Miscarriage mourning
Erin Stewart
DeseretNews.com blogger | July 16, 2009 at 9:05 a.m.
I had a miscarriage two weeks ago.
That's one of those sentences that doesn't seem real until you actually say it. Kind of like when you tell people you are pregnant and the words sound surprisingly delicious as they roll off your tongue. It's like that, except when you announce a miscarriage, the words scratch your throat as they come out.
I've hesitated to tell a lot of people about my miscarriage, mostly because I know what the reaction will be: How are you doing? How do you feel?
I don't know the answer to either of those questions. I feel OK. I feel sad. I feel scared. I feel sick. I have no idea how I'm supposed to be feeling.
I was only six weeks along -- barely long enough to see anything on an ultrasound. But to anyone who has been pregnant, you know it's long enough to have calculated a due date and decided which room will be the nursery.
So I feel like I'm lost in the no-mans land of early miscarriage. I didn't lose a baby with a face and a name. I don't have anything to bury.
How do you grieve an idea?
To any of you with experience with this, please tell me. How do you get closure when you lose something that you didn't really ever have?
Vignette V6 Mon Jul 20 00:21:01 2009
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Sarah Hinze | 1:38 p.m. Jul. 16, 2009
I am the mother of nine children for which I am very grateful. I also had three miscarriages over a twenty year period. The miscarriages were so traumatic that I was impressed to research the topic on a spiritual level. As a result of that research I wrote two books that helped me in my grief and also helped others. Those books are "We Lived in Heaven" and "Songs of the Morning Stars". I have since come to understand that for me each miscarriage was an individual spirit and for various reasons, including my health, their physical development, and especially their missions to stay on the earth, or leave all came into play. After years of prayer study, and collecting stories from others, my miscarried children now either: returned in another pregnancy, chose to stay on the other side to act as a guardian to our family and my husband and I will raise them in the eternities, or will come at a future time to another family member. I hope that my testimony may be of comfort to those who have miscarried children. There is comfort to come, I promise, in time, once you understand God's plan for them.
Another blogger wrote:
I concur with Sarah Hinze, all miscarriages have a spirit assigned. Some are waiting for a body that works. I do not believe that the spirit is actually in the body that early on. So the miscarriage was not a child to be mourned but a hope lost, until the spirit gets its working body. In my mind this would be when the fetus is not really a fetus but a mass of cells that grew as far as they could. To me that is not a child even though it was "alive" while it grew. Other miscarriages also have a spirit assigned and the body counts as having been just that. The key word is that it had a body. So not all miscarriages are equal. I have had three and do not believe any of them were children lost to me. I do believe that the first one which was the most advanced and traumatic was later born to me among one of my six subsequent healthy births. I guess the other two did as well since I had such a long line of kids waiting for healthy bodies. I would recommend everyone read Sarah's books
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