“Driving home from the hospital with no baby. How can this be real.”
It was a middle-of-the-night tweet from Chrissy Teigen, the model and author married to singer John Legend. The couple had just lost their son, Jack, after pregnancy complications.
“We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before,” Teigen wrote on Instagram around midnight Wednesday. “We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It just wasn’t enough.”
Teigen had been posting updates on Twitter and Instagram throughout the hospitalization — inviting, as she does, a fickle, sometimes adoring, always unpredictable public into the private parts of her family’s life in a way that I’ve always found both endearing and brave.
And then the very worst happened, and she posted that too — inviting that same public to draw on its empathy reserves for this family we don’t really know, during the darkest moment of their lives.
Their candor may be a tremendous help to others who’ve suffered, or will suffer, a similar loss.
“Pregnancy and infancy loss is something that continues not to be seen, and we need to see it,” said Joey Miller, a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in loss and trauma. “We need to pay attention. We need to validate women and their partners, many of whom are continuing to suffer in silence. While this is a deeply personal loss, collectively we need to be more aware, deepen our sensitivity and increase our awareness about something that happens, unfortunately, with great regularity.”
Up to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, Miller said, and 1 in 100 pregnancies end in stillbirth, which is defined as a loss after 20 weeks of gestation.
Yet the women and couples she counsels who’ve suffered this type of loss often feel uniquely alone, in both the experience and the aftermath. Their grief feels minimized and misunderstood.
“Many people erroneously believe there couldn’t have been enough time to form an attachment,” Miller said. “That could not be farther from the truth. Many women form an attachment from the moment the pregnancy is confirmed. The depth of grief has nothing to do with the length of the established relationship.”
In addition, the women or couples are left grieving the plans and hopes for the child and the intact family that will never materialize. And they don’t have a lifetime of memories to draw on for comfort.
“If a grandparent or adult parent dies, we have all of these birthdays, anniversaries and holidays to recall,” Miller said. “For many women, having a few ultrasound pictures is very different from a collection of memories of many years spent together.
“It upsets the natural order,” she said. “Pregnancies and babies are supposed to be associated with new life and beginnings, not final endings.”
And it often leaves the partner who wasn’t carrying the pregnancy completely adrift.
“Many partners don’t even make it on the map,” Miller said. “There are no social norms that guide parents in these situations, leaving partners feeling completely helpless while simultaneously grieving the loss of the attachment themselves.”
Many grieving couples, Miller said, continue to feel misunderstood years after the loss.
“Eighty percent of women will go on to conceive again,” Miller said. “And sometimes when there is another pregnancy, society can misunderstand, thinking, ‘They finally got what they wanted! Now their family is complete!’ But someone is always missing.”
Maybe seeing a famous couple publicly experience and express some of those grueling emotions and complexities will help. In 2015, I wrote about Lynn and Craig Persin, a Chicago couple whose baby girl died inside Lynn when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant.
“We felt like we were the first people in the universe to go through it,” Lynn told me at the time.
She wrote about the loss on her personal blog, and the traffic crashed her site. Ten thousand people read her post in a single day. She heard from strangers around the country.
I still hear from readers about that column. They hunger for community, and they hunger for resources, and they hunger to feel understood.
Miller has a book coming out Oct. 13 titled “Rebirth: The Journey of Pregnancy After a Loss,” which weaves together personal stories and therapeutic guidance. “The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America,” by Lara Freidenfelds, is an excellent book. The Star Legacy Foundation (starlegacyfoundation.org) is a nonprofit devoted to stillbirth and pregnancy loss research and education. Ariel Levy’s memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” is a beautiful examination of life before, during and after a pregnancy loss.
“Grief,” Levy writes, “is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.”
But you don’t have to do it alone. And in reminding us of that, Teigen’s posts are as generous as they are heartbreaking.
Heidi Stevens is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
