At a Loss: Finding Your Way After Miscarriage, Stillbirth, or Infant Death

By Donna Rothert

"A heartfelt and wide-ranging series of encouragements for dealing with grief."

--Kirkus Reviews

If you've experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, termination of pregnancy due to health risk or abnormality, or death in the first year of your baby's life, you're not alone. Life after these losses can be heartbreaking, confusing, and lonely. Family, friends, and medical professionals may minimize your loss or say "You can always try again."

Written by a psychologist who experienced two pregnancy losses herself, At a Loss offers thirty essays on the thoughts, feelings, and struggles that come along with losing a pregnancy or baby. Whether you are early in a crisis of grief or exploring the loss years afterward, you will find self-compassion, healing, and new ways to make meaning of your loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Air Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733438612

Book preview

Chapter 1: Expectations

Sometimes I think, I need a spare heart to feel all the things I feel.

—Sanober Khan

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Why am I so upset about losing someone I didn’t even know?

My partner isn’t crying—I don’t think he’s grieving in a healthy way.

I will always feel like I do now.

When our lives have been sent off course by baby loss, our expectations of ourselves (and sometimes our partners) can be off as well. It’s so easy to do a pile on, giving ourselves a hard time for having a hard time. We may worry about grieving too slowly and wonder, Am I dwelling on this? or How do I stop feeling this way? We may worry about grieving too quickly and worry about moving on or forgetting or betraying the baby.

I remember having both feelings—being totally lost in the sorrow but at the same time feeling pressure to find my way out quickly and in a manner that worked for those around me. Unfortunately, there is nothing clear, clean, or elegant about the experience of early grief, with all of its pain, fear, and confusion. It often makes a mess of us, at least for a while, and we want it to stop. I wish I didn’t know what I look like when I cry and brush my teeth at the same time, but, alas, from my time after losing my daughter, I do. It’s just not a graceful phase of life.

Even if we’ve experienced significant loss before in our lives, we are all beginners in any fresh episode of grief. It’s never fair to ourselves to expect that we are going to launch into some enlightened, graceful version of mourning after baby loss. Not right now, maybe not ever, and that’s okay.

You don’t have to be composed; you don’t have to be skillful; you don’t have to make anyone else comfortable. And there is no deadline when you have to be healed or back to normal. Pressuring yourself or pretending will not get you to a better place faster and, sadly, that tactic may make things harder for you.

Moreover, you don’t have to chase the very fraught goal of being past your loss or finding closure, which may feel all wrong or like an insult to your experience and your understanding of baby loss.

So, what is a good starting point? What should you expect of yourself? I won’t join the chorus of people telling you how to feel. Instead, what if you just notice what you feel? Whatever your emotional state is right now, it will change. The intensity of pain you experience in grief doesn’t stay the same, because it can’t.

Eventually, some other feeling will appear. The emotional song you are compelled to sing at any given moment may be one that makes you cry, yell, or withdraw a bit from the world, or it may be one that makes you smile, and the next song may be quite different. It’s enough to keep a heart very busy. Whatever is pouring out of your heart, whatever your version of grief may be, it deserves your respect. Rather than running to an action or thought that might take you out of your grief, you—in fact, all of us—sometimes need to take a bow in reverence for your loss, your life, and your changed self.

Living with grief can certainly feel messy and chaotic. That is a reasonable expectation right now. It may make you feel a bit crazy to have your emotions become so unruly. But it’s still you living a chapter of your life. You may be flooded with sadness about your past and reliving memories sweet or tragic. You may be full of hopes or heart-fluttering fears about your future. These are all signs of life. The next chapter of your life is going to be more of you living—and by surviving whatever you feel right now in this moment, you’ve already begun.

Chapter 2: The Body

Scars are just another kind of memory.

—M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

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The last thing I want to look like right now is pregnant.

On top of everything else, my milk came in.

I feel hormonal and my hair is falling out. This seems like a cruel joke.

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Baby loss is unique in that there is, at least for a woman who has been pregnant, a physical experience that goes along with the emotional challenges. Nonpregnant partners and those working with the support of gestational carriers may also have strong reactions to the physical changes that occur during and after pregnancy as they witness them and empathize.

In all of my pregnancies, I felt a buzzing and humming in my body—different than it felt at any other time. It was a subtle but constant reminder that my physical and emotional selves were changed and changing further. Our hormonal weather and the shape-shifting of our bodies can be additional tangible reminders that we are expecting. If a pregnancy progresses to the point that we feel the movement of the fetus or baby, it can seem that a channel of communication has opened up as we receive the signals of action and growth.

These physical changes typically lead us to become more attached. When we’re pregnant, there can be endless daily reminders of this changed status as we make more trips to the bathroom and adjust to a swollen belly or a different kind of walk. It’s a cycle that reinforces our baby dream: we expect a baby; we physically change both internally and externally; we signal our changes to the people around us; and others, in turn, react to us as a mother- or