Let’s Talk About Grief: Disenfranchised Grief, Part 1, 11/8/21

I can count on one hand the number of times writing did not help me navigate or process a situation. Grief was one of them.  

Perhaps if my grief had been “ordinary” in society’s eyes, the writing would’ve been easier. But, it was not. At the time, it seemed words were insufficient to help me process all the thoughts and feelings of an unusual experience. They remained stuck in my head and heart with no outlet. 

In my lifetime, I have experienced many types of loss, death-related and not, but none have impacted me in the way a pregnancy loss has. This post is the first of several on the topic of grief. In Part 1, I’m writing about the grief we don’t talk about over the loss we don’t want to acknowledge – pregnancy loss. Such a loss can come in many forms – miscarriage, stillbirth and abortion.  

According to the latest statistics, in the U.S. alone, one in four women will have a miscarriage, one in four women before age 45 will have an abortion and one in 160 women will have a stillbirth. Not rare by normal standards but you wouldn’t know that considering how little these losses are addressed.  

According to Dr. Kenneth Doka, a world-renowned expert on death, dying and bereavement, grief becomes disenfranchised when it “is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially validated or publicly supported.”  

I can think of a few reasons why pregnancy loss can lead to disenfranchised grief. Grief, disenfranchised or not, is a hard life experience to navigate. Many cultures, especially Western ones, do not address death. Here in the U.S., we have an unhealthy relationship to the eventuality we will all face one day. Death is viewed as a topic to be avoided at all costs. Don’t believe me? Take a look at TV and social media. Nearly every show, post, or ad you see is geared toward the futile chase of youthfulness and perfect beauty.  

The onset of video games that glorify or exaggerate death is another example of this obsession with life. Your gaming character has an infinite amount of lives. There’s never a need to confront death. But, the fact remains that death is a part of life. Everything physical that has a beginning will have an ending one day.  

Another reason pregnancy loss can lead to disenfranchised grief is people do not know how to navigate the death of a child. Pregnancy is viewed mostly as a happy occasion filled with hopes, dreams and expectations. A multibillion-dollar industry orbits around this human experience.

Society believes children are not supposed to die before their parents, so when this occurs, it upsets the balance of things. People just don’t know what to do, so they don’t talk about it. This increases feelings of abandonment, alienation and shame for the griever.

A third reason is one of the losses – abortion – has become a highly politicized and controversial subject. The women at the very center of this controversy are easily dehumanized by people on both sides of the matter. I have more to say on that in Part 2 of this grief series.   

Regardless of how it occurs, I believe there are few things more devastating than the loss of a child.  

Regarding my particular experiences with disenfranchised grief, I found that writing could not help me process the losses. Words were inadequate to describe the jumbled ball of feelings I had within me. I felt myself drifting off to nowhere. I lost my first pregnancy in 1996 after spending years of trying to get pregnant. It was hard to express why this little life mattered so much, and then to have it taken away, well, the anguish was so acute.  

My feelings were all over the place and sometimes, I couldn’t feel at all. I felt silly for grieving someone I had never seen, heard or touched let alone bonded with.

I felt invalidated when I was told that I could try again, that the baby wasn’t even real and there was a reason for it happening. I had no guarantee there would be another baby. As my fertility doctor had told me that getting pregnant would be difficult if not impossible, I believed the pregnancy was truly a miracle.  

After the miscarriage, I felt fear, believing I’d never be a mother again. This thought terrified me. Another feeling was self-hatred. I believed my body had failed me yet again. It had difficulty getting pregnant let alone sustaining a pregnancy. I felt completely inadequate.

Without being able to get what I felt outside of me so I could navigate through it, I fell into a deep depressive episode. I was so depressed that I just didn’t care to get out of bed on most days. When I did, I would just veg in front of the TV and eat my feelings. Writing was the very last thing on my mind. I even missed out on a momentous trip to Japan with my sister and mother. Depression robbed me of so much during that time period.

I lost my second child in 2007. This loss was accompanied by guilt because I was totally caught by surprise. I wasn’t ready to take on another baby and to be honest, I didn’t want one. I had six children, with my youngest being two years old, and I had just returned to work. Another child was not in the plan and I believed I would have to quit my job. Just as I was warming up to the idea of having another baby, the miscarriage happened. I blamed myself, thinking my  thoughts condemned the baby to death and God was punishing me.  

Compounding this loss was medical trauma. The onset of the miscarriage was a lot more painful and bloodier than the first. I never knew I had so much blood and it’s a miracle I didn’t pass out. I drove myself to the hospital so my partner could be with our little kids and then had to endure alone the wait in the ER plus the D & C procedure itself. I remember waking up and my eyes filling with tears as I realized where I was and why I was there. It would’ve been nice to have a hand to hold and a hug at that moment.  

After each of these losses, I buried everything. I lied to my boss about why I had to miss a few days of work. I couldn’t face this had happened to me again, and writing was the furthest thing from my mind.  

I remained confused as to how to answer questions when people asked how many children I had. Do I say 6 or 8? Am I doing my lost babies a disservice if I only say 6? To this day, I don’t have a definitive answer.

I also was processing feelings of ingratitude and selfishness. How dare I mourn when I had six living and healthy children? What about the women who’ve never been able to have any? Or women who’ve lost children at birth or in early infancy? I thought that my losses couldn’t possibly compare to theirs. I got super good at burying these feelings by focusing on work, my children’s needs and volunteering.  

Several months after my second miscarriage, I learned of a support group at the hospital for families who’ve had miscarriages and stillbirths. The nurse who facilitated the group was very kind and gentle, and I started to have hope I could find my way through this. Unfortunately, the group disbanded due to lack of attendance and once more, I was adrift. I still couldn’t write. 

Through my work, I met someone who became a catalyst for my healing. She invited me to a weekend retreat she was facilitating, so in the summer of 2010, I first attempted to write about my losses at that retreat. She was affiliated with a ministry called Rachel’s Vineyard that helps women who have had abortions or miscarriages. During that weekend, I was able to write to my lost babies, give them names (Andrew and Elizabeth) and participate in a memorial service. I spoke of them openly in a nonjudgmental environment for the first time in a while.

That retreat experience greatly facilitated my healing and planted the seeds for my own professional work with women who’ve had pregnancy losses. If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful healing ministry, please go to www.rachelsvineyard.org .

Today, I am more open talking about my losses though I gauge my environment. Not everyone is ready or willing to hear about what happened to me, and that’s okay. I have come to a place of acceptance about that.  

I’m also using this gift of writing to help me process what I’ve lost. Writing found its way back to me eventually, and I began writing about my grief. Writing has helped me so much that I want to pay it forward by offering grief writing groups, retreats and possibly classes.  

All any of us can do is keep trying. Writing is helping me in that effort.  

In the next post, I’ll continue the conversation about disenfranchised grief with a focus on pregnancy loss by abortion.