Grief.

The concept of grief is something I have been reflecting on more and more recently. It feels as if once you have gone through a very traumatic event and have had to grieve the loss of something, it never really leaves you. Grief tends to sneak up on you and sometimes make itself known at times when you could have sworn you had overcome it. The revelation being that healing is not linear and in order to overcome we just need to learn to live with loss.

When I look back at the last 2+ years of my life I see so many instances of lessons learnt through painful experiences. I recall so much trauma and loss. Loss of paths that were once open to me. Loss of ambition, of security and of certainty. The grief involved with mourning has made me feel less like myself and at times I’ve been scrambling to hold on to anything that isn’t sinking along with me. Since my many miscarriages I’ve joined endless amounts of support groups. There are so many women out there who have gone through years and years of infertility, loss, miscarriages and even stillbirths. Their stories humble me but they also have made me realise that nothing will ever fix the losses they have had to endure. Many of them have gone on to have other children but are still haunted everyday by those they lost. 

I find myself somewhere in between the women who have decided to be childfree and have never swayed from this sentiment; and the women who have lost pregnancies and live life childless. For most of the latter group, these women always wanted children but have accepted their circumstance of childlessness. In many ways this makes me feel like I don’t really fit into either group. I never wanted children but tried for them anyway and then miscarried pregnancies to then affirm how much I didn’t want the end product to begin with. This makes the heartbreak of my losses ever so different because I will forever mourn them but I know that I don’t want to be a parent in the life I envision for myself. The complexity and somewhat irony of this is not lost on me.

It makes the pain of the loss and the way I grieve unique in a way that is hard to put into words. It means that pregnancy announcements still trigger me in a way that I am never prepared to deal with in spite of knowing this isn’t what I want for myself. It’s made me realise that there are some things in life that cannot and will never heal; not fully anyway. These things we are forced to live with and they present dualities in our minds in terms of emotional responses that are trauma inflicted against rational elements that tell us we are better off. The discomfort that’s involved in acknowledging this hard fact is one which is heartbreaking in itself; but ignoring it will only prolong retraumatising ourselves when those feelings we have pushed down and ignored remerge with ferocity. 

So what do we do? How do we go on knowing all of this? Personally, I’ve allowed myself to grieve again and again. Each time it hurts a little less and the feeling passes more quickly. I also understand that the more time passes the less I will be triggered. Potentially over time this will mean I will either be able to protect myself by not putting myself in certain situations or be able to rely on the scar tissue that has evolved with healing in different ways, slowly and over time. I also understand that my story will never be exactly the same as others and there is no guilt to be had over that. I have had to forgive myself for the choices I have made which have deviated off the path I saw for myself. I give myself credit that I was open to trying even though deep down I knew the path was not for me. I acknowledge the complex grief I will always feel, for the rest of my life. But in acknowledging it and sitting with it, I release and relinquish its power over me.