On Miscarriage, Pain, and Loss
The most personal, painful post I’ve shared on here
In mid-February, my wife, Becky, and I learned that we were expecting a child. In late-March, we learned that the pregnancy would end in miscarriage. This is a story that thousands of couples go through every year, a saga that is common, heartbreaking, and hard to conceptualize until one actually goes through it.
What follows isn’t some treatise on grief or the story of what we both learned through this. To the extent that this post is a story, there’s certainly no moral. Becky and I are both still processing the pain of this loss, and the sudden shift from happiness to grief in the span of little over a month. In many ways, this is a story of loss and pain, and how senseless death can seem. We’ve found great comfort in our faith, our church, and our families, but I’d be lying if I said that we are past the pain of what happened, or even close to it. If this entry seems messy, unorganized, or poorly-written, that’s probably because — just like this entire experience — it is.
Becky and I both come from large families, and we both always wanted children. With stables careers and incomes, we decided to start trying for a baby in January. For Becky to be pregnant so quickly, just a month later, seemed like a clear blessing. Scared and excited, we both turned to the process of preparing for our baby. By mid-April, barely two months later, it had all ended.
I don’t know if the specifics of what we went through adds or detracts from this story at all. We spent hours in doctor’s offices finding out what went wrong and what to expect. We saw a seemingly-healthy pregnancy turn into one with question marks, and then into a non-successful one. I’ve seen my wife in more emotional pain than I’ve ever seen anyone, and I’ve cried more tears than I ever remember shedding at any other moment.
Perhaps we should be thankful that things aren’t worse. We both have close family relationships and a strong Christian community at our church, and these are blessings of incalculable worth. Without the help of our pastor and families, we’d feel even more lonely, discouraged, and tired. In the middle of this sadness, we have found some measure of comfort. We have both heard stories of couples who have gone through multiple miscarriages, and from where I sit now I struggle to comprehend that level of loss. We’ve only experienced one, and it was heartbreaking in a way that nothing has been for me.
I feel as though posts on grief have some message or moral at the end, but I have nothing to add from those angles to what I’ve written here. Christian theology teaches that suffering exists in the world because of sin. Sometimes, as unsatisfying as this can be, that’s the only reason for what happens. I understand how a calamity of this kind could cause someone to lose their faith in God. I found myself asking “why?” on multiple occasions. I don’t question God, or my religious faith, but I know that my worldview doesn’t guarantee a satisfying answer for this. Sometimes pain just exists.
I deliberately waited until a few weeks after we learned the news to write this post, but I always knew I wanted to complete it. Writing thoughts down has always been one of the best ways for me to process huge life events — whether good or bad — and I’ve filled many pages of a journal trying to pin down this one. I’ve found that I remember our baby the most in the mornings. Right after I wake up, before the full weight of the day ahead catches up with me, these are the moments when I feel our loss the most.
As time passes, these moments have gradually lost some of their intensity. My wife and I both cried bitter tears when we found out what was happening to us, and we’ve both been emotional wrecks for weeks now. Time is slowly healing us and slowly moving us on. Personally, I’ve struggled with this phenomenon as it has happened. I never knew my son our daughter, and I’ll never get to. This grief, as painful as it is, is my only link with our lost baby. As it passes, I’m losing a little bit of what I have left.
There are also many reasons to be thankful, though. Becky and I are both young and healthy, and there are no long-term reasons why another attempt to have a child shouldn’t be successful. This loss doesn’t necessarily mean that our future efforts to start a family will end in the same way. We were also blessed not to lose the baby farther along in the pregnancy (as weird as that sentence feels to type). We experienced a great deal of pain, but I can only imagine how much worse it would have been closer to a due date.
If there’s any way to wrap up something like this, it’s to note how long this grief and pain persist. Recently, I had a particularly long week at work. Nothing especially challenging or unpleasant happened, but I found myself exhausted at the end of each day. Each day moved incredibly slowly, and I felt like I was moving through the entire week like a fog. Becky remarked to me that this might be an unconscious ramification of the grief, or perhaps some kind of sadness that didn’t manifest itself directly. I think she was right. That Friday, I burst into tears listening to this song on the way home:
The central point of this song — a future and a full life that was lost — hits at so much of what my wife and I have been feeling for the last two months. Yellowcard’s Ryan Tedder reflects on the life that his child would have had, and lines like “And you would have all the love in my heart,” or “Now I live in a dream where I am/holding your little hands/I never got to meet you, my best friend” are tragic in a way that I can only now fully understand. Music has a way of expressing emotion that I can’t always convey through words alone, and this song is one of the best summations of what I’m feeling that I’ve come across.
I find myself wanting to close this story with some lesson, despite my earlier disclaimer. Perhaps though, there’s no better place to end than at the cross in the opening picture. Christianity teaches that God grieves with us in our loss, and that He comforts us as we mourn. And despite everything we’ve been through, I still find these words (Psalm 27: 13–14) to be incredibly comforting:
I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.
