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What People Don’t Understand About Miscarriage
20 women talk about how it feels when a pregnancy ends in a book of deeply personal stories
Talk to women who’ve miscarried, and you will often hear that comments by well-intentioned friends made their grief worse.
Yet it can be hard to know how to respond sympathetically when many things can affect how a woman feels about the end of a pregnancy, ranging from how long she had carried the child to how much support she had from a partner.
Anyone who feels uncertain about what to say might pick up About What Was Lost: Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope (Penguin, 2006), edited by Jessica Berger Gross, a collection of 20 essays by women who miscarried between the sixth and 23rd weeks of pregnancy. Although not a self-help book, its entries suggest the range of emotions that can arise when a pregnancy ends; shock, grief, sadness, denial, and anger about the insensitivity of friends or family.
Collections of essays reflect the tastes of their editors, and in this case Jessica Berger Gross calls herself “an organic-eating, yoga-teaching, Birkenstock-wearing granola girl.” When she miscarried after eight and a half weeks, she sobbed for days, partly because she had to put aside her dreams of “the short list of literary French names I’d…
