It starts, as it often seems to, like the bay’s rising and falling. Sometimes there’s a catalyst, a sudden crash like an unwelcome speedboat, but more often than not, its tides are predictable, a gravitational pull. It no longer rages and roils. It starts soft and slow, welling up and up and up. Sometimes it crests and breaks like it is supposed to; sometimes it meanders, not quite reaching a destination. My grief is patient. It waits, and waits, and waits.
This is how it goes. It’s a perfect late spring day, Mother’s Day weekend. Sailboats scattered across the water, people fishing or playing with their dogs, the New York skyline in clear focus. I walk the marked path through the dunes I planted last year with a group of volunteers, part of an effort to restore the living shoreline. The word living feels especially acute against the backdrop of a bay teeming with life of all kinds, its constant reminders of the death my own body has harbored in recent years. My aloneness becomes more palpable with each sunning, splashing family I pass. I am aware of the sand’s complicated texture under my sneakers, soft in some places, jagged with rocks in others. I walk carefully so as not to trip over a drainage pipe or sink into the muddy depression where it empties, or to hurt anything else that might be living there: the Eastern mud snails feeding on detritus at the bay’s bracken edge, or the stray horseshoe crabs just at the end of their mating season.
That’s probably why I notice the turtle, tiny and intricately patterned with brown and black hexagons. At first she appears to be moving, intact except for a crushed hind leg. She could have been making her yearly journey onshore, preparing to lay eggs in the dunes. Except she’s not. The flies have already gathered.
The turtle is yet another reminder that my husband and I walk among the grieving, human and otherwise. I want to turn away. But more than that, I want to know what happened. Had she been picked up and then dropped by a seabird? I am both curious and repulsed, both eager for and afraid of getting answers. In the end, I double back, snap a photo, and send it to Jenna Reynolds, director of the nonprofit Save Coastal Wildlife. It seems like something a good citizen scientist would do.
“That is a dead, probably female, Diamondback terrapin turtle,” Jenna responds. “They are the only native turtle that lives in brackish or estuarine waters along the Jersey Shore. This time of year, many adult females are coming on land to lay eggs. It is a stressful and dangerous time for these ladies, and not all survive. Most die from being run over by speeding cars or boats. There are many threats to these turtles, and this is why their population is going down and they are listed as a species of special concern in NJ.”
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The turtle’s story was all too familiar in post-Roe America, a mother who had had to journey farther than she should have to give birth safely, who like more and more mothers these days had died trying, a casualty not of nature but of human recklessness. Mother’s and Father’s Day are days of mourning in our household, so it seemed only fitting that we should find such a travesty on such a weekend.
In her unforgettable book Of Time and Turtles, Sy Montgomery explains, “Turtles are the most imperiled major group of animals on earth… They suffer from pollution, climate change, and invasive species. Cars run them over. Dogs, raccoons, skunks, and otters chew them up. And on top of all this, there is a murderous, monstrous illegal trade in turtles—for their meat, for their eggs, for their shells, and for pets” (13). Turtles continue to exist in large part because of people like the ones Montgomery profiles, who spend large portions of their time caring for these fragile creatures, all for no money and very little thanks. These people are not recognized by society as caregivers, yet they find their life’s purpose in taking care of the more-than-human world, and each other, in unconventional ways. There are other ways to give back to the world than by filling it with more people.
I should know. I came home from the hospital without my babies, holding instead a slew of hospital blankets, slipper socks, gluten-free crackers, lists of resources for bereaved parents. I held onto these for a very long time. Surrounded by painful reminders everywhere I went—the nursery we’d painted yellow, the courtesy parking for expectant mothers at the supermarket, the chipper voice on the machine when I called the pharmacy for my meds, proclaiming that “CVS now has vaccines for you and your family”—I was actually comforted to remember the care and tenderness I’d been shown by the hospital staff. Sadly, this is not most people’s experience, not by a long shot. Hospitals are inaccessible to too many mothers, whether because of cost, distance, or restrictive laws that seek to control women’s bodies. As far as positive memories go, I realize, the ones that take place in hospitals aren’t great. Still, there were no cards, no flowers, no funeral, no ashes even. So we held onto what we could.
I didn’t choose my grief, but I am choosing not to silence it. It is all I have left of my children’s brief lives, aside from a few tangible objects I can’t bear to look at: an ultrasound photo, a baby blanket, a pair of matching mom- and dad-to-be mugs. I keep them in the room we still call the baby’s. I never go in there if I can avoid it. The door stays closed.
Not everyone was as kind as the nurses and doctors. On my first Mother’s Day, not one person called or sent a card or even a text. Subsequent Mother’s and Father’s Days have brought many more kindnesses, to be sure, but also a slew of indignities: my husband and I have been subjected to family members exchanging gifts in front of us, Mother’s Day-themed news articles forwarded to us, and even, once, being asked to ghostwrite an email from another mom to her friends, congratulating them on how special they are. These were people who knew what we’d been through, what we’d lost. Imagine, then, the cruel response from a culture that refuses to acknowledge grief in any of its forms, let alone this kind of invisible loss.
We all recognize certain types of loss. If we’re fortunate, we take bereavement leave from our jobs, perform the pre-made grieving rituals. But we also know these aren’t the only losses, nor are they always the worst ones. Surely you have experienced other losses, and surely they have broken you just as hard.
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It isn’t easy to remember that I wasn’t always this person, haven’t always known what it feels like to have lost a child. For the first 30 years of my life I was a relatively ordinary woman with ordinary aches and pains: breakups, rejections, family drama, work stress. Now, I am in a category of my own. Most people can’t imagine, don’t want to imagine, what it’s like to be me.
Some may accuse me of overdramatizing. There is a very easy comeback for this: Do you know what it feels like to lose all of your children? Then you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Carrying grief, to borrow a metaphor from the poet Kathy Nelson, is like carrying a wreath of skulls around my neck, the grand prize in a horrible, twisted competition I didn’t even know I’d entered. I suppose this is also what it means to love. You enter the game every time you fall in love—with a person, a place, an idea, an almost-person—knowing you might be forced to wear the grief-medallions for all eternity.
Sometimes it’s not just the grief. Sometimes it’s the outside world’s insistence—the pressure from work, family, even strangers—to act as if I’m not grieving. Sometimes it’s survivor’s guilt, the sense of being off-balance if I’m not suffering every minute, if I go an entire day without thinking about the children I’ve lost. How can you possibly think about anything else? the grief asks. Is it not heartless, indecent, to keep on living? But eventually I do just that, because it’s the only thing I can do. At a certain point, I start functioning, because there is no other option.
This doesn’t mean I am not devastated. I will never not be devastated. I will never not be torn apart.
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There are people who recognize their duty to protect the world around them only because their children will have to grow up in it. I wonder what would happen if they’d give as much thought to everyone else’s children: human, or otherwise. I think of J.D. Vance’s comment, resurfaced in 2024, that people who don’t have biological children “don’t really have a direct stake” in our collective future—as if, by losing my children, I had also relinquished my right to love the world. There are those who say that until parenthood, they had had no idea what love was. This strikes me as a profound failure of the imagination. In my more charitable moments, I feel sad for them. How empty their lives must have been in the before-times, that it took so many years to learn what it meant to love, to cherish, to protect. We can see how this self-centeredness and lack of imagination have played out in some of the world’s greatest problems, from climate change to health care to racial injustices. For some people, these are only real problems if and when their own families are affected. What if, instead, we learned to take care of others, human and more-than-human, and the world we share, on their own terms?
Even well-meaning people make this mistake all the time. Montgomery profiles a groundskeeper who takes care of the turtles nesting in and around the parking lot at his workplace, putting up signs and patrolling the area for nests, then protecting and removing those nests as needed. “The people who work here are mothers and fathers, too,” he says, by way of explaining why he takes on this demanding task without pay, and why his fellow employees get involved (71). But what if they’re not mothers and fathers at all? What if the turtles themselves are enough to be worth saving?
Is it so hard to fathom that other people’s children, other creatures’ children, don’t matter any less to me because my own are already gone?
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In Diane Seuss’s powerful book frank: sonnets, there is a poem that begins: “All lives have their tropes over which we have minimal control.” How incredibly true, and how incredibly unfair, that our lives are so circumscribed. That each life is enclosed by a framing device, something our name conjures even after we’re gone. That each life has to be about something, like it or not. Seuss’s tropes range from the metaphorical (“Maybe…you’re the princess rankled/by the pea. Or the pea smothered under 10,000 mattresses and the princess/on top like a heavy cherry”) to the mundane (“What if birds/are it? All your birthday gifts bird-related.”) to the appalling (“Your people were burned./Or your people lit the match.”). I could keep going. Maybe you’re a pilot. Maybe you’re a musician. Maybe you give up family life for a life on the road. Maybe you thrive on it, or maybe you have regrets. Maybe you love sunflowers, or the color green, or Disney World. Maybe your life is hemmed in by war or poverty. Maybe your life is cut short by any number of brutal ways to die, and that brutality is the thing most people will remember about you, no matter what else you did. A life can be about so many things. So many possible aboutnesses we don’t get to choose.
Grief is like any of these. It’s a practiced art form. You do it constantly, like a musician practices their scales or writes songs under their breath as they go about their day, or a journalist keeps a notepad. You are never not doing it, even when you’re doing other things. It’s like breathing. Unlike other art forms, however, grief is one you don’t get to choose. You don’t have anything to show for it; you are not considered a success after putting in your 10,000 hours. Grief makes nothing happen. You think you know what your life is about, until one ordinary day like any other, an invisible hand taps you on the shoulder and a voice whispers in your ear: From now on, your life is going to be about grief. What you thought your life was about, supplanted, without your consent.
In my twenties, I always thought I’d write about art, or feminism, or climate change. Even the detritus I find on the beach seems a more fitting subject for literature than grief—more concrete, maybe, or less exhausted by time-worn cliches. All of these undoubtedly show up in my work, but not in the ways I’d thought. Nearly all of my poems and essays deal with pregnancy loss, or loss more generally, in some way. I would trade it all in, of course. I wanted my life, my writing, to be about anything else.
You don’t want your life to be about grief. You don’t want your name to be synonymous with what happened to you. I cringe whenever someone says to me, I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning. Or, no one knows what to say to you anymore. Believe me, no one wants to be that person.
And yet, I often ask myself the same questions. How do you get out of bed in the morning, knowing that the best years of your life are necessarily, irretrievably over, and in all likelihood you still have to get through the next 30, 40, even 50?
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When I am too exhausted to grieve, I cope. My coping mechanisms range from the healthy (friends, writing, exercise) to the unhealthy (alcohol) to the truly bizarre. Since the loss of my children, my eating habits have taken a turn for the juvenile. My favorite foods are similar to those of my two-year-old niece: apples, bananas, lupini beans, oatmeal. Even the processed foods I eat tend to come in “fun” shapes and sizes: almond puffs, broccoli bites. Weird.
Coping mechanisms are a method of control. But, as Seuss reminds us, we have minimal control. The list of places I rarely go is neverending. Street fairs, shopping malls, parks, parties, social media—any event that seems food- or family- or child-centered, or where personal questions might come up, is now off-limits. Avoidance is supposedly not healthy, I know. But why punish myself by showing up in places that are triggering, or where my presence might be unwelcome or viewed with suspicion? Why bother going anywhere?
Throughout most of human history, ways of coping with grief have been ritualized. But over time, many of our traditional mourning customs have been phased out, especially in Western societies. In the United States, most deaths take place in a hospital or other facility rather than at home (source). With the rise of hospital deaths and funeral homes, the “parlor” became the “living room,” and so the dead were pushed out of our private spaces. In terms of public life, we’ve dropped the custom of wearing any particular color or garment for a specified length of time, showing no outward signs of grief to the rest of the community. This is how insistent our culture has become on keeping the dead out of our lives, how afraid we are of allowing ourselves the time and space to grieve.
The mortician and bestselling author Caitlin Doughty puts it succinctly: “What I always find fascinating about the American way of death is how successfully we’ve hidden death. Dead bodies go to funeral homes or industrialized crematories. People who are dying are hidden away in hospitals or nursing homes. Even our animals are removed from view and taken to slaughterhouses, so we don’t even know where our meat comes from anymore. So never in history has there been a society that has so successfully hidden away death, and I think that’s caused innumerable problems” (interview).
Of course everyone should be able to grieve in their own way; no preset rituals should be forced on someone in the worst moments of their life. Imposing a time limit on grief is nothing if not cruel, and customs like wearing black for a full year can be restrictive, not to mention the financial strain of buying a whole new wardrobe. At the same time, when we lose common rituals and shared understandings, we also lose community—the very thing grievers need to rely on for support. If these statements seem to contradict each other, it’s because there is no right answer. Nothing about grief makes any sense. Grief means learning to hold multiple truths at once.
There is no standard ritual in any culture that I know of for pregnancy loss, stillbirth, infant loss, or infertility. Individuals may choose to mourn in a variety of ways, but for the most part we are left to our own devices. Why? Is it too awful, too shameful, too terrifyingly unspeakable, to acknowledge? Imagine, then, how much more awful that lack of acknowledgement is for the person on the other end. And with one in five pregnancies ending in loss, and one in six adults experiencing infertility worldwide, there are more people suffering in isolation than we think.
This is probably why I was never offered my children’s remains. I didn’t even know this was a common practice at some hospitals until I learned about it from women I counsel through a volunteer organization. There is no rhyme or reason as to why some grieving parents get to bury their children’s ashes and some don’t. It has very little to do with where they live or how far along they were in the pregnancy, and everything to do with our culture’s lack of emotional competence around grief and dying, even (and especially) within our medical system.
Other species are much better at this whole death and mourning thing than we are. As Kathleen Yale says of African elephants in Orion Magazine, “We have watched them relocating remains and sitting with newly deceased kin for hours, returning again and again for days, in vigil. Some continue to seek out these places for years, traveling great distances to pay their respects to the one they cared for. Before a familiar skeleton, they may cradle loose bones in a curl of trunk, perhaps holding one upon their tongue for a time. They may trace a swoop of bare skull as if remembering the certain curves of a beloved’s face.” Imagine holding the bones of your loved ones. I cannot, though in some cultures this is a common ceremonial practice. Yale continues: “To see them so enthralled with death is to wonder if they possess a greater understanding of their own existence in this world.”
It’s impossible to know whether or not this is true, but several studies have suggested that animals have a strong concept of death, and that they grieve as uniquely and unpredictably as humans do. One book in particular, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó, deals with animals and infant loss in particular. According to Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker, “a female Tonkean macaque known as Evalyne gave birth to her first baby, which died five days later. The morning of its death, Evalyne refused to eat, instead staying in her enclosure and screaming; after that, she carried the infant’s body everywhere, grooming it, licking it, and at one point putting her fingers in its mouth as if to stimulate the suckling reflex. For seventeen days, she never even set it down.” Similar behavior has been observed in other primates, as well as whales and even a dingo. Says Schulz, “For such creatures, it might make sense, no matter how lifeless a baby appears, to hold out for the possibility that it will somehow revive.”
Is this grieving? We can’t possibly know. On the other hand, at the risk of anthropomorphizing, how could it not be?
“Anthropomorphism: we should have made it our religion,” says the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Vulnerables. “How much less depression among us might there have been. Think of all the extinctions that might have been prevented, how our own species, how the whole planet might have been saved.”
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We don’t know if and how most species grieve, but we know what they don’t do. They don’t offer overused platitudes, like “It gets better,” or “life goes on.” They don’t criticize one another for sharing their grief, or with whom they share it, or for not sharing it at all. They don’t expect the griever to move through five incremental stages within a certain length of time, or to act like a person who isn’t grieving. They don’t shame one another for not going to work, doing household chores, attending social functions, or having the ability (or even the desire) to do the same things they used to do.
If you know someone who is grieving, don’t tell them it will all work out in the end, because in reality, you don’t know. Don’t tell them how or when to “move on.” You don’t get to decide how long, how often, or how much. It’s not your grief.
Don’t tell a grieving person life goes on. It’s an outright lie. It just reminds them that your life goes on while theirs never will, not as before, not ever. Grief exists precisely because someone’s life did not go on. Life is never a guarantee—for a person, a species, a planet. Don’t say that life goes on when you don’t actually know that it will.
Don’t tell them it gets better when you have no idea if this is the case. Sometimes it gets worse. Think about an average human lifespan. Do the worst years always fall at the beginning? Do the best years always fall at the end? Of course not. Life is not a linear progression from worse to better. For me, the happiest years of my life will always be the first thirty, when I had no idea what it felt like to lose one child, let alone all of them. How could it be any other way? Even if it were possible to be happy again after the loss of my babies, I don’t know if I’d want to be. There comes a point where you outlive your best years, and you still have to get through the rest of your life. People live this way. They do it all the time. Unless you are very young, this is probably true for most people you know.
Similarly, don’t push a grieving person towards “acceptance.” Everyone wants to use this word, because it’s supposedly the last of the five stages. It means the griever is almost “done” and they are ready to rejoin the non-grieving world. This may be more convenient for you, but it is probably not going to happen as easily as you want it to. When you say “acceptance,” you are saying that what happened to them is acceptable.
Acceptance shouldn’t be the goal. What happened to me is unacceptable, period. It was useless, needless, purposeless. I didn’t learn something from it or come out stronger. Yes, I gained some perspective and insight others don’t have. I would gladly trade it all in for the working use of my body and for the lives of any and all of my children. I am working towards acknowledgement instead: the idea that one day, maybe far, far, far into the future, I will wake up and realize that this has happened to me without being utterly stunned. One day I will not be shocked by what my life has become. This is acknowledgement, not acceptance.
There is, of course, no obligation to go through any of the five phases at all. Grief is not a 12-step program, where you have to attend willingly. I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t owe anyone acceptance, or any of the others.
If the list of what not to do seems overwhelming to you, imagine how much more overwhelming it is for a griever to deal with these kinds of comments on a consistent basis. This is, of course, in addition to processing the grief itself, and the daily task of figuring out how to live in the world without whomever they have lost. The best way you can bear your share of the burden is to look for alternative ways to support the grieving person in your life, which may look different from the ways you’ve traditionally been taught. It’s not the griever’s responsibility to educate you as to what these are—they have enough to deal with as it is. Read a book; do a google search; join a support group; look to a professional or volunteer counselor for advice. There are those out there with wisdom to share, those who are generous enough to have offered up their experience as a resource for others. Seek them out. Do some of the work grief demands.
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If grief is not an addiction through which one moves toward recovery, nor a step-by-step program through which one moves toward acceptance, then where is the roadmap?
Grief is more like a celebrity crush. Hear me out. Think of your most torturous celebrity crush, the one you had when you were in middle school (or maybe older than you care to admit). You probably imagined yourself married to this person, daydreamed about the rest of your life with them, wrote their name in your schoolbooks over and over again. But sooner or later, you met with the reality that your crush was unrequited. Or else a new crush started to take its place, maybe someone more attainable this time, or maybe there was another distraction, and you started to devote your daydreams and schoolbook-graffiti to that. Grief works kind of the same way. It starts to—not fade exactly, but at a certain point, you realize grief does not, cannot, love you back.
Nearly all of today’s most pressing cultural and political issues can be traced back to a refusal to acknowledge, or an unwillingness to understand, the collective grief we face as a society and as groups and individuals within society. It is why the horrors of slavery, genocide, climate catastrophe, and other traumas both historical and current are undertaught, and it is why some forms of these harms are allowed to continue. It is in part why books by authors from marginalized communities are being banned by the thousands—there are those who are so afraid of their children having to face and empathize with someone else’s hard feelings, especially someone who doesn’t look or speak or love like they do, that they attempt to banish these voices from all public spaces. It is why a lack of understanding of poverty, and its many attendant manifestations of grief, persists even in a country where 38 million people live below the poverty line. There was that viral tweet back in 2022, when a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business asked her students how much they thought the average American household income was. More than one-fourth of her students thought it was over six figures. One guessed $800,000. This from a school situated in the poorest major city in the United States. (source)
Our failure to acknowledge climate grief is why climate anxiety has soared in the past decade, especially among children and young adults. Decades of denialism regarding the planet’s health and the true causes of its degradation have led us here: famine, violent conflict, hundreds of millions of climate refugees. Glaciers melted, species disappeared, seasons disintegrated into a parody of their former splendor. Who wouldn’t be anxious, given all we have lost, and given social pressure to act as if the world is not on fire? Such vehement denial of grief, a burgeoning field of research shows, actually makes climate anxiety worse, to the point where we are too debilitated to take action that could still prevent the worst-case scenarios from happening. Says environmental researcher and BBC correspondent Panu Pikhala, “If grief is not recognised, it can manifest itself as anxiety” (source).
Instead, says Jason Schneiderman in his poem “Staircase”: “Tell me it’s OK to be alone./Tell me it’s OK to be scared. Tell me it’s OK to be grief stricken./Tell me not to give up.”
Grief itself makes nothing happen. But it can inspire any number of generative acts: art, journalism, social or political activism. Grief makes nothing happen, but it is worth doing. As a culture, we cannot possibly begin to contend with the large and looming challenges of our time until we learn to talk about grief.
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To honor our children’s lives, my husband and I decided to spend last Mother’s Day memorializing their loss with a ritual hike in western Massachusetts. It was refreshing to have a change of scenery, away from home and family gatherings and everything they represent. Chris drove us three hours each way so we could spend a day in the resonant quiet of the forest, rather than surrounded by happy families. We hiked near a small pond, which couldn’t have been more different from the Jersey shore to which we are so accustomed. There were extended families, elderly couples, people walking their dogs. On a bench nearby were two college lesbians on what looked like a first or second date, and in the dorms overlooking the pond must have been students preparing for final exams. There were herons fishing at the edge of the pond and frogs and chipmunks darting through brush. So unlike the bay and ocean, their cycles of crest and crash, the pond hummed a continuous dull murmur, comforting in its strange way.
Oases do exist, even in a life that is stubbornly, utterly bleak. I don’t believe happiness is possible for me, or even a realistic or desirable long-term goal. But I believe in the power of a meaningful life, the power of small but necessary actions, the power of creating something the right person may find at just the right time. I believe in moments, however fleeting, when the oceanic fog of grief lifts, if only temporarily, if only just long enough to see what’s ahead. I believe in oases because I have lived them: at my job, teaching young people a new language and working with some of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met. At the end of a long day, receiving an email from a reader, letting me know that my words were exactly what they needed that day. That light of connection. At a concert with hundreds of strangers singing together and feeling less alone. The fact that concerts still exist, that, even in the age of generative AI, there is still music that’s not manufactured by machines, that there are still people who care enough to write a song that will save someone’s life. That a song can still break your heart, can contain multitudes of joy and pain and longing and anger and encouragement, all at the same time. On the boardwalk, once, when a crowd had gathered to watch a whale in the distance, surging into and out of view, making a triumphant splash each time it reappeared. That the whale still exists, despite. That coffee still exists, and birds, and astounding poems and much-needed late-night conversations with friends. That you don’t have to have kids to roast marshmallows, or sing campfire songs, or build a snowman. That our neighbor saw the snowman we’d made in our backyard the day after a blizzard, its branch-arms waving, and told us it made his day.
Maybe not oases of untainted joy, but oases nonetheless. Oases of meaning. Oases of wonder. Never forget that they are still here, even when the fog of grief makes it impossible to see them. Know that the fog is OK, too—that this is a feature of grief, not a flaw. But know that the oasis is still there, still waiting for you, when it finally abates.
