Author Jessica Zucker has written a terific piece on miscarriage for the Washington Post. It is entitled “I Had a Miscarriage. Talk To Me.” In it, she laments that people “seemed to vanish” as if they feared contamination”.
I think this is an experience which many women who've suffered miscarriages can relate to. Granted, there are people who have miscarriages, who want to bury the experience deeply and never talk about it. (Frankly, I think this comes with it's own challenges and reprucusions.) However, most of the women I've talk to, do want to talk about their experiences with loss.
I understand that people are uncomfortable. Their worry about saying the wrong thing, sometimes prevents them from saying anything at all. They're not sure how to behave or what to do. Zucker writes about contracting Malaria and how people in her life seemed willing to talk about that because it “didn't include death.”.
Several years ago, I was friendly with a woman who was the mother of one of my son's friends. I won't go as far to say we were actually friends; we never hung out. But our sons spent a lot of time together in those days and we chatted a lot when we would pick the boys up from one another's houses. During this time, I became pregnant with my daughter. This woman and I talked extensively about babies and the future.
A week after my daughter died of severe congenital heart defects, I saw this woman at a basketball game (our sons also played in the same basketball league). She waved hello but said absolutely nothing else. Even when people are flustered in the face of loss, they can often come up with an “I'm sorry” or an “I heard about what happened”. Yet this woman never, ever said anything at all. I was dumbfounded.
When we don't talk about these losses, it sends the message that they aren't worth talking about. When you combine the lack of conversation with our cultural attitude of “just get over it” in relation to any loss, we get the sense that these losses don't matter or aren't significant.
Zucker says “perhaps the very antidote to drowning in the heartbreak od reproductive trauma is talking about it candidly...” I completely agree.
I feel that Zucker's article is excellent and I would recommend reading it whether you've had a miscarriage or not. You can read the article at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/01/26/i-had-a-miscarriage-talk-to-me/