Ambiguous Grief and Pregnancy Loss
Grief feels pervasive, all-consuming, blinding us from that which surrounds us. Grief is all we can see; it clouds our vision to the point of opaqueness. When we can’t see around the edges of our grief, we feel trapped in it, believing that there is no way we will ever feel any differently. We are left feeling despondent, defeated, and hopeless.
We can feel grief in many situations in our lives, and is not only reserved for the death of a loved one. In fact, there is a type of grief that is commonplace and more universally experienced: ambiguous grief.
Ambiguous grief is the grief we experience when a death has not occurred; rather we have lost something that either isn’t tangible, such as a hope or a dream, or we have lost a person in our lives but they are still living.
Ambiguous grief could be used to describe how one feels after a divorce: you’re not only losing your spouse, but losing the dream you had laid out for your future. We experience ambiguous grief when someone we love is diagnosed with dementia, severe mental illness, or addiction. They as a human being are still physically present, but their psychological presence has changed dramatically, if not entirely. You have essentially lost the person you came to know and love.
We even experience ambiguous loss for things that are not as tangible, such as a dream, a hope, or a vision for our future. We can grieve the loss of a dream job, or not being accepted to our top-choice college. And, we can especially experience grief as we witness our world struggling with illness, systemic racism and poverty, and political divisiveness.
And yes, we experience ambiguous grief when we experience a pregnancy loss. In fact, grief is the primary feeling I hear people report after the loss of a pregnancy. Individuals and couples are grieving the loss of their unborn child. While the expectant parents never met the child, they grieving the loss of the dream of who the child would become. In that fetus, they say goodbye to a promised life. They say goodbye to selected baby names, nursey wallpaper, the prepaid prenatal yoga subscription, and a drawer full of onesies.
One would think that with how pervasive this feeling is, we would allow more space to grieve in our society. Sadly, we are not a culture that provides the time necessary to process grief. If your loved one dies, you get three days to attend the funeral. But what if you have a miscarriage? Or you are going through a divorce? Or you are living in a global pandemic? How many days, hours, or even minutes, are we allowed to take off?
The answer is not enough.
I could postulate on the countless reasons this is the case. For one, we are a society focused on hyper-productivity. And grief is far from “productive” by our culture’s work standard. But, I wonder if a more prominent reason is because grief is uncomfortable. When I recognize that someone close to me is grieving, it reminds me that I, too, will grieve the loss of something or someone. None of us are immune to grief, and we will experience it (many times) during our lives. We don’t want to be reminded of our impending pain, so we ignore it when we see it in others. We continue to focus on work, productivity, moving forward.
Because we do this to others, we can feel immense shame when we experience it ourselves. We aren’t taught how to grieve. And when we feel an emotion that literally turns us inside-out, we feel the shame of being unable to move forward. Dr. Brené Brown defines shame as the intense fear of disconnection from others. In pregnancy loss, shame might say, “why can’t I get over this? Everyone else gets over it?” Or, “people have miscarriages all the time, and they can go back to work.” Or, “I shouldn’t be sad because this wasn’t even a baby, it was just a bunch of cells growing.”
But in doing so, our grief is left unprocessed, which can lead to confusion of feelings, difficulty making decisions, increased conflict with family and friends, and emotional dysregulation. Unprocessed grief can make everyday tasks seem impossible to complete, meaningful relationships challenging to maintain, and our most treasured hobbies rendered seemingly meaningless.
But how do we cope with this type of loss? If we as a culture struggle to cope with more normalized loss, how do we cope with a loss that isn’t tangible?
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