Miscarriage is a Significant Loss

It is normal and natural to feel deep pain after a miscarriage.

Others may imply—or even tell you outright—that miscarriage happens too early for you to feel attached to the baby. They may say miscarriage is so common that you shouldn’t feel upset. They may urge you to focus on getting pregnant again instead of grieving what happened. However, you know that miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy often feel like profound losses.

Your grief is real. Your grief is justified. And the depth of your grief depends less on how many weeks you were pregnant and more on how attached you felt to this developing baby—or to the idea of your future with a child. The more you wanted this baby, and the more you invested in your hopes and dreams, the more painful your grief journey will likely feel.

Love plus loss creates grief. If you wanted and loved this baby, of course you grieve. And now, you must mourn.

Many Share Your Pain…

As many as half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage—often before a woman even misses a period. Among women who know they are pregnant, about 15 percent experience miscarriage. This makes miscarriage a remarkably common form of loss, affecting about a million couples each year in the United States.

The term miscarriage includes a wide range of pregnancy-loss experiences. Early miscarriage, the most common type, refers to pregnancy loss before 12 weeks of gestation. Late miscarriage covers the period from 12 weeks to 19 and 7/8 weeks. Once a pregnancy reaches 20 weeks, the loss is called stillbirth. Early pregnancy loss also includes molar pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, and blighted ovum.

Different types and stages of miscarriage create very different experiences for women. For example, late miscarriage may end with the mother delivering a baby in the hospital. In early miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, there is often no baby to see. Still, the grief journey that follows miscarriage depends more on the depth of love and attachment than on gestational age, terminology, or diagnosis.

The Time Betwixt and Between

Early pregnancy may show up as a plus sign on a home test, but otherwise it often remains invisible. With very late miscarriage or stillbirth, a baby emerges. But with most miscarriages, there is pregnancy and then no pregnancy. Yes, there is still love and attachment. However, there is no baby to hold or bury, no footprints to ink, no locks of hair to save, and no photos to cherish.

The mystery and invisibility of miscarriage make it unique among significant losses. Your love for this baby—or, in very early pregnancy, your desire for a baby—was real. Yet having nothing tangible to hold can make your loss feel even more devastating.

The language we use around miscarriage adds to the difficulty. The term miscarriage can imply that the mother failed to carry the baby well enough. Words like embryo and fetus may be medically accurate, but they fail to reflect the love and loss you feel. Even the word baby may or may not feel right to you. Some families who experience early miscarriage feel they lost not a baby but a sense of hope and possibility.

So if you feel that others do not understand or recognize your loss, you are not alone. And if you feel unsure about what you lost or how to talk about it, you are not alone in that either.

Acknowledge Your Loss

Acknowledging that your heart is broken is the beginning of your healing. As you experience the pain of your loss—gently opening, acknowledging, and allowing, the suffering it will diminish. In fact, the resistance to the pain can be more painful than the pain itself. As difficult as it is, your must, slowly and in doses over time, embrace the pain of your grief. As Helen Keller said, “The only way to the other side is through.”

Express Your Grief

Grief is the thoughts and feelings you have on the inside about the death of your baby. When you express those feelings outside of yourself, that is called mourning. Mourning is talking about the miscarriage, crying, writing in a journal, making art, participating in a support group, or any activity that moves your grief from the inside to the outside. Mourning is how you heal your grief.

Be Compassionate with Yourself

The word compassion literally means “with passion.”  So, self-compassion means caring for oneself “with passion.”  While we hope you have excellent outside support, this article is intended to help you be kind to yourself as you confront and eventually embrace your grief over your pregnancy loss.

Many of us are hard on ourselves when we are grieving.  We often have inappropriate expectations of how “well” we should be doing with our grief. We are told to “carry on,” “keep your chin up,” and “keep busy.”  Actually, when we are in grief we need to slow down, turn inward, embrace our feelings of loss, and seek and accept support.

Take good care of yourself as you grieve. Nurture yourself physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.

Help Each Other Heal

Miscarriage often affects many people. Everyone who knew about the pregnancy and had hopes and dreams for the baby’s future will grieve. Parents, grandparents, children, extended family members, friends, and coworkers may all be touched by this loss. Open and honest communication is the key to healing. Talk to one another about the miscarriage. Support each other. Try not to judge each other’s thoughts and feelings, but instead accept that each person’s grief will be unique.

Understand the Idea of Reconciliation

In the spiritual sense, you will not “recover” from the miscarriage. Your heart is broken and you are torn apart by this loss.  You are not the same person today as you were before the miscarriage.

But you can become reconciled to your loss. As you continue to express your grief openly and honestly, you will begin to heal. The sharp pangs of sorrow will soften, and the constant painful memories will subside.  You will become more interested in and hopeful about the future. You will experience more happy than sad in your days. You will begin to set new goals and work toward them. You will experience life fully again.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School’s Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, Grief One Day at a Time, and Healing Your Grieving Heart After Miscarriage, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.