A Grieving Woman’s Love Letter (to Oneself)
Dear one,
There is a strangeness in your chest—one that dictates you to stay possessively silent and survive on the breaths that are so far and few in between. Reason warrants you to take deeper breaths but you know each inhale puts you at risk of another maddening episode of tears; so instead you safely choose otherwise.
You will find it a ruinous thing to look at your reflection in the mirror. Women often radiate or are told they are ‘blooming,’ when they’re pregnant. You’ve been told you had the warmest glow about you as you carried your child. You are in no way ready to confront what a woman carrying death would look like in the mirror. For months you had a life inside your belly, then after a routine ultrasound appointment, you’re left with the ruins of your loss, and a depressing visual of yourself as a closed casket housing the remains of the physicality of your pregnancy.
The people who love you will safeguard the sanctity of your healing. The people who surround you will shower you with a parade of Grab food deliveries, thoughtful flowers, and pillow-like paragraphs that you can rest and nourish yourself with. The people who know you will let you absolutely be—treating you like the newborn you had hoped to have; letting you find your footing while staying a few steps away, ready to carry you off back to the bed that embraced you.
Your pregnancy used to be a lovely little chapel on a hill that brought warm memories and ideas of family in communion, but it’s the grief that follows the miscarriage that closely resembles the most intimidating cathedral of shadows. The grief seemingly towers over you and extends beyond what you can see or grasp.
The people who need you will see your absence as nothing but an inconvenience in their daily commerce. The people who used to surround you will pass judgment on how you’ve handled yourself while in the thick of suffering a miscarriage. In a few months, they’ll hardly matter. Their unwelcome criticism of how you handle your grief speaks more about their lack of empathy than their capacity for grace during a tragedy. Wish them well and pray they do not one day find themselves in your position—having to contend with hateful commentary as you navigate the death that has visited your family’s soul.
Revel instead in the loveliest notion that your grandmothers’ prayers are still protecting you.
Find comfort in the grand constellation of moments that may be traced back in the far future. Attempt to grasp the idea that life isn’t happening to you—it’s happening for you. Only then can you be resigned to the fact that these little tragedies aid the movement of your life’s cinema.
Bathe in the sadness you find yourself so waist-deep in so that you can take ownership and actively immerse instead of passively drown. The incidence of shadows means there is strong light somewhere. You would do better by celebrating the source of light than the occurrence of the shadows that surround you.
You’ll tell your story twice, thrice, ten, three hundred times. Until one day, the story takes on a new energy and it will taste foreign to your tongue. The order of events will one day blur, your anecdotes will differ, and you’ll find that your story has turned into a distant legend.
Slowly you’ll see the constellation of moments unfold before you. You’ll have sacred moments to yourself whispering at the realization that there were a few things left for you to do, a number of lives for you to meet, and a hundred narratives for you to build before you’re to enter motherhood. You’ll be gifted a grand yet silently sorrowful new perspective to your dailies. What was once a tiring encounter at work now presents itself as an opportunity to reexamine your stamina. What was once an angry exchange now presents itself as a method for practicing conflict resolution. What was once the hardest truth to swallow now presents itself as a necessary baptism to assault you into the growth of the woman you’re to become.
There is a depth and darkness to your newfound calmness. It’s a blinding contrast to the wars you used to wage on those who thought to provoke you and the fortress you’ve built around your family. Now your energy is reserved for healing yourself—not inflicting pain on others nor setting them right when they’ve recklessly thrown their assumptions.
You’ll approach your initial due date with pain. Despite the hours and weeks you’ve spent slowly rebuilding your life and yourself, there still come the rudest instances that unravel the stillness. It’ll feel harder than when you were first confronted with the news of your miscarriage. Eventually, you’ll spring forward once again and commit to the healing.
Your days will bring you women who resemble strength and sunshine.
These women will see you and find you new fortresses while you heal. There will be women who will offer you their own personal tragedies as a means of communion. You’ll be looked after and showered with light and well wishes. You’ll also be challenged by a good number of women to hurry yourself along and pull yourself out of the trenches of your grief.
Grace and gratitude.
Those words will come to you as you spend your nth night in a maddening mix of tears and sleeplessness. The pain you’ve been dealt now comes as a canvas for grace and gratitude. You’ll repeat this for days as you drive on the highway, as you exchange pleasantries with strangers, and as you finally muster the courage to look into the mirror again and see your reflection.
The closed casket that used to house the physicality of your pregnancy now more closely resembles a woman once again. You are no longer defined by what you have lost nor what you feel you have wrongly carried. The weaponized commentary inflicted on you as you navigated your miscarriage no longer reaches you.
You’ll be offered a fertility tattoo by the loveliest and one of the fiercest women you’ll meet in the mountains of Buscalan. She did not know your struggle, nor did she know you had just suffered a loss—but she baptizes you with it and blesses you beyond what she could have imagined.
The home you’ve built with your husband will be filled with such warmth and anticipation. It will almost feel like the insides of a kitchen as you prepare sweets in the oven. There’s a little mess on the kitchen floor and the countertops, the bottles of ingredients are all a merry mix of misfits, but you know there are such good things coming.
One day something will click. Your husband has been your partner-in-crime. The energy you’ve flowed with the past year will ask to be released or perhaps shared. You’ll spend your wedding anniversary shooting people who have accepted a little dance of discovery with you. You’ll be shooting them in sunlight and capturing how they interpret a grand white cloth before them. You won’t know it at the time, because you were just drawn to shoot friends, but you were celebrating the grief that once held you captive.
The portraits will be displayed at the yearly art fair to thousands of people. There will be those who graciously offer you their thanks. There will be a thoughtful few who will tell you they were moved. You’ll be lucky to witness a handful of those who offered deep breaths as they surveyed your show.
Your father and your mother will rush to your home after you’ve called with the bad news. You are after all their baby. The fierce familial love that binds you is the very thing that sets you free to forge your own days. You’ll sit and thank the world you’ve been born as a daughter, sister, wife, and hopeful mother.
Step into the sunlight that is your life. Thank the towers of grief and loss that cast shadows to remind you to move. Fall in love with the ruins that once reminded you of what could have been and instead adopt it as part of your personal heritage.
Celebrate the ancestry that led you to the woman you are today. Surround yourself with people who spare no time commenting on the misfortune of others because they’re far too busy building shelters of goodness for those around them.
Your grandmothers’ prayers are still protecting you.
Don’t be surprised when you find one night, while you were writing this very letter, after the most random Google search, that your mother’s mother’s name means ‘grace and consolation’ while your father’s mother’s name means ‘gratitude and appreciation.’ You’ll realize that after all this time, intergenerational wisdom flows from one mother to another.
I hope you take comfort in knowing that you are loved, that you are guided, and that you will one day speak the prayers as your grandmothers have done, to protect the littlest girls who will walk after you.
Maybe they’ll also learn to partake in the narrative of loss, death, or even miscarriage—so that more women who find themselves in the strangest grief could find community as a welcome consolation to their pain. Remember that the sanctity of motherhood isn’t stripped when you bring these difficult conversations to light. You don’t need to hide yourself away because there are those who decreed that you should’ve handled your miscarriage silently or differently.
These letters and these words aren’t written for them—they’re for the eyes of those who need the space and bandwidth to process grief.
Revel in the quiet truth that all personal tragedies can be driven toward good for others. Honor your loss with grace and gratitude and find little ways you can put sunshine and strength out into the world—we all know we need it.
In between styling shoots and her work with non-profit Waves For Water, Meg Manzano attempts to honor their little one loved and lost on Instagram @littleonelovedandlost hoping it serves as a safe space for those going through a similar journey.
