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While touring the historical homes in
Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, we discovered a garden area that
intrigued us. A large plot was designed as a maze, and tall hedges flanked
each side of the maze’s narrow path. As I wandered through it, I couldn’t
even jump high enough to see over the top of the hedges. I felt
disoriented, with a sense of growing frustration that I had no way to make
informed choices about where I was headed. I had to follow the path until
I came to an intersection that offered one direction or the next, with
absolutely no way to guess which direction would most likely lead me out
of the green labyrinth.
When I wandered out of the bushy path, I looked up to see a much higher
level of the gardens. From this vista, someone could sit and watch people
meandering through the maze. In some ways, it must have offered a sense of
superiority to sit there and talk about which way someone should have
turned to get out of the maze easier. From high up, the intricacies of the
maze were inconsequential, the height of the hedges didn’t seem
problematic, and the whole maze itself was seen in a different
perspective.
The grief of infertility
The grief you experience during your infertility journey is so very much
like that maze of hedges. As you wander your way down its narrow path, you
can’t see which direction leads to the way out of your pain. All you can
do is make a choice here and there and continue trudging along.
Shelves of books have been written on the various ways we encounter grief,
the ways we handle grief, the ways we respond to grief, and the ways we
suppress grief. One online bookstore had over 2,600 titles under the
topic. Plenty of stuff is out there to read, but when grief slaps you face
down into the mud, you just don’t feel like pulling yourself up and
finding a book about how to get through it.
Ideally, the best option would be to educate yourself ahead of time for
what the tumultuous ride will be like. But since almost no one expects
to be labeled infertile, the onset of grief is fast and furious.
Hopefully, during one of the breaks in the storm, you have encountered
this chapter and can assess where you are in your grief journey, how
you’re doing, and how you need to take care of yourself to survive the
storm effectively.
Every person’s experience with grief is unique, because every person and
every situation is different. As Thomas Attig wrote in How We Grieve:
Relearning the World:
No two of us engage in the same pattern of activities, projects, and
commitments. No two of our life stories are identical. No two of us
remember the same past, live the same present life, or share the same
expectations, hopes, and dreams for the future. Each of us experiences the
world from a distinctive perspective in life circumstances uniquely our
own. Because this is so, no two of us experience bereavement in identical
ways. Each loss affects us in a particular time and place in our lives,
shatters our distinctive daily living patterns, and disrupts our unique
life stories. …In turn, no two of us face the same challenges in moving
beyond our grief emotion, putting our lives together, and going on into
the next chapters of our life stories. Because each of us faces unique
tasks, no two paths of grieving are identical.(1)
Two women in infertility treatments may both experience miscarriages, but
their grief journey will not be identical. They have different
backgrounds, expectations, temperaments, and outlooks. We must never say,
“I know exactly how you feel” when someone has experienced loss, because
we cannot know exactly how they feel. A better response would be:
“I remember what it felt like when I (had a miscarriage, learned I was
infertile, etc.). I’m so sorry you’ve experienced the loss of ----.”
Philosophers, scholars, therapists, and counselors have studied grief
throughout the ages and have identified some areas of common ground in how
people walk through grief. Though grief is expressed with
individuality, some common themes exist in each grief experience: shock,
denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. Originally, these
were considered the stages of grief, but stages proved too
static, too defined for a process that was not predictable for each
person.
Nowadays, counselors more accurately describe the grief process as a
journey where we move in and out, back and forth, across and over these
phases as we work our way toward a new emotional balance. Each phase is
not characterized by a clear beginning and ending, but rather a blending
from one to another, overlapping and intertwining along the way.
The journey may have a specific beginning, such as a miscarriage or a
specific test result, but the grief of infertility doesn’t have a specific
ending. The loss of a child, a pregnancy, or the loss of your dreams is
something that you weather and survive, but it’s not something you forget
and never revisit. It’s a part of what defines your life story.
The grief of
miscarriage
Infertility’s web of grief begins when you realize you’re not getting
pregnant or not staying pregnant. The web is complicated by the grief of
actual loss. Unless a person has experienced a miscarriage, they cannot
understand that miscarriage brings with it all the feelings of grief
associated with a death in the family. What people don’t realize is that
you have already bonded with the baby! You already considered yourself a
mom (or a dad) when you learned you were expecting. You can’t just erase
all the anticipation and joy you felt.
You have the added pain of not having a clue whether the baby was a boy or
a girl. You don’t know what you would have named the baby. You don’t know
what went wrong and that brings about some fear for future pregnancies.
Celeste has battled infertility for years. With her first pregnancy, she
miscarried. In her second pregnancy, she bore Briley, and then, with her
third pregnancy, she miscarried again. Here are her thoughts on what she’s
lived through.
Survivor's Quote: I’ve been on both
sides of the fence: hoping and praying for a pregnancy, and then losing
it. It is so much better to never become pregnant than to have all the
hopes and dreams of feeling a life inside of you, and then, for whatever
reason, have it all ripped away from you at six weeks or even four months.
It is a pain you never get over. Some people have said that since I have
one child, I should be happy with that, and that it couldn’t hurt so badly
the second time I lost a baby. Wrong again. I think my miscarriage after
Briley was far more painful than the first one. The reason is because when
I lost the first baby, I lost the “thought” of what being a parent would
be like. When I lost my third pregnancy, Briley was two years old, and I
knew exactly the joy that I was losing.
My husband works with a
friend who has had two miscarriages in the last year. She told him, “I
feel like we’re building a family in heaven, but I want to be building one
here! We won’t be able to see those children until we die.”
Though a measure of medical progress has been made to determine why some
women miscarry repeatedly, it is still considered the most common
complication of pregnancy. One source reported that
10-15 percent of all first pregnancies miscarry
and that about 2 to 5 percent of couples suffer from recurrent pregnancy
loss, usually involving 3 or more miscarriages.(4)
The grief of neonatal
death
I once worked with a woman who was elated to be pregnant with her
first, and then was beside herself to learn she was carrying twins. She
was the epitome of a beaming, pregnant woman. But her little boys died at
birth, and instead of having two bassinets to stand over and whisper
lullabies, she and her husband had two tiny graves to cry over. Years
later, I sat at a church retreat in a discussion group with a woman who
opened her heart to us. I listened and wept, as most of the other women
did, as she described the death of her newborn son thirty years ago.
The pain of losing an unborn child or a newborn child is just as full and
real as the death of a person we’ve known and loved for years. And that’s
precisely what most people don’t understand. Comments like, “It’s better
that you didn’t have time to bond with it,” trivializes the significance
of this little person. Bonding with your baby happens long before she’s
born.
A stillbirth is defined as the death of an unborn child between week 20
and birth. Neonatal death includes babies who survive birth, but die soon
afterward. Some questions may never have answers—what went wrong, what
could I have done differently, what warning signs did I miss. But parents
encountering neonatal death have decisions to make that parents of
miscarriages do not: whether they will see the baby and whether they will
have a funeral.
The parents should be able to choose whether or not to see their infant
after birth. Even if a doctor or other staff recommends against it (due to
physical abnormalities, etc.), the parents can request the opportunity.
Putting a face on their child, holding him in their arms, can help
immensely with closure, with putting an identity to this little one they
were awaiting. Giving the baby a name helps, too. This little one is an
important person in your life, even though their physical presence was
shortened. Having a name for your deceased child helps you to attribute
personhood to him. The woman whose story I heard during the church retreat
explained that she had just begun to find closure to her son’s death by
giving him a full name and having it engraved on the headstone…thirty
years after his demise. Some people choose to have a memorial service or a
family prayer time to commemorate their baby’s life. Whatever is most
comforting for the parents is what should be done.
Finding ways to remember the baby helps parents to feel that the child’s
influence, though brief, is not forgotten within the family. My
sister-in-law lost twin girls, and because of surgical complications, she
and her husband were unable to see the babies. But they decided to give
them names, Stephanie and Chelsea, and they have an angel ornament for
each girl on the Christmas tree every year. Finding ways to remember a
baby’s life can help parents move forward.
The grief of losing
embryos
Technology has increased our options in infertility treatments, and
with it comes a wave of ethical implications—and grief possibilities.
Infertile couples a generation ago may have had inseminations available to
them, but they never knew if actual fertilization of the egg occurred
unless a pregnancy resulted. Now with IVF, ICSI, and ZIFT procedures,
couples know if eggs are fertilized, if embryos are healthy or if they
die.
Survivor's Quote: We were thrilled
when I had 7 eggs to retrieve! We tried to fertilize all of them, and four
“took.” Only two survived, and they were implanted. I imagined two little
lives floating around inside of my body. I prayed for them, wondering if
they were little girls or boys, or one of each! It was incredible to
ponder. But in a few weeks, it was clear that neither implanted, and the
IVF was a failure. (Casey)
Another ethical labyrinth
is selective reduction (SR), a procedure which eliminates embryos already
in the womb during a multiple pregnancy in an effort to improve the
survival rates of the remaining embryos. Hoping to come out of this
pregnancy with healthy twins or triplets, instead of losing quads or
quints, a couple may make the difficult choice to terminate the least
viable embryos. The procedure is controversial from moral and spiritual
perspectives, and those who choose it grapple with its implications. They
may feel grief at eliminating one or more embryos, but don’t give
themselves an opportunity to process that grief because they are
overwhelmed by the consequences of what they chose to do.
The grief of losing fertilized embryos, whether naturally, in the lab, or
through SR, is rarely discussed. Embryos are so early in the game that
most people outside the realm of infertility have a hard time recognizing
their loss as a valid reason for grief. But what everyone else thinks
doesn’t matter. The degree to which you connect with your embryos is
entirely up to you. If, besides grieving a failed IVF, you need to grieve
the deaths of embryos, do it. Find a meaningful way to remember that those
microscopic dots of life represented the combined genes of you and your
spouse. Would it help you to try to assign a gender to them and a name?
Some couples pray about it and ask God to give them peace one way or the
other as to their potential child’s gender. Does it help to imagine that
they, tiny as they were, are just as precious in God’s sight as any other
baby? Well, it’s true.
The grief of a failed
adoption
A couple who is pursuing adoption has likely already known the grief
of infertility, and probably the grief of miscarriage or even neonatal
loss. To step into the arena of adoption puts their hearts on the line for
another kind of grief possibility. In pregnancy, a baby can be lost
anywhere from week 1 until week 40-plus. Likewise, an adoption can fall
through at many points along the way. (Chapter 10 discusses ways to
minimize the likelihood of failed adoptions.)
Survivor's Quote: We met and matched
with a birth mom and dad and her family. She was due in three weeks. Her
family made us a bit nervous, but when she went into labor, we came to the
hospital. Her grandparents were nice, but not very supportive of her
adoption plan. Needless to say, she had a beautiful baby girl that we
named. All went down hill from there. After two days, we decided to return
home to give everyone some space. Two days later, she decided to keep the
baby. (Joy and Jeff)
I know a couple who
brought the baby home from the hospital, but during the waiting period
required by their state, the birth mother changed her mind and wanted the
baby back. My husband and I experienced a failed adoption, though
thankfully, it was months before the birth mother was due. Still, though,
there was a period of grief and loss for what we thought we were going to
have.
With a failed adoption, a couple may encounter a different level of grief
which is wholly unlike the grief of losing a baby in pregnancy. An
adoptive couple may have reason to grieve that the child’s life is in
danger from abuse or neglect. The child is not dead, but they know that
somewhere, he may be in a horrible home.
Survivor's Quote: The teenage girl who
chose us to be her child’s parents had confessed during one of our
meetings that earlier in her pregnancy, she had hit her stomach, hoping to
cause a miscarriage. We continued working with her until the baby was
born. But right before she was to place him in our arms, she changed her
mind and decided to keep him. Perhaps more than our own pain of losing a
child, we grieve in vain for the plight of this baby who is now living
with a mother who abused him before he was even born. (Patty)
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God can be trusted
with your unknown reality
Grief and grieving have taken on negative connotations in our language
because their very mention brings up dark, dismal images of sad scenes, of
encounters with death or tragedy. But the experience of grieving is
actually a path toward healing, of coming to terms with the loss in your
life. It’s not just important for you to grieve your loss; it’s vitally
necessary for you to do so.
Grieving is the active effort on your part to process the loss you’ve
experienced—“active” in that you let yourself experience the pain and
sadness, come face to face with the reality of what is lost (or is being
lost from month to month), and honestly assess your feelings at a hundred
points along the way.
Grief protracted,
expanded, and elongated
Infertility is a war against the circumstances and conditions that
keep you from bringing forth life, and ironically, most people
characterize infertility’s grief as a series of deaths—the death
of your dreams, your hopes, your desires. Your loss is not a one-time
event, like the death of an elderly relative, but a series of experiences
over a period in your life. Grieving through your infertile years means
coming to terms with any number of losses along the way—month after month
of not getting pregnant, miscarriages, failed inseminations, failed
invitros, failed adoptions, and more. The events often tumble on top of
each other so you don’t have the luxury of grieving one loss before the
next one hits.
How to handle your
feelings of shock and denial
It’s not unusual to go through a period of numbness when you’re first
discovering you’re infertile. For some of us, it’s like a slow dawning,
realizing that pregnancy is not happening as quickly as it should. For
others, it’s the shock and disbelief that comes from the result of one
test that shows an inadequacy. Surely this can’t be happening to you!
We may deny this new reality by trying to prove it’s wrong: We’ll work
really hard in the next few months and we’ll get pregnant, you just wait
and see.
How to handle your
feelings of anger
Your anger may be directed in several ways: at yourself, at others,
and at God. First of all, own your anger. Admit that you’re angry.
Beth believes that anger that’s not dealt with, that gets turned inward,
can turn into depression.
How to handle feelings
of bargaining
When someone in grief tries to find ways to negotiate the situation
into a more positive resolution, that’s bargaining. We try to bargain with
God, with ourselves, and with others.
How to identify
feelings of acceptance
Eventually, after bouncing around in a myriad of feelings described in
the categories above, most couples who have not conquered infertility will
work their way toward feelings of acceptance in regards to their
infertility. Acceptance doesn’t mean they like this new reality
they’re in. But they can consider the change with more emotional balance
than before.
Make the pain go away
The only way to feel better after experiencing loss is to allow
yourself to feel horrible for a while. The grief process is one that must
be walked through fully. Too many people squelch their pain because they
think it’s going to overwhelm and destroy them. Too many people stop the
grief process because they fear it will destroy their faith, rather than
rest in the truth that their faith will survive. Too many people just
don’t trust themselves to survive grief.
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