If you’ve ever lost a child, a pregnancy, or perhaps even the ability to become pregnant in the future, don’t allow others to tell you how or how long you should grieve.
“I dreamed of a young band of angels
That shone like stars from above
‘Cos each had a bright burning candle
Except for the angel I loved
And I asked why their candles were burning
And why hers wasn’t the same
She said: Oh Daddy, each time I try to light it
Your tears just keep drowning the flame”
—Kris Kristofferson, Hall of Angels
In the summer of 2006, having been married a couple of years, my wife and I decided to do something totally crazy: have a child.
The process was fun of course, and it seemed it was going to be easy. We achieved pregnancy the very first month we tried.
Thrilled, we began telling a handful of family and friends and planning for the future. We’d picked out names–after a long process of negotiation–and began preparing for our family.
Then, the unthinkable happened. We miscarried.
It shouldn’t really be unthinkable of course. Estimates are that somewhere near half of all pregnancies result in miscarriage. That may seem high, but that could be because many couples don’t talk about their miscarriages. It’s also the case that when miscarriage occurs early in a pregnancy, many women never know they are pregnant.
People react to situations like this very differently. Some, understanding that the embryo was about the size of a pencil head and that many miscarriages result from fetal abnormalities or other dysfunctions, are casual about it, move on quickly, and just try again right away.
This wasn’t us. Though we were only a few weeks along, we were devastated. Whatever the stage of development, this baby was real to us and we had real grief to deal with before moving on. For us, this wasn’t about any kind of biological or religious idea of when life begins. Though we’d have been unlikely to choose one for ourselves, we both support abortion rights. That didn’t make our baby or the associated grief any less real.
We never knew the sex of our embryo, but as we’d already picked out names for both, we called her/him LEHR, which used the combined first and middle initials of the male and female names we’d chosen–L-E-H-R.
We waited a couple of months before trying again and this time, it took around six months of hard, fun work before pregnancy was achieved. Our son was born the next year.
In the meantime, we took a while to grieve. My wife is an artist, obsessed with color, and she did a small, abstract painting of what our child might have looked like.
We also wanted something living in remembrance of our lost child. We went to a local nursery to look at rose bushes. There were several available, but the one we chose wasn’t a bush at all, but a rose tree called Hot Cocoa. The Hot Cocoa Floribunda Rose is a dark red in color, nearly black in some versions. It’s beauty in our back yard still reminds us of what we lost. It has survived, year after year, even (so far) through the California drought.
October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. The movement to honor these losses began in 1987 and the first memorial was established in 1988 by President Reagan. The movement was reestablished in 2002 and is now celebrated in the US, Canada, and Italy. The day exists to honor those lost by miscarriage, stillbirth, sudden infant death syndrome, or any death of a newborn.
Some in the movement participate in the International Wave of Light, lighting a candle from 7:00 to 8:00 PM on October 15th in remembrance of their lost love ones. The result is a “wave of light” that is designed to span the globe for twenty four hours.
Note that the day is not in any way involved in the politics of abortion and reproductive rights.
If you’ve ever lost a child, a pregnancy, or perhaps even the ability to become pregnant in the future, don’t allow others to tell you how or how long you should grieve. For some, it may be a fast process, and you need not feel any guilt if that is the case for you. But for others, it is meaningful, even debilitating. Take your time, grieve, honor your loss and then you’ll be able to move on.
—A version of this piece also appeared in the Porterville Recorder on October 7th, 2015.
top photo: bcgrote/Flickr
bottom photo: Drew Avery/Flickr