When You Lose The Life You Carry
I come to the page with hesitation, as part of me wants to keep this story to myself, hidden away like a treasure, or a sin. Then I start wondering why this particular story isn't meant to see the light, why women stay silent so often, why we are masterful secret keepers, especially when it comes to our own experiences.
Grief is one of the topics my writing tends to gravitate towards. I follow this impulse because it is a common experience that most people tend to go through in silence. Grief, in essence, is lonely. Even when you have other people's invaluable support, it is a process you have to undergo yourself. But there is nothing more comforting than feeling understood when you're in the midst of it. So, I write these words to make sense of my own experience, but I share them to let others know they are not alone.
It goes like this: Earlier this year, I was pregnant, then I wasn't. For almost three months, I carried a life inside of me, shared my body, my resources. On the three-month mark, I got to see this tiny life on a screen, barely seconds before I heard, "I don't have good news".
More words followed, but the only ones I could hold onto were, "there is no heartbeat". I looked back at the screen. Where I had seen life, I now saw death, resting within me. The silence felt cold, and for the first time I noticed the soft hum of the machines, suddenly transformed into an anthem of terrible news.
"But why?", I asked. This is what we always want, an explanation. Life rarely gives us any. The doctor assured me it was nothing I did, it was probably a genetic issue, but from that moment I embarked on a quest to find answers. They never came. What I found instead was a very large community of women who had, too, lost a little one, or more. The truth is, between 10% and 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. We just never talk about it, which makes it a very misunderstood experience unless you go through it yourself.
My miscarriage was the silent type. I never had any symptoms, just the shock of those words and the coldness of the room surrounding the image of a very still, very small baby. I was instructed to induce the process with medication, which would trigger a mini labour. The initial joy had given way to dismay at the idea of having to banish the little soul from my body. Part of me wanted to hold onto that baby, keep them inside somehow. How could I simply let them go?
I didn't know how painful it would be. How heartbreaking. I didn't know how much I would cling to all the little things: The positive pregnancy test. The estimated due date, which is today, November 11th (11/11, what a magical number). Blueberries, because that's how we referred to the baby, little blueberry. I became obsessed with buying a plant. I got a night sky petunia because they look like a galaxy, and every day I would look at its colours, feel its petals, until the flowers died too, and I felt something release within me. But I still miss that baby and the life we could have had.
There are things people commonly say in these cases, things I used to think too before I went through this experience: At least it happened early. At least you are fertile. You can try again. What they don't understand, what I didn't understand, is that to most of us, it feels impossible not to bond with the life we've created. We become mothers the minute we know they're in there. We love them by the time their heart starts beating. So, even if we go on to have other children, the one(s) we lost can never be replaced or forgotten. Just because loss is common, it doesn't hurt any less.
The stories we consume, overall, tend to be very straightforward: A pregnant character leads to a live baby. But babies sometimes die, both in the womb and out of the womb. After my loss, I went back to a movie I had seen some time ago and didn't particularly like: Pieces of a Woman. On my second viewing, something had changed. It was me, of course. This time, I grieved with Vanessa Kirby's character, fully understanding what she was feeling. I knew what was happening when she smelled the apples, when she planted their seeds, when she looked at children or passed by a shop window full of baby clothes. This is why it's so important to share our stories, especially our stories of grief, because not a single experience is truly unique to any one of us. And we shouldn't feel alone.
Accepting death as part of a natural cycle is a lifelong lesson. We tend to think it's unnatural for younglings to die, but nature proves over and over that it's not. And yet, in most cultures, loss will inevitably be the saddest thing we experience. We are expected to be sad. We are expected to mourn and cry, or to feel numb for a little while. Going back to our normal life within just a few days as if nothing had happened, as if we were supposed to be over it and move on quickly, is the least compassionate thing we can do to ourselves and each other. And with miscarriage and other types of losses that are equally misunderstood, hiding our pain will only make it harder.
The solution: More support, more community, more openness, more acceptance. More stories that help us feel seen. More stories that help others understand what we're navigating. I was lucky to have support, and I was lucky to find countless testimonials of women who had gone through the same thing. I cried and talked and wrote for as long as I needed to, and after a while, I felt lighter. After a while, I no longer envied others who had healthy pregnancies or who had given birth to healthy babies. But this was only possible because I gave myself time to acknowledge and feel my own pain and anger.
Little blueberry would be here now, or would soon be, turning my life upside down in the most delightful and terrifying way. Instead, there's the usual peace and quiet —still beautiful, still rich—, as well as the comforting thought that some of my baby's cells might still be living in my body, now part of me.
This is not the year I thought I'd have, but it's the one I got. If anything, it has taught me control is, more than ever, an illusion. We can only direct so much. In the current state of the world, that is a lesson to cling to.
