Unborn, Unspoken Grief

What happens to grief when it goes unspoken?

Last month, during Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, I found myself reflecting on the quieter kinds of grief that linger beneath the surface, without words or witness. It led me back to a memory I don’t often touch, one that’s nearly thirty years old now but still alive somewhere inside me.

I don’t write about it often, but it’s there: the day the doctor told me there was nothing we could do. The sterile light in that room, and the stillness that followed. He explained that I would need a D&C—a short procedure to help my body complete what it couldn’t do on its own and gently clear what remained after the miscarriage.

When I think back on that time, what stands out most isn’t only the loss itself, but the silence that surrounded it. Friends didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to begin. The quiet became a kind of company—a shield, but also a wound.

In the latest issue of Carlita’s Way, I share more about that season of loss, and about two women whose stories helped me understand my own. Here’s a passage:

“Natalie* was just nineteen when her baby girl died suddenly of SIDS. She told me that no one in her family had ever lost a child, so she didn’t know who to go to. She didn’t really talk to anyone about it, because she didn’t think anyone would understand. The silence around her deepened, and after a while, she said it felt like even God couldn’t hear her anymore.”

“Camille*’s loss came in the middle of the pandemic. She went in for what she thought was a routine ultrasound and learned that her baby boy no longer had a heartbeat. Because of COVID restrictions, she labored and delivered him alone. She told me she began to question God—asking why it had to happen that way, why she had to be alone. She said she felt helpless and abandoned.”

Our stories are different, yet threaded with the same ache of grief that lives in the spaces words can’t reach. Writing about these moments helped me see how silence can protect us but also isolate us. It can keep us safe, but it can also keep us unseen.

What I’ve learned is that healing doesn’t happen just because time passes. It happens when something in us softens enough to tell the truth out loud. For me, that truth is that I still think about the baby I lost all those years ago. I still wonder who they might have been. And sometimes, as a way to make peace with that loss, I tell myself that the daughter I had afterward was that baby finding her way back to me. I don’t know if that’s true, but it brings me comfort to believe it could be.

Even when I don’t talk about it, the love is still here—just quieter now, folded into the rhythm of my life, and maybe folded into that story I tell myself, the one where love somehow found its way home again.

From the upcoming Winter 2025 Issue of Carlita’s Way

Carlita’s Way is a seasonal, reflective magazine of personal essays exploring the human experience in all its complexity. Each issue offers a space for candid reflection, transparent vulnerability, and therapeutic storytelling shaped by both adversity and resilience.

The Winter issue will be released soon. You can join my mailing list to be the first to know when it’s available.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.