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Some mothers have children teeming underfoot; others hold them in memory without tangible proof.
we are all deserving of support. Free from grief hierarchies or timelines, we must be gentle with ourselves during this nascent period and resist comparing and contrasting our stories.
what was even more unimaginable is that, on that busy street and as my life felt as though it was unraveling, people around me continued to live theirs. As I held the remains of my daughter in a bag, blood collecting in pools around my ankles, people were rushing past me to work or day care, a coffee date with a friend or a mundane errand. The contrast was nothing short of jarring.
grief doesn’t adhere to a timeline, and that healing from any traumatic experience is a cyclical event with no beginning or definitive end.
a common reaction to traumatic events is a kind of “perseverance approach.”
Loss divided time into “before” and “after,” and I felt suspended between them both.
trauma is a depleting game of mind-body pinball.
researchers have pinpointed animal grief through hormonal changes in females who have lost a baby, namely an increase in stress hormones called glucocorticoids.
We cannot assume the stage of gestation will automatically determine the potential impact of a pregnancy loss—it does not.
grief knows no timeline, and one pregnancy does not erase the loss of another.
“Pregnancy after pregnancy loss can be exhausting on so many levels. Loss has a way of stealing surrender.”
My body did not fail; it did its job, as painful as this dissolution may be.
this enervated chapter of my life. A chapter on death, and life after.
Trauma seems to provoke this dichotomy, this corporeal confusion, as it were. It’s both: gratitude for what is and utter despair for what isn’t (and what could have been).
yup.
Why does it matter whose suffering is “worse”? And is this even a thing, comparing and contrasting pain? Pain is pain. Grief is grief. Incalculable at their best, sadistic at their worst, pregnancy outcomes surely don’t lend themselves to a discrete or linear hierarchy.
