Surviving the Grief That Swallowed Me Whole After My Miscarriage Was Beyond Hard

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TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains information about child loss and miscarriage, which may be triggering to some.

A miscarriage is so much more than just a loss of a pregnancy. My miscarriage was a loss of myself. I will never be the woman I was before that day. I have been irreversibly altered in every way. The 10th anniversary of the worst day of my life (the day I lost my third child) was May 1. Like all moms who have lost a pregnancy or child, I might be able to get through my days without constantly crying and buckling under the pain of the grief and depression now, but the first month that was not the case.

I lay in bed and cried for nearly a month straight. The grief time bombs still go off occasionally and randomly, but I think the worst part may be the guilt I feel from learning to live in my loss. Nobody tells you how much the pain of surviving when your child has died weighs on your mama heart. The guilt of not dwelling on that pain and on some occasions forgetting for a split second that the child you lost is no longer here can bring you to your knees.

I’ve realized that loss never really leaves you, not truly; not the big ones. They remain right beneath the surface, just deep enough for you to get by, to go on living in that forever changed, never the same way, only the loss of someone you love more than yourself affects you. A miscarriage or losing a baby/child is different than losing anyone else.

Some days, I stumble into the grief like a drunk falling into a wall, and then I stay there for the duration because even though it hurts when the wounds are reopened, there is comfort in the familiarity. The knowing washes over me like a warm surf pulling me into the undertow. Gasping for breath, the pain of drowning reminds me that I am still alive.

Losing a pregnancy or child is the kind of loss that swallows you whole.

I’ve been living in a protective state of comfortable numbness for the past 10 years. Maybe it’s where I need to stay for the rest of my life, because I can’t let myself feel everything, all the time. I can’t live like the exposed nerve that my soul sometimes is. I mask it with levity. I tell myself that I’m letting go, but then I see something, hear something, or remember something, and my dam of grief breaks wide open and it all comes flooding back. Vulnerability replaces the protective cover around my heart.

There is no rhyme, no reason, and no explanation that can ever console a grieving mom’s heart. Just an immeasurable and unfathomable loss. The kind of loss that swallows you whole. The kind of loss that makes it painful to breathe. The kind of loss that is almost not survivable.

May is always a hard month for me because it’s the anniversary of the loss of our third child. I know it sounds weird to remember and mark a day of loss, but when you are left with a loss this big, that no one else seems to feel as strongly as you, you feel like you have a responsibility to hold on to that memory with everything that you are or your baby will disappear forever. You have to fight for it. If not, it will be as if he/she never existed and that is too much to bear. So you hold on because, as a parent, you feel like it is your privilege to make sure the world knows your child existed. You are the keeper of their legacy, however short-lived it was.

I don’t cry every day anymore or wear my grief like armor.

Losing a baby leaves the mother feeling unimaginably alone with her anguish and emptiness. I was so afraid after my loss that I gave up the dream of having another child. Sometimes I get angry that my arms are empty, especially since having a hysterectomy. I know that I will never have the chance to have another baby. It’s been a decade since my miscarriage with our third baby, but there are still some days the weight of that loss is as heavy as the day it happened.

These days my grief is much more subdued and quiet, but it is there and can be felt as strongly as it was on May 1, 2012. There are certain things I will never forget: the minute they didn’t see the heartbeat, sitting in a waiting room full of beautiful bellies full of living babies as I sat there with my silent womb. I remember calling my husband to tell him and no words coming out of my mouth, the primal screaming and sobbing that I did alone in my car in the parking lot as my heart broke in between the doctor’s appointment and preschool pickup.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the emptiness that I felt in my soul that afternoon or the way my 4-year-old hugged and kissed my belly to tell the baby she loved him the morning before I left for the hospital for my D&E. Or how A Thousand Years played on the seemingly eternal drive to the hospital — or even the sick child I saw at the hospital that morning and feeling sorry for her mother.

I’ll never forget the way I refused to go ahead with surgery until they performed one last ultrasound. How I made my husband snap a photo of the ultrasound machine of our baby and the loneliness that I felt as they wheeled me back to surgery. I’ll also never forget the nurses lovingly telling me stories of their own losses and the sadness I felt when I saw their eyes fill with tears. The helplessness that I saw on my brothers’ faces when I found them sitting with my husband in the waiting room while I was in surgery. The love that I felt for each person who tried to hold my heart and protect me from the inevitable pain that was to come next.

The emptiness that emanated from my womb throughout my entire body was overwhelming.

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The endless crying and guilt. The disappointment at my body’s failure. The blame that I wholly accepted. The solitude and hatred that permeated every single thought for those coming weeks. Lying silently in stillness feeling unworthy of breath. Looking into my daughters’ eyes and seeing the confusion. Fake smiling to survive. People telling me that God has a reason. Someone asking me if I was relieved. People telling me that my baby was in a “better” place as if my arms were not good enough. Having misplaced love and anger and not knowing what to do with either. Trying to be normal for everyone else.

I celebrated my husband’s birthday, two days after my D&E, because I refused to let my pain make things weird. I celebrated my Godson’s communion that same weekend after sending a text to everyone not to bring up the miscarriage to me. The next weekend, we went out for our 13th wedding anniversary and celebrated Mother’s Day, which may have been the cruelest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. The next weekend, I put on a brave face and attended my 4-year-old’s preschool graduation and my 6-year-old’s violin concert, and a few days later threw a party with all of our friends and family — the same party where we were going to announce our pregnancy.

That Thanksgiving, the due date of what might have been, someone asked me, “Don’t you miss the pitter patter of little feet running around the house?” as my nephew played. I had to run to my room to not break down in front of a house full of people. Between all of these brave faces I was putting on for everyone else, I was crumpled up in a ball, sobbing in my bed. I stayed in my room alone as much as I could. I felt like I was dying. Secretly, maybe I hoped that I was.

I pushed all of these feelings down.

I’m scrappy and I’m good at being stoic even when I just want to give myself over to my grief. There are so many women who have lost a pregnancy, a baby, or a child, and it all really is the same to a mother; we’ve lost the possibility of what could have been, and that changes you in ways you never expected. We are irrevocably and molecularly changed from the person we were up until the moment we experienced that loss.

I’m damaged. I’ll never be who I was before the words “I can’t find a heartbeat” were whispered to me in a poorly lit, sterile room on the second floor of the women’s health center by a kind woman who didn’t know what else to say as I stared back at her, begging her to change her mind and take it all back. You are not alone. We might all process it differently and it might look different from the outside, but on the inside, we are gutted and speechless and feeling more helpless than we’ve ever felt before.