GainesvilleMoms.com

I was talking to a girlfriend about loss. I was sharing about losing my sister and she was sharing about losing a baby to miscarriage. It was very interesting to hear about how miscarriage affects a woman. I am sure it is different from person to person, but she said that she didn't lose a pregnancy, but a child. And that really touched me. Has anyone else here dealt with loss. Sometimes, loss is too personal to talk about, so if that's you, I completely understand. For me, sharing always brings healing as you can probably tell if you read my blog.

I've never had a miscarriage, but I have lost my mom and a brother. My mom passed away 4 years ago from COPD and emphysema from smoking. And my brother passed away this past November from cancer. I also have a brother who lives in a residential rehabilitation center. He was an electrician and was electrocuted on the job. It is a different type of loss I think. He is still here but he is a completely different person than the one we grew up with. I have a "different" family...my parents were foster parents before I was born and 2 of my brothers were foster kids that stayed with us from the time they were 5 and 6 until they were adults...we don't consider them any less brothers, since we grew up together...and my other 2 brothers are my Dad's kids from his first marriage. Then I have a younger sis and me. So, there were a bunch of us...haha.
Losing my mom has been the hardest thing ever. We were super close. There have been so many times that I just wanted to pick up the phone and ask her about something! My sister and her little boy lived with her in S.FL and when she died they moved up here. That was really hard...I love my sis but we cannot live together..haha. Just recently, she started renting a house on my street and that has been wonderful!

You have certainly experienced a great deal of loss in your life. I do not know what it is like to lose a parent; but I do know what it is like to lose a sibling. For me, the hardest thing in my life. I understand what you mean about just picking up the phone. You know, after I had my baby, I actually picked up my cell phone and was going to call her. It has been 2 years and I still forget momentarily. I'm sorry that you lost your mom, and especially since you guys were so close. Thank you for sharing with us...

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I miscarried once awhile back. I didn't know that I was pregnant though so it wasn't too bad. I was sad of course but I can't imagine what it would have been like if I had known or had been planning it.
I would have to say the worst loss in my life has been losing my father. He died of cancer in Nov. 2006 and I have never been through it like that before. We found out that he had cancer and that it was bad in May of 2006 - I was 6 months pregnant at the time and six months later, he was gone. There are no words that can describe how much I miss him. If I hadn't had K to keep me going, I truly believe that I would be pretty bad off.

Something I always feel kinda guilty about is when my father-in-law is playing with K and having a blast. (I am blessed to have WONDERFUL in-laws)I get kinda sad, and sometimes mad (not at him of course) because it's not fair. It always runs thru my head that she should be having fun with my dad too. It's silly, I know but I'm told it's all part of the greiving process. At least now I smile at alot of the memories instead of just cry. (except for that one week that comes every month - then I just cry - LOL)

One of the hardest parts for me was just that losing my sister was not fair. That was always the hardest and I still find myself saying that today. Being pregnant in the middle of a loss is quite a lot to handle. It's like double, or triple the stress. I almost wonder if the timing wasn't meant to be b/c I would have probably stopped eating altogether (since that is usually how I deal with stress) had I not been pregnant. I think it forced me to take care of my body. Thank you so much for sharing...

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I miscarried my first baby. Even after I got pregnant again, I found myself crying over the loss of my first baby. I just read an article yesterday about this and one particular woman shared that most women don't talk about their loss until someone else is going through it. I think it's hard to express this kind of pain when you never had the opportunity to physically hold or know your child before losing them, and at the same time, many people tend to respond as if it isn't a big deal (and expect the grieving mother to get over it quickly) because the pregnancy was not quite as real to them.


M:
Did you experience all of the stages of grief with this loss? And, how did you grieve? I have heard from many women that although the pain of the loss is very real, it's something that is not spoken about very often. Also, did you share the loss with your other children? And what about your husband. Did he also grieve? I bet it must be hard for men as well...

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I've never had a miscarriage, but I have lost people close to me. The worst had to be my aunt. She seemed to be healthy, then all of a sudden one Saturday morning her mother took her to the ER. Three months and three hospitals later she was brain dead and had to be pulled off her machines. She died of pancreatitis. Normally it's something that is caught earlier and treated. She just happened to have a severe case. The worst part about the whole ordeal for me was reading a journal my grandmother had kept after my aunt had died. There was one place where my aunt was able to scribble a note. "If I don't have this surgery tonight, will I die?" The only thing that we could come up with was that she had heard nurses/doctors talking. In the end I was ready for her to go. She had been hooked up to machines for so long and it was obvious that she would never have a productive life again. The day of her viewing she would have been 36 years old.


Casmly:
Thank you for sharing with us. It is hard to watch a loved one be hooked up to machines, especially when you are used to seeing them healthy and vibrant and strong. That was my experience with my sister. In the end, I could barely look at her because she didn't look like her and she didn't even feel like her. There is something different about the way a body feels when it is being kept alive by artificial means. It's very odd, but she only felt like a shell of herself. At the end, before the machines were unplugged, I knew she had already let go. Your aunt, like my sister, was very young. My sister died a few weeks after her 24th birthday. Again, thank you for sharing.

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I have never had a miscarriage. My sister has, but I don't remember her even talking about it, at least not with me. My biggest loss was my grandmother who lived down the road from me. She had had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) that was diagnosed when I was in elementary school. After her diagnosis, she sat down all of her grandchildren and told us that she had this disease, but she would live a long, long time. In her last few years, she was in the hospital quite a bit. We went to see her occasionally, but we always knew she would come home. Every day, through every cold that became pneumonia and everything else that became so bad, she struggled to live so that her great-grandchildren would remember her. She was at every birth that she could be at (if she wasn't in the hospital, she was there). At the end, she had 10 great-grandchildren.

Her last hospitalization was at the end of 2006. Narcotics made her loopy, and despite the fact that she was falls precaution, there were no precautions made. She got out of bed, slipped and hit her head on the marble window sill at AGH. She died a week later from blunt force trauma on my 1st wedding anniversary. She had begged to be let out of the hospital a year earlier to be at my wedding, and she had been there. Even today, more than a year later, I still cry about her great-grands that will never get to be held by her, much less remember her. The baby I am carrying now would have been her 13th. She was a huge part of my life, and I miss her everyday. My cousin even bought her house; she doesn't call it her house, she calls it Nana's house. I have a peace lily that the people I worked with sent to my grandfather's memorial service a few years before. She had treasured it. I made sure it was at her memorial service and then brought it home. It bloomed this year on March 1st and still has the bloom. Her birthday was March 11th.

Sorry for it to be so long, but there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of her.



Carrie: Thanks so much for sharing your memories of your nana with me. What a special woman she sounds like. You are a lucky woman to have had her in my life. I barely know my grandmother on my father's side, and I never knew my grandmother on my mother's side. They just never seemed to interested in us kids. Who knows why. But you had a very special one. Do you ever have dreams about her? I remember having some very powerful and special dreams about my sister right after she passed. I think that helped me somewhat. I honestly haven't cried very much about her death recently because I do not let myself think about it. I don't know how healthy that is. I talk about her and write about her, but as soon as I feel the tears coming up, I switch gears. Maybe it is just too much right now. Although, I cried with my last post.

Thank you so much for sharing your story with me.

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Wow, Suzy, what a loaded topic for me..as a matter of fact, along the same topic, I sent you an email at the GVL Sun in reply to your “Birth Story” blog from last week...but here goes.

I suffered two miscarriages back in 2002. The first was right after New Years, and the second, of all times, was Mother’s Day weekend in 2002. My hubby, who had been taking very good care of his mother since his father had passed away 4 years prior, went out to his mother’s place in the country to help get her house and yard ready for the big Mother’s Day bash we had planned for that weekend, and to share with her the good news that we were pregnant again. He got there, and discovered his beloved mother already gone. She had passed away sometime early that morning. Not entirely unexpectedly, as she had been ill off and on over the 4 years since her husband had died, but still, you’re never ready to lose your mom. So he finds Mom, and, instead of going ahead with plans for a Mother’s Day family party, we make funeral plans instead. What a rough day. Late that night, all I remember is standing in my closet, changing the clothes I had worn on that awful day, when I vaguely remember feeling dizzy, and the next thing I remember, my husband is standing over me, me only half-dressed and somehow now in the hallway, husband is shaking me, crying, and saying, “what’s wrong? What’s wrong? Are you OK?” Neither of us remembers much of the detail, but the end result: miscarriage number 2, on the day we lost his beloved mother.

And, because bad luck always seems to come in three’s: we lost another family member that weekend, though not to an actual death. On Mother’s Day Sunday, when the family and friends were all gathered for my mother-in-law’s wake, my husband’s youngest brother began to physically attack one of my husband’s daughters when he did not like an opinion she voiced out loud about, of all things, a football team. He grabbed her and was beginning to rough her up a bit when my husband and his oldest son had to jump in and subdue him. Needless to say, ugly words followed, with my brother-in-law leaving, after calling everyone some hateful names, saying we’d never see him again, and sure enough, we haven’t. He did not even show up the next day for his own mother’s funeral. So, in a sense, my husband lost his youngest brother that weekend as well, in addition to his mother and our unborn baby.

To say that that qualifies as the worst weekend of our lives is an understatement. Looking back, I do not know how we survived.....I am physically aching just remembering it all......

Triple A Mom,
I don't have access to my work email account from home, unfortunately, so I won't get it until I go back to work although you can always email me at suzyarichardson@gmail.com or you can send me a Private Message, any time.

So, wow, your post brought tears to my eyes. I totally understand what you mean when you say you are physically aching. I remember feeling that way, too. My sister died when I was 3 months pregnant, and I remember being physically ill from the pregnancy and emotionally drained because of her death. We had also just moved out of state, so I lost my entire support system. I still do not understand how I got through it, except that I found one girl friend in South Carolina who listened to me and was just there for me, even when I didn't think I needed it.

She is one of the moms on the board today

My husband did not really know how to handle me with the loss. I think I needed a woman to help me through it. Did you have a good support system when you went through all of that? And on Mother's Day weekend. I cannot imagine. Although, every year around Christmas time, I get really sad, because we lost my sister 10 days before Christmas. Ouch, it still hurts to say it.

Well, thank you so much for sharing your losses with me. You have been through a lot.

I finally got some quiet time and I used it to read every single post here, carefully. I was going to just post one response, thanking everyone for sharing but I decided to respond to you individually. Loss is a hard part of life, and it comes to different people in different ways. But, there is a common thread in our losses and that is the pain of the loss. Thank you all so much for sharing.