There seems to be some misunderstanding in the general populace that we, as grieving parents, are only still grieving because of our inability or unwillingness to accept reality. To them, us accepting reality would mean that we would move on from our grief, go back to being the person we were before loss, and live our lives as if our hearts were not irreparably broken. Worse, this message is not spoken out of true concern for us, but out of their discomfort at our grief. So they perpetuate a myth that we are stuck in our grief, living in the past or just not accepting reality the way that they think we should.
Yeah, f*** that!
It is the process of accepting reality that actually causes our grief to intensify and extend. We accept the reality that we became parents as soon as we saw that positive pregnancy test. We loved. We planned. We dreamed. We envisioned our life with our child, watching her laugh, learn, grow, and become her own person.
And then we saw that life and dream die.
Yes, we initially tried to fight against that reality. We cried out when the doctor told us our HcG levels were dropping or that there was no heartbeat on ultrasound. We told the doctors they must be wrong when they said our child had a fatal diagnosis. We said over and over this can’t be real. We searched for some miracle story that might give us reason to hope that the tests were wrong and this tragedy was not happening to us. But it did happen. Our children did die.
And now we are accepting that reality every moment of every day. We grieve BECAUSE we accept the reality that our children are not where they belong, which is with us.
We grieve the loss of our child. We grieve the future we, and our child, are denied. We grieve the death of all those dreams.
Our grief is constantly being triggered and the wounds re-opened by our own memories and the world around us. How can we not grieve what we have lost when every commercial break on TV seems to include at least one ad for a pregnancy test? How can we not grieve when we cannot go in public without seeing pregnant bellies and babies everywhere we look? How can we not grieve when the people who should be there for us, instead minimize our pain by saying or implying that we should be over it already?
As Megan Devine eloquently stated, “There is no time when pain and grief are completed; you grieve because you love and love is part of you. Love changes, but does not end.”
Just as our grief cannot be gotten over and is never complete, we cannot go back to being the person who we were before. We have loved too much and lost too much. How could such a deep loss, as the loss of our children, not forever change us? To even attempt to go back to being our previous selves, would be to deny the great love we have for our children. They did exist. We loved them, continue to love them and will always love them. Our hearts have been irreparably broken and pieces are missing; that is our reality. It is the others who feel the need to deny the reality of our situation.
- The Ornament - December 7, 2021
- Hobbies That Turn On Us - December 17, 2019
- The Devil Doesn’t Need More Advocates - December 3, 2019
I think that’s what all my friends thought. And my family.
I think they thought that I could go back to being the person I was before. But I couldn’t. Obviously. And then we lost another. And another. I gave birth to three children. One was stillborn. Two lived and became SIDS deaths.
Yet people still believed (and still believe today), that I could go back to being that person. That person who had never been a mother. Never been a parent.
As everyone who has ever been a parent will say: that is impossible. So we grieve the loss of our children, the loss of their lives, and the loss of our lives as their parents. And everything is irrevocably changed forever.