share and what to leave out, of course.

  Ultimately, there’s really only so much planning one can do for conversations like these. And then it happened. We’d been talking about our respective days, and he’d been curious to hear more about my work and the stories I hear there. He proudly tells people that his mommy is a “doctor of the heart” (so some actually think I’m a cardiologist, amusingly), and expresses intrigue in psychological development—the way our histories shape who we become. One question led to the next, and there in his bedroom, I shared with him how my work intersects with my life.

  “Well, Mommy, at least you never went through what those women went through. Actually, though … I guess if you had, you’d be able to understand them even better.”

  Here we were, I realized. It was time. I seized the opportunity and let him guide our way through it.

  “Well, sweetie, I did, actually,” I said.

  “Wait, what?!” he replied. “You did? When?”

  I brought him back to the day it happened, and piqued his memory by reminding him about how he’d had his first-ever semi-sleepover that evening, and that this was what led to it.

  He pressed further.

  “She was a girl,” I told him, “and I named her Olive.” I explained that, at just three years old, he’d told me he’d wanted a sister named Olive. So I told him that since his daddy and I had loved the name as much as he did, we had decided to give her this name.

  “That’s the name I loved. I really love that name, Mommy.” There was a pause. “Wait, so you wanted three kids?” he asked.

  “No, my love,” I explained. “Noa wouldn’t be here if Olive had made it.”

  He understood and opined about how much he loves his sister before telling me how sad he was for me that I’d had to go through that.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” he offered. His questions continued: “Why do babies die too soon?”

  “Sometimes it happens because the baby isn’t healthy, like Olive,” I explained, “and sometimes it’s because of other complications.”

  “So the baby’s heart is beating one minute, and then not the next? Does it hurt the mommy’s heart when that happens?” he asked, curious and concerned.

  “They hurt indescribably so,” I told him.

  “But what do the mommies do the next day? Without the baby?”

  “They rest. They cry. They remember. They receive support,” I replied.

  And at that, he asked to feel my heartbeat, and offered to let me feel his.

  What a milestone moment this was, sharing about my loss with my older child. My tender-hearted son. Such connectedness was ushered in during this deeply important conversation between us. I can only imagine what it felt like for him to hear this, and the way his mind will tinker with this emboldened information over time.

  This exchange precipitated several other conversations, piquing his interest in pregnancy, loss, and the ways families piece their lives back together afterward. It’s thrilling to watch his mind work as he darts questions at me that even some adults have never asked. There’s abounding empathy revealed in his every perceptive query; it just about bowls me over with pride and gargantuan love. It makes me want to eat him up. Talk for hours. The subsequent conversations frequently took place during car rides—en route to piano practice, baseball games, play dates, they just pop out. He’ll spring a question on me seemingly out of nowhere, which reveals and reiterates to me how thoughtful his mind is and what a huge heart he has. Liev asks, unprompted, from the back seat: “Mommy, how old would that girl be now?”

  Unsure what he’s referring to, as just a moment ago we were talking about Fortnite, I reply, “Which girl, sweetie?”

  “The pregnancy you lost. It’s so sad. How old would she be? Because if Noa is five and a 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 look at a horrific or heartbreaking situation. Sometimes when we try to make sense of why bad things happen to good people, we find ourselves searching for meaning where there is none, getting caught in a manufactured duality. We can hold both. There is room and necessity for nuance, complexity, and gradation. We can be hurt and healing simultaneously. We can be grateful for what we have and angry about what we don’t at the exact same time. We can dive deep into the pit of our pain and not forget the beauty our life maintains. We can hold both. We can grieve and laugh at precisely the same moment. We can make love and mourn in the same week. Be crestfallen and hopeful. We can hold both. And so it goes. We grievers might stumble upon these notions the hard way (I’m not so sure there’s any other way to come face-to-face with them), but nevertheless, we work to integrate them and, in time, deftly tuck them in to our pockets as hard-won wisdom we might just get the chance to impart someday.

  This is what I’ve learned—as a woman, as a therapist, as a griever, as a mother. Though “healing” might not be the most apt word to describe what happens to us after we survive pregnancy or infant loss, we aim to become familiar with our newly shaped lives. We rest in this strange and unfamiliar place. We do our best. We arduously wrestle with and try to predict what might come next. We wonder if we will ever be our (previous) selves again. We ruminate on the what-ifs. We might even become impatient with grief. We make plans, knowing they, too, might take a left turn, even though before we were most always certain they’d go right.

  Maybe for some, the concept of healing resonates. Either way, what matters most is that we take a stance of unequivocal compassion for what follows pregnancy and infant loss. Lacking in self-judgment, we do our best to play it by ear and show up for ourselves in whatever it is we are feeling. We can’t always plan it. Control is out of reach, ephemeral. We can’t get “out” of grief or “past” it or even “through” it, necessarily. And crucially, we should not try to circumnavigate or dodge it altogether. We can exist in it, together. We already do, actually, by the mere fact that we are one in four (miscarriage), one in one hundred (stillbirth), one in eight (fertility struggles)—the list goes on. Statistics adding up to the millions means we are plentiful and robust. But until women no longer silently muse, I am in this alone, I feel isolated, and Why am I the only one this is happening to? our work is not done. My work is never finished.

  We must challenge ourselves communally and individually to do our part to shift the narrative: be it by sharing your own story, checking in on a friend, or claiming your truth aloud despite the fear. Big or small, your effort and place in all of this matters. Whatever version feels right for you, do that. And then maybe stretch a little further the next time. Stretching the empathy might yield transformative change: empathy for yourself and maybe even toward a reproductive outcome unfamiliar to you.

  Together, we have the chance to rewrite the reproductive-loss script—we already are, in fact—for grievers and loved ones alike. It’s underway, this much-needed zeitgeist shift. Imagine if the reproductive-loss landscape looked and felt fully inclusive of the spectrum of reproductive outcomes; if grief were no longer conceptualized as something to do away with, but rather were respected as the wise teacher it is; if silence, stigma, and shame dissipated altogether, and we actively moved closer to uncomfortable conversations, rather than further away. Then, and only then, will society change form. Permeating culture, storytelling would—once and for all—replace silence, making as much room for heartache as it needs, in perpetuity. With no rush, no expiration dates, no comparing or contrasting, no turning in on the self. None of that. Instead, this newfound spaciousness would normalize the circuitousness of bereavement and reframe discussions around pregnancy and infant loss.

  Make no mistake: this is radical. Our mothers and grandmothers, aunts and sisters do not necessarily know what this world looks like, and it may be a difficult mindset to adjust to. What we are creating, through our vulnerability, our stories, our deeply personal and yet magically universal histories, may stir mixed feelings: everything from resentment that they did not receive the same support we are offering to those who come after us, to old and unprocessed grief—grief they were not allowed the time nor the space nor the language to process. Through truth-telling and expanding the reproductive dialogue to include grief as a mainstay—as well as apathy and relief—a much-needed metamorphosis might just be in order.

  Your story might be the very genesis of this. I dare you to find out. I am here, rooting you on and supporting your every step. Sometimes a witness is precisely what we need to be seen, to be heard, to be honored for who we are, exactly where we are. To be seen amid transformation. A transformation that is so deeply personal, so profound. What’s more is if enough of us dare ourselves to speak up, then maybe, just maybe, we can collectively incite a cultural transformation. A revolution of reproduction.

  I have learned an immeasurable amount from the women who have sat with me in these moments. Through these potent exchanges of emotional intimacy, I have been bowled over by both the beauty and the catharsis that comes about from sheer vulnerability, benevolence, and tenderness. These connections have been legitimately life-changing, and they so deeply reflect what happens when we allow ourselves to share with one another—candidly—about these harrowing experiences. I’ve learned that getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is part and parcel of the grieving process. I’ve learned that silence is suffocating and that shame strangulates. I’ve learned that community might be the very antidote to these insidious vestiges. I’ve also learned that magic lies in allowing ourselves to lean in to our pain. We don’t drown. We have one another to buoy us. Several years ago, for one of the installments of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign, I gathered a diverse group of women, and one of the things I asked them to reflect on during our time together was what they pictured when they envisioned a world where we have achieved the mission, where we have finally replaced
silence with storytelling. The responses should come as no surprise to anyone who has read this far: “I’d feel safe.” “I’d feel at peace.” “I’d feel inspired.” “I’d feel empowered.” “I’d feel liberated for the women ahead of us.” “It would be so freeing.” I’ve heard every iteration—the ongoingness of hope for a shifted loss landscape. It’s unequivocal. We want the reproductive-loss conversation (and lack of it) to palpably change. It’s indisputable. We want it. Millions of us. Whether it’s one story at a time, or a slew of them shared all at once—we want to see cultural change.

  Through normalizing the conversation around what is in fact a frequent outcome of pregnancy, we work toward never again hearing a woman in the aftermath of miscarriage say, “I feel alone.” We know there is a way to meet heartbreak with abundant support and free-flowing dialogue, eschewing antiquated things like self-blame, guilt, and notions of body failure. If the pregnancy-loss conversation was all-encompassing and capable of holding space or nuance, and if the various expressions of grief were embraced as acceptable reactions to miscarriage and infant loss—if we, as a culture, would simply trust those who experience pregnancy to name, express, and own the many outcomes of gestation—more of us would feel empowered to give a name to our complex feelings of loss, and less of us would feel as if these losses were somehow a fault of our own.

  I think of all the change I’ve seen with my own eyes, and I well up and teem with hope when I imagine what it could mean for future generations. For our families. For my daughter. And my son. And their offspring. And onward.