The Pregnancy Loss Nobody Prepared Me to Talk About

I had a miscarriage at 27, at eleven weeks, in a Minneapolis hospital that was efficient and kind and that sent me home with medical aftercare instructions and very little else.

My partner was there and we were both managing the shock of it in the particular silence of two people who had not yet found the language for something they had not expected to need language for.

In the weeks that followed, the silence extended into the wider world in ways that were not chosen and were very isolating. Pregnancy loss is statistically common - estimates range from one in four to one in five pregnancies - and culturally largely invisible, which creates a specific loneliness for the people inside it.

I had not spoken about the pregnancy early, following the cultural convention that you do not announce before twelve weeks, which meant that most people in my life did not know there had been a pregnancy to lose.

When I began to understand that I needed to talk about what had happened, there was no natural audience for it - no one who had known what they would be losing.

The grief was specific and complicated in ways I had not had language for: the loss of a future rather than a person I had known, which is its own kind of grief that does not fit the frameworks we have for the other kinds.

My body, which had been pregnant and then was not, carried its own processing that was separate from the emotional one. My relationship with my partner, which I had expected the experience to bring closer, required work to keep close because we were each grieving separately and in different registers and had to learn to do it together.

I went to a support group at 28 - found through a GP referral - where I sat in a room with other women who had been through versions of the same thing and discovered, in that room, something I had not been able to find anywhere else: the experience of not having to explain what I was talking about.

I want to write this because I wish someone had told me before: it is common and it is not small and you are allowed to grieve it and there are people who understand it. Find them.