On the Pain of Miscarriage

The discovery that a woman is going to have a baby is met with a variety of reactions, depending largely on whether the pregnancy was planned and wanted or not.  Have you ever noticed that it seems that women who desperately want to become pregnant have a far greater difficulty getting pregnant than those who don’t want a baby at all.  But, this is only anecdotal, not the result of scientific research.

Because childbirth is such a common part of the human condition, we rarely think about just how often the conception, development and birth of a child is fraught with struggle and difficulty.  On the website Canadian parents.com in an article titled “Miscarriage” it is reported that 20% of all conceptions end in miscarriage.  That means that of the 1034 children born in our region in 2008, 207 families lost a child through miscarriage.

That is a lot of loss, most of which goes pretty much unnoticed by everyone but the family and close friends of the couple who experience this loss.  Yet, even though the loss goes largely unnoticed, the grief that grows from that loss is real and there are people around us who live with that grief.

Fortunately, many who experience the loss of a child through miscarriage have good supports to assist them through their time of grief.  But there are always those who suffer alone and this is sad.   Since 2005, I have been holding a service of remembrance and interment on the last Wednesday of the month of May at the Heritage Cemetery in Steinbach.   In 2005, through the gracious cooperation of the South Eastman Health/Santè Sud-Est Inc., City of Steinbach, Steinbach Memorials, and the local funeral homes, we have secured a place of remembrance at the Heritage Cemetery where we gather annually to remember the loss of children through miscarriage, still birth or death soon after birth.  The beautiful headstone that marks the Place of remembrance reads, “How very softly you tiptoed into our world.  Almost silently, only a moment you stayed.  But what an imprint your footsteps have left upon our hearts.  In memory of the babies now in the arms of God.” 

Each year, around this grave, parents who have lost children to miscarriage, still birth and death soon after birth gather for a short service that intentionally honors the life that was lost and provides a company of fellow suffers to remember the losses with. This service is not only for those who have lost a child in this way in the last year, but for parents who have lost a child in this way but never had the opportunity to formally mark that loss.  We have had

During the service we take time to read the names of the children who never graced our homes and families.  They were, after all beautiful, unique, precious children that God gave to us, even if it was only for a few short weeks or months.  Some families had the remains of their child cremated and if they wish, we inter the cremains at the grave site and provide those families, as well as any others a place to come to, to remember the little one that they lost.

It is a short service, only about 30 minutes, and if you would like to come, please do.  You can bring whoever you like with you, and together we will remember the life that was lost to your home and family and give honor to the precious person your child would have been.

Remember, you are not alone.  If one in every five pregnancies ends in miscarriage, then there are many who have gone through just what you have.  My wife and I, many years ago now, experienced this loss five times over.  We lived thousands of miles away from family as we had left the United States to serve a church in Saskatchewan; each of those losses we suffered alone, sometimes not even knowing how to comfort one another.  With each loss we wondered if we would ever have the family we had hoped for.  My wife jotted the dates of each death (that is what a miscarriage is) in the front of her Bible and we move forward.  I sometimes wonder what kinds of marks these repeated losses left on her heart.

For me, I can not say I could even access my grief at that time in my life.  I had grown up in a home where all that mattered was “doing the right thing”.  Emotions were down played, rejected, minimized; but that was the way it was in those days, emotional integrity was valued by very few and many of us learned just to swallow hard when our feelings threatened to break out.  Over time we many of us became so adept at rejecting our own emotions that we rarely felt them.  But this is not how God created us.  He created us in his image and part of what it means to be created in his image is that we have the capacity to feel.  Feelings have a way of finding their way to the surface and for me it happened one afternoon.  I had come home from work and my wife and boys were not yet home.  I sat in our den watching a TV show, a story about a couple who where experiencing a miscarriage. 

The longer I watched, the more this something welled up within me till finally I was weeping.  The tears flowed, I sobbed and then I realized that I was crying for all the children we had lost to miscarriage, I was morning our losses, I was grieving.  Then I heard the back door open and that deeply entrenched response kicked back in and the tears stopped and once again all that sorrow was locked away in my heart.

Years later I come to work at Bethesda Hospital and Place and I was asked if we might have an annual Service of Remembrance and Interment for those who lost children.  These annual services have allowed me to finish my grieving and in turn to encourage and I trust help some, like you, grieve your lost, perhaps for the first time.  Sometimes we fear our sorrow, we think that if we give it reign that it will overwhelm us, it will consume us and that we will lose control.  I know this fear, it has often been mine, but just the opposite is true.  When we allow ourselves to feel that pain, to embrace that sorrow, to experience the grief we actually begin to heal.

So, if you have lost a child to miscarriage, still birth or death soon after birth and you have never memorialized your loss, why not join us on Wednesday, May 26th at 1 p.m. at the Heritage Cemetery on Loewen Blvd. in Steinbach.  We will be gathered in the back of the cemetery, there will be a 20’x20’ tent erected and those who come will be joined by their common experience and begin or continue the process of healing.  If you would like to bring flowers, that would be fine, an opportunity will be provided to lay them at the gravesite. 

The service is scripted, you will not be put on the spot and if you wish, you will be asked to provide the name of your baby so that that name can be read out and remembered by all who have come.  I’ll be there and I hope to see many of you who know what it means to loss a precious child.