I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

by Jessica Zucker

But 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.

I had to remind myself that sharing my loss with anyone should be a choice, not a requirement.

If I kept moving, maybe the trauma wouldn’t catch up to me and swallow me whole.

It took over my body, seared my insides, and then poured out of me with reckless abandon.

I longed to go back in time, to undo this grand loss, to return to the before-loss me. Now, there was only post-loss me to familiarize myself with, and I didn’t want to know her at all.

Loss divided time into “before” and “after,” and I felt suspended between them both.

This was a level of vulnerability and raw exposure that I’d never imagined. My heart had been pried open, and I was swelling with emotion so profoundly it hurt.

We’re conditioned to not share these stories. We’ve become accustomed to living parallel to one another, oblivious of the pain we’re all trying to overcome.

I could roll around in the grief, roar about resentments, shriek in horror of the events I’d navigated.

Now, I was stuck replaying the visuals and the physical feelings associated with death occurring in my body.

When you begin to unpack the messaging of “wait until the second trimester,” the logic goes something like this: “Don’t share your good news until you are in the clear. This way, if your good news becomes bad news, then you won’t have to share your bad news.”

We have the right to mourn the milestones reached only in the most hopeful recesses of our minds—the first steps that were never walked, the first words that were never spoken.

moments of irreparable shatter, my own heart still technically beating whilst feeling anything but viable, convinced emotional resuscitation will never be.

If only these initial life preservers of support were enough to buoy me through the future waves of grief and mourning.

I increasingly became more stunned by the reactions—the actions and inactions of people around me.

What is meant to come off as support is in actuality dismissive.

“Your pain is just as real and valid and important as anybody else’s. Your loss matters because it is your loss. Your hope, dashed. Your body, grieving. Your sadness. Your love. Try to resist the urge to compare and contrast. There needn’t be a loss/grief hierarchy. It only serves to minimize your experience. Face your pain without distracting it by somehow making it less than. Or too much. You are significant. Your heart is shattered. Lean into the ache. It’s yours.”

Sometimes—I found rather quickly—having history with someone doesn’t necessarily protect you from egregious statements, unintended harsh comments, or unfortunate stalemates. Sometimes, instead, hearing afflictive words from someone you’ve known your entire life can be arresting, blanketing you in an isolation no one should ever know.

But for everyone else, it seemed as though my unconscionable experience somehow forced them to flee. Where have they gone? I wondered.

I get it: the fear of talking about the incomprehensible. We are human after all, and so it is understandable that we shy away from what the vast majority of us have labeled as “tough topics.” But we must attempt to embody a sense of eagerness when it comes to those we love, those in our inner circle, and also, hopefully, our community at large.

We at least need to try. To grasp at words, convey love, communicate care. Something. Anything. Anything other than silence, avoidance, or disappearing altogether.

With pregnancy loss, especially an early one, you might find, for example, that people think it is not deserving of the same type of compassion we offer those who have lost a relative, or a friend. “Aren’t you over it by now?” or “at least it happened early in the pregnancy. You’ll move forward quickly”

Some people prefer privacy, others long for support, or a little bit of both. Find out what she wants. Do not disappear. Challenge yourself to show up even if it makes you uncomfortable.

Unless asked, do not give advice on family-building options. Let her lead the discussion about how she envisions her reproductive future.

I don’t know what I expected her to say, but it wasn’t that.

Grief’s disbelief hovered full-time, and that alone was enough to manage.

It scared me to feel this alone alongside him. Engulfed by my fresh trauma, fear hovered here and there, seemingly everywhere. Alone I wasn’t, but alone I felt.

I wanted so badly to know how he felt; I wanted to see some tangible proof that we were traveling down this road together, but it seemed as though he was only ever skimming the surface of this earth-rattling pain.

It didn’t feel like we were “in this together” in those early days. Instead, I found myself wondering whether or not he was even capable of meeting me in the depths at all, since it hadn’t physically happened to him. I wondered whether he was opting out of taking that deep dive in an attempt at self-preservation. Either way, it was painful. I envied that he seemed to have the choice at all.

“Some days things feel totally copacetic between us, and others it feels like we’re on different planets. He’s just so … unchanged,”

The fear of getting pregnant again was just as intimidating as not being able to get pregnant again.

“Sometimes things happen to us and they deepen our work. They incite a metamorphosis or a deepening of something we’ve already started. I believe your loss will do this.”

While there was a version of me who wanted nothing to do with being pregnant again, there also existed another part of me that saw a subsequent pregnancy as an opportunity to reset, to rebuild, and to perhaps create the larger family we both now wanted.

an ongoing oscillation between hope and anxiety.

Beyond anything else, pregnancy after loss for me became a lesson—albeit one I wish I hadn’t had to endure—in being present; to do nothing more than inhale, exhale, repeat. It was all I could do to keep from being swallowed whole by anxiety.

Life doesn’t replace death. It doesn’t need to, and it simply can’t.

One of the most insufferable and surprising parts of grief is that one moment we can’t stand to feel our sadness for another second, and the next we are scared of ever losing the intensity of that feeling.

Replacement isn’t a thing when it comes to pregnancy and human beings. We find, then, that it’s imperative to extinguish the idea that the existence of good negates all that which has been painful in the past.

I wonder how many people are rainbow babies and don’t know it.

The fear of loving and losing once more feels untenable.

“You’ll be okay, there’s always a rainbow after a storm!” Is there, though?

So, in the absence of understanding, people say hollow things with the best of intentions.

So many of us require more than the promise of a happy ending.

“I used to think God had a plan, but how could all of this be part of my plan? Or his plan for me? What could I have done to deserve this?”

But what happens when the betrayal of one’s body, as in the case with Opal, feels so incongruous with these long-held beliefs, or upends a lifetime of thinking that things were one way, then they turn out to be something else completely?

This is the unique place that rainbow babies occupy in families: in a way, they carry the complexity of grief we felt as well as the relief we might now feel. That is the bittersweet beauty of rainbows.

For some, like Opal, there is an idea that loss, like everything, is part of “God’s plan.” This sentiment and its theological underpinnings didn’t resonate with me—why make something so heartbreaking into an experience God would have a hand in?

“Everything happens for a reason” is another phrase that gets repeated in some spiritual circles. To this statement, my retort is a diplomatic “does it?”

In Judeo-Christian scripture, God rewards the unwavering faith of a follower by granting her the ability to have children despite her being barren. “And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise,” reads Hebrews 11:11.

If God grants conception to those who are faithful, what does that say about religious women who are infertile? Who experience pregnancy loss? Who give birth to a stillborn? Religion and religious teachings can perpetuate the idea of “worthiness”—of who is, in the eyes of God, deserving of parenthood.