Lessons From Loss

I walked into the Pregnancy Loss Clinic on Monday, May 8 (the birthday of one of my children), drowning in trepidation. I couldn’t believe that my miscarriage could be successfully managed without a D&C. I was sure there would be something in my medical history that made me ineligible for the medication, or that the process would fail.

How do you feel when you can’t protect your child? You die inside.

In the midst of all my anxiety and grief, there was a morning, April 11, when “I woke up and realized how very well I feel for being seven weeks pregnant.” I struggled with that realization, vacillating between panic and peace, for two weeks before my next scheduled doctor visit. Over and over, I relieved the day I had my D&E.

The ob-gyn who performed the D&E for Loila had advised me to wait three months before trying again. At that point, he said, my odds of miscarriage would be the same as for any other expectant mother: one in six. The possibility of trying for another baby began to weigh heavily on my mind. I was 39: it felt like time was running out. And then, there was this devouring emptiness inside of me - “a hole in my gut the size of Manhattan,” I described it. I believed that having a healthy baby would help to fill that hole. Perhaps it would have.

An ongoing issue for me in dealing with my first, and subsequent miscarriages, was the desire to understand why it had happened. I was dumbfounded to hear my doctors say, “We don’t investigate miscarriages until you’ve had three.” Reeling from my first loss, it was hard for me to imagine multiplying that pain by three before anyone would throw me a lifeline…

We had several choices for what we could do with Loila’s remains: have them cremated, bury them, or allow the hospital to dispose of them (“respectfully,” I was assured.) We left her at the hospital for two months while we grappled with that decision and everything else. I wrote in my journal, “Some days, I think I would like [to bury her]. Sometimes I think it would be too much effort, or too much emotion.”

One of the very hard things about my first miscarriage was that it felt like God had withdrawn himself from me. I wrote in my journal about one night when I cried, “but not over the baby. I cried for loneliness and confusion. I cried because I prayed for peace and it did not come. I cried because I could not feel confident that peace would ever come.”

I can’t overstate the loss I felt going into the hospital for a D&E. I was losing the possibility of delivering my baby naturally, the closure of having a body to grieve over. . . .

Many women would feel differently, but I knew immediately what I wanted: to wait for this baby to come naturally, to give her the dignity of a birth. To be perfectly frank, I liked giving birth to my children. Don’t get me wrong - it hurt like nothing has ever hurt before or since, I moaned and wailed and complained, I was scared before and slightly traumatized after each baby - but it was a joyful experience too. Those labors are precious memories for me, gifts to my children. Like I would eventually realize a name could be, a birth was a gift I could give to this child. . .

“I’m sorry” implies empathy, and empathy is powerful.

I received a wide variety of responses when I told my friends about my miscarriages. They ran the gamut from “You wouldn’t have wanted a handicapped child,” and “It’s a good thing, actually. Mother Nature takes care of the ones who can’t survive,” through “Oh well, I hope you can be as brave as someone else I know,” to a friend who hugged me and wept and just said, “I love you so much!”

It was half a year, and more, before I gave “the baby” a name. Why not sooner? I can’t remember now, to what degree I just didn’t think of it, and to what degree it seemed too presumptuous. I’d never heard of anyone naming their miscarried child. It wasn’t till I suffered my second miscarriage that it became necessary to give them each a name, just to tell “the babies” apart.

To another parent grieving the loss of a miscarried or stillborn child, I would strongly urge them to name the baby. Miscarriage is grief in a vacuum - the emotional impact of losing a child with nothing concrete on which to hang that grief - no mementos, no pictures, not even memories. A name is tangible; it is an identity.

My heart remembers.

Eight days after my unexpected breakdown, on October 31st, I had some light bleeding - never a good sign when you’re pregnant. I spent the day lying on the couch. It’s torment to find yourself on the brink of catastrophe with nothing you can do to prevent or prepare. Paradoxically, the only “action” I could come up with to meet this emergency was to rest: ironically, I would soon learn that it was weeks too late for any preventative action.

I couldn’t stop crying, and I didn’t know why.

It was a Sunday morning in October, 2005. Andrew had gone early to church, to one leadership meeting or another. It was my job to get the six kids into Bubba, our big old van, pick up my neighbor and her brood, and drive us all to the chapel. My neighbor’s kids would fight over who got to sit by my two-year-old and help him out of his car seat when we got there. Andrew would be waiting with a bench saved for us, primed for the all-hands-on-deck operation of keeping our family contained, quiet, and - with luck - listening, during the sacrament service. I did this every week. It was a challenge, but I like to be challenged.