Sharing Sorrow

This weekend I found out a very close friend had miscarried. They were going to be expecting their third child, and it was hopefully to be a boy. So now she is left with shattered joy and a broken heart. She is left with questions that don't have any answers, yet, like me she asks them anyway. All too well, I understand the shock, pain and disbelief she is feeling. I remember feeling so alone. No one in my family understood what I was experiencing.

September 4, 2006 was when I miscarried. In vain I tried to find support, searching for women who had been through what I had been through and could tell me that I could get through it to the other side. There were plenty of secular forums for miscarriage, but they carried no hope. Frustrated, I decided to journal it out.

So for those of you who have been there, and for those of you who have not, I lay my raw emotions, questioning faith and broken heart bare for you to see. Perhaps, through my pain, another woman can find hope that life continues and healing does come...

"But I was still on my period and those are usually mutually exclusive terms --pregnancy and period. Now I was worried about the bleeding whereas before I was having a normal period. Now it was not so normal. I recall feeling so helpless every time I went to the bathroom as I saw more clots pass. Could a newborn growing baby survive the bleeding? With no other information, I decided to believe that God could maintain the life within me as He was the One Who gave it in the first place.

Fervently I prayed and stood in faith as day after day passed with still more bleeding. Then on Sept 4, 2006 I started to cramp badly and ended up in the ER. They did several blood tests and then an ultrasound. The ultrasound finalized the awful truth…there was nothing in my uterus. Nothing left except my broken heart. I remember still believing until the doctor uttered those words. Was it faith or denial, I still cannot tell. But when they finally told me the results of the ultrasound, then reality came crashing down on top of me. Suffocating me. Stripping me of any faith or hope. Leaving me emotionally naked and beaten.

To leave the hospital so broken was so incongruous compared to the births of our two sons. Now I had to go home and tell my husband and children. Not to mention everyone else that we had told. It seemed so cruel to have to relive those moments so painfully still raw and listen as others tried to find something comforting to say. What is the proper response? "Thank you for your thoughts but I still feel like crap." Is that okay? And with a miscarriage so soon into the pregnancy, people around you forget much sooner than if you were bigger and farther along. Does it make it less painful to have it happen earlier on? I hope to never have to find out.

Alegria Corazon… what a beautiful name for what would have been a beautiful baby. I wonder what she would have looked like? Would she have dark hair and eyes like her daddy and brothers? Would she have been less active in-utero than her brothers were? Was she even a she… I don’t even know that much…
What will it be like to meet her for the first time in Heaven? Will she know how much I loved her? Will she know how much her death hurt me and broke my heart? Will she know how excited we all were to have her? How her brothers kissed my belly and gave her hugs? Di d she feel any pain as she died?

Now I am not so sure I want to get pregnant. But I cannot allow the fear of this happening again to run my life. We just passed two cycles and according to the doctor, we have less of a chance of having another miscarriage. What caused the first one? That is what I want to know.

There is a shadow of extreme guilt that follows me around, haunting me at every turn. Why did I have to take hormonal birth control? I knew it would mess me up, but I had no idea that the consequences would be this awful. I feel directly and solely responsible for what happened. How do I forgive myself for killing my baby????? I cannot help but think that if I had never taken the Nuvaring, I would happily be growing out of all of my clothes right now.

**Side note here: When I say that the hormonal birth control would mess me up, I meant that the chemicals and hormones would interfere with my body's natural cycle. I had no inkling that one of the side effects of hormonal birth control could be a viable pregnancy and then miscarriage. I carefully researched the Nuvaring and its side effects as my husband and I believe that life begins at conception, and we didn't want anything that would interfere with a fertilized egg (conceived baby) implanting into the uterus.**

I don’t even know how far along I really was. The only date I have to remember is three days before my birthday. Sept 4th will forever be seared into my memory. I will never forget.

How can you love someone so much that you have never even met? How can it hurt so badly to know someone passed but you only found out about them a week ago?

Miscarriage grief is silent and overwhelming. It is not as if a relative had lived and then died. While a baby is definitely a life from conception onward, society considers it not as bad. Miscarriage grief lingers and others do not understand because so quickly do they forget, for there is nothing to remind them. Forgotten and alone. That is how I feel right now.

Maybe there is no help because people do not want to admit that it could happen to them. If you don’t acknowledge it, it cannot hurt you.

Well, that is all I can muster for tonight. I am going to sleep and hopefully tomorrow will be better."


There is more, but that was the first day I journaled it all out. It was painful to be that raw and honest with myself and my emotions. But it was the beginning of healing for me. Once I could express the turmoil of my soul, I could then slowly pry my battered heart out of the jaws of grief that had gripped it.

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I wish that I had words of comfort to bring to her, but there aren't any that erase the pain. And so I pray for God's transcedent peace, His loving healing touch and complete restoration of her body and soul. I will travel the journey through grief with her, perhaps carried together the burden will be lighter.