This resonates with me so much. I had a miscarriage in February 2021, and I spent weeks looking for the “perfect” thing as a memorial. I think my brain needed something to latch on to, but I must have spent 300 hours on Etsy and Google considering all of the things you mention here. Nothing felt right. Eventually (without knowing of my search), my MIL gifted me a little crystal bear holding forget-me-nots, something I never would have picked for myself, but it allowed me to stop searching.
My grandfather died year before last and he was a super gardener. His garden won awards and everything. One of the last times I saw him was the summer before, before cancer took over. I have a picture of him standing with pride against one of those mammoth sunflowers. It’s head was bigger than his. At his funeral my dad gave out sunflower seeds to everyone (in october) and people were encouraged to plant them the next spring and share with the rest of the family how they got on. It was really lovely seeing them all the following summer in pictures or reality. It was like a communal ritual which felt like a lovely way to remember him by. I like to think too that it will have encouraged some into a love of gardening as well.
After my second miscarriage, I opted to get a tattoo on my wrist. It's a tree, to represent the Dolly Parton quote "Storms make trees grow deeper roots." For me, it's less a memorial for the baby I didn't get to meet, and more a testament to my strength in wading through that truly horrendous period of my life. Because you're right - everything else (plants, flowers, anything really) just doesn't quite feel right. The ritual that felt better for me was one that celebrated my own part in the whole thing, rather than focusing on the baby (if that makes sense).
My grandmother also died in 2021, and we had a graveside service to try to avoid being in an enclosed space. My daughter was only 18 months old, so we spent much of the service trying to entertain her enough that she didn’t get too loud. My grandmother had a beautiful singing voice and was a painter as well as a decorator/planner of weddings with the requisite floral arrangement skills, and it felt somehow incomplete to just have such a simple service that did not acknowledge in some fashion her many artistic talents. My whole family is blessed to have at least one of her paintings displayed in our hour homes, and my daughter told me the other day she wants to live in the house displayed in the painting in our dining room (it was of a home on the water and does look very picturesque).
I'm reading this late, but I wanted to say that I understand this need, and I appreciate you writing about it. After my early miscarriage, it felt important to me to name the baby, but I realized later that I had really been naming my grief over the possibility, which you so beautifully described here. I'm glad that I did it, because I think it brought me a lot of peace.
Thank you for sharing the book about rituals. I put a hold on it through the library and am looking forward to reading it.
I feel like rituals around death serve two purposes -as part of the process of privately grieving and also to mark the loss socially, within society.
The trouble, for me, with miscarriage rituals, is that they only satisfy the private grief. That is not what I need. I have things that already help me here (for example, when we had 3 losses in 3 months at the start of 2023, I walked a lot around a Victorian cemetery near my home. It has fantastic views of London and was left to go wild and re-wooded (although it is now maintained). I spent a long time looking at the markers of the lives of babies and children, and there was something comforting about being in a place where so many generations went to mark such profound loss; or next week when it is the due date of the pregnancy I lost in the summer, I'll have a glass of fizz (not least because I also have a 'weigh in' for IVF funding the day before!).
The trouble I have is not having a way of marking this in society. Of having what has happened witnessed. So many (all?) of our rituals around death focus on a collective sense of loss, and that isn't really experienced to the same extent with pregnancy losses -friends and family might be sad for you, but they will not continue to note and mark loss or due dates, it does not feature on their landscape.
I think, for me, the reason so many miscarriage rituals do not 'fit' is that the place the emphasis on processing and remembering on the mother/parents -I don't need any more pressure there!
I've spent a long time mulling over what would fit, given the above, and the closest I can come to is something like a scene from the horror film Midsommar. The context is entirely different but a female character witnesses something that deeply upsets her and the rest of the women there gather around her and cry and moan with her. I remember Florence Pugh, who plays the character in question, talking about how powerful that scene was to film.
I think that is what 'feels' most right to me - people to hear and empathise and feel my grief in their own bodies. But even writing that sounds like being such a 'drama queen'.
And I think that is sort of the paradox of pregnancy loss, for me at least -I want the public recognition, the recognition in my community/society that I am mourning and what I am mourning, but I've also been conditioned to not 'make a big deal' of it.
It is hard. I do wonder, however, how things might be different if we collectively mourned all sorts of female experiences with our female friends and family members.
Really lovely piece Jennie. I've really struggled with finding a ritual too. I never did write that letter to the children that never were, as they are too nebulous in my mind. I've never planted anything, also because it reminded me of what I flushed and never buried. I've wanted to go to a baby loss remembrance day, but never managed and I'm not sure why that is so difficult for me (apparently). The only thing I've consistently done, and am really happy about, is that when I visit a church (which is only for cultural reasons, as I'm non-religious and atheist) I light three candles every time. I've never lit candles in my own home, but churches are remote enough for me that I think I feel happier (safer?) lighting them there... xxx
This resonates with me so much. I had a miscarriage in February 2021, and I spent weeks looking for the “perfect” thing as a memorial. I think my brain needed something to latch on to, but I must have spent 300 hours on Etsy and Google considering all of the things you mention here. Nothing felt right. Eventually (without knowing of my search), my MIL gifted me a little crystal bear holding forget-me-nots, something I never would have picked for myself, but it allowed me to stop searching.
My grandfather died year before last and he was a super gardener. His garden won awards and everything. One of the last times I saw him was the summer before, before cancer took over. I have a picture of him standing with pride against one of those mammoth sunflowers. It’s head was bigger than his. At his funeral my dad gave out sunflower seeds to everyone (in october) and people were encouraged to plant them the next spring and share with the rest of the family how they got on. It was really lovely seeing them all the following summer in pictures or reality. It was like a communal ritual which felt like a lovely way to remember him by. I like to think too that it will have encouraged some into a love of gardening as well.
After my second miscarriage, I opted to get a tattoo on my wrist. It's a tree, to represent the Dolly Parton quote "Storms make trees grow deeper roots." For me, it's less a memorial for the baby I didn't get to meet, and more a testament to my strength in wading through that truly horrendous period of my life. Because you're right - everything else (plants, flowers, anything really) just doesn't quite feel right. The ritual that felt better for me was one that celebrated my own part in the whole thing, rather than focusing on the baby (if that makes sense).
My grandmother also died in 2021, and we had a graveside service to try to avoid being in an enclosed space. My daughter was only 18 months old, so we spent much of the service trying to entertain her enough that she didn’t get too loud. My grandmother had a beautiful singing voice and was a painter as well as a decorator/planner of weddings with the requisite floral arrangement skills, and it felt somehow incomplete to just have such a simple service that did not acknowledge in some fashion her many artistic talents. My whole family is blessed to have at least one of her paintings displayed in our hour homes, and my daughter told me the other day she wants to live in the house displayed in the painting in our dining room (it was of a home on the water and does look very picturesque).
I'm reading this late, but I wanted to say that I understand this need, and I appreciate you writing about it. After my early miscarriage, it felt important to me to name the baby, but I realized later that I had really been naming my grief over the possibility, which you so beautifully described here. I'm glad that I did it, because I think it brought me a lot of peace.
Thank you for sharing the book about rituals. I put a hold on it through the library and am looking forward to reading it.
I feel like rituals around death serve two purposes -as part of the process of privately grieving and also to mark the loss socially, within society.
The trouble, for me, with miscarriage rituals, is that they only satisfy the private grief. That is not what I need. I have things that already help me here (for example, when we had 3 losses in 3 months at the start of 2023, I walked a lot around a Victorian cemetery near my home. It has fantastic views of London and was left to go wild and re-wooded (although it is now maintained). I spent a long time looking at the markers of the lives of babies and children, and there was something comforting about being in a place where so many generations went to mark such profound loss; or next week when it is the due date of the pregnancy I lost in the summer, I'll have a glass of fizz (not least because I also have a 'weigh in' for IVF funding the day before!).
The trouble I have is not having a way of marking this in society. Of having what has happened witnessed. So many (all?) of our rituals around death focus on a collective sense of loss, and that isn't really experienced to the same extent with pregnancy losses -friends and family might be sad for you, but they will not continue to note and mark loss or due dates, it does not feature on their landscape.
I think, for me, the reason so many miscarriage rituals do not 'fit' is that the place the emphasis on processing and remembering on the mother/parents -I don't need any more pressure there!
I've spent a long time mulling over what would fit, given the above, and the closest I can come to is something like a scene from the horror film Midsommar. The context is entirely different but a female character witnesses something that deeply upsets her and the rest of the women there gather around her and cry and moan with her. I remember Florence Pugh, who plays the character in question, talking about how powerful that scene was to film.
I think that is what 'feels' most right to me - people to hear and empathise and feel my grief in their own bodies. But even writing that sounds like being such a 'drama queen'.
And I think that is sort of the paradox of pregnancy loss, for me at least -I want the public recognition, the recognition in my community/society that I am mourning and what I am mourning, but I've also been conditioned to not 'make a big deal' of it.
It is hard. I do wonder, however, how things might be different if we collectively mourned all sorts of female experiences with our female friends and family members.
Really lovely piece Jennie. I've really struggled with finding a ritual too. I never did write that letter to the children that never were, as they are too nebulous in my mind. I've never planted anything, also because it reminded me of what I flushed and never buried. I've wanted to go to a baby loss remembrance day, but never managed and I'm not sure why that is so difficult for me (apparently). The only thing I've consistently done, and am really happy about, is that when I visit a church (which is only for cultural reasons, as I'm non-religious and atheist) I light three candles every time. I've never lit candles in my own home, but churches are remote enough for me that I think I feel happier (safer?) lighting them there... xxx