Content warning: miscarriage & suicidal ideation
On April 30th 2020 my life turned upside down.
Our baby, a gummy-bear-sized embryo measuring 7w4d was found to be dead at the 8 week ultrasound. No heartbeat, a few days behind in growth, irregularly shaped gestational sac. I never dreamt that a cluster of cells would wreck me to the core.
It didn’t hit me right away, part of me expected this. I didn’t begin my descent into sobbing and despair until I was scheduling my follow-up appointment with the secretary that I checked in with an hour prior.
I had always said I expected my first pregnancy would miscarry. I heard it was common, and having EDS I assumed I might have fertility issues.
I quickly spiraled into an extremely dark depression. The kind I used to experience through ages 12-21. The kind that left me obsessed with death, chronically suicidal. My emotions were an absolute roller coaster. I have never flip flopped so drastically before. Some days I was filled with hope and determination, only to fall into hell again at a moment’s notice.
I made this butterfly mandala on May 18th, desperate to create something of value out of the tragedy that had occurred. Obviously it did not heal me, it could not save me, but it gave me something to look at and made our child’s existence more tangible.
On May 27th I also made this piece that I typically avoid showing people because it is so much more straightforward than the butterfly:
It’s the closest thing I could create to a portrait of our baby.
The embryo is actually pretty much to scale with a real 7 week old embryo on the physical copy. It’s actually pretty cute, I think, as cute as a weird blob can be.
Please remember that all people experience grief differently.
Some people do not outwardly grieve miscarriages at all, others react even worse than I did. Most fall somewhere in-between. Grief is also something we don’t just “get over”, it is something we move forward with. Grief is traumatizing, and it is a trauma very few people get to avoid.
However you experience grief, whether you grieve an unborn baby, a child of any age, a sibling, a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend, acquaintance, a beloved pet, a place you cannot return to, even an enemy or a stranger…
Please remember that grief is a bizarre, hard-to-define thing that we all experience differently and you are not weird or wrong for grieving whoever and however you naturally do.
May the memories of those you love that have gone before you bless you always.
Ari October Art 