Eighteen months ago I lost my baby in the 8th week of pregnancy. This was my 3rd loss. I managed through the next couple of months by keeping busy because I was in a new job and I wanted to do well at it. I even went to work the day after the loss and I told no one at work about it. Four months later I received a severance package from that job, and I felt immediate relief. The job was stressful because there were many difficult people that I had to deal with there and I needed to let go of the stress and just feel the grief. Maybe I didn’t care enough about the job because my emotions were deadened, like how nerve endings deaden when they are exposed. After the job ended, I needed to just feel nothing and then feel the pain and then feel nothing again and then more pain and over and over again until the pain was less and the nothing had a slight twinge of a possibility for future happiness to it.
After the loss I was told that “time heals” but it doesn’t heal. Only I can heal myself by grieving the loss. Grief helped me heal and that’s why even though months went by I wasn’t able to move on. When I finally decided to grieve it was as if the miscarriage just happened because I was frozen in my emotion state.
People told me that I’ll get over the loss and that it is “nature’s way”, but when you have discovered the joy of being pregnant and have planned giving the rest of your life to your new child, you never totally get over it. You don’t really want to get over it either because getting over it seems like a betrayal to the child that you lost, as if there never was a child. There was a child and there always will be a child and there will always be a loss of a child and that will never change. The best you can do is eventually accept that there will always be a void in your life.
People have told me that they understand but they really don’t fully understand. The truth is, grief is personal, and people can tell you about their own xperiences but your experience with grief will be different because you are different and your life is different and your loss is different. Life didn’t just continue on exactly the same as it was after the loss. It did for other people, but everything was different for me. My past, present, and future felt completely different after the miscarriage. I didn’t like that past, present, or future but there was very little I could do to change that. I cannot go back in time and prevent the miscarriage or change the fact that the baby is alive only in the past tense now.
The worst part of the grief is that after three losses I still continue to grieve each loss separately and together. Although I’ve survived through the worst of the pain, I am always finding new ways to grieve the loss and I keep trying to find ways to live with the loss.
Grief makes everyone so uncomfortable, so I have learned to hide what I am going through.
No one understands and I don’t think they ever will. Right now I feel like I’m okay with that.
