Trigger warning: This post is about continuing our loving bonds with our babies who died before being born.
A few weeks ago, I received a letter of apology that let loose a flood of memories. During the past fifty years, I had not thought about or felt anything about or even remembered much about the boy who was the first great love of my life. I accepted his apology and began piecing together the details of age 14 to 17 when I once loved a very nice boy who once loved a very nice me.
At first it felt miraculous to be quickly recovering from what my therapist tells me is an uncommon condition called “Dissociative Amnesia.”
But along with the flood of fond memories of what had been a loving and lovely coming-of-age romance, I remembered the tragic end. When I was 17, cuddling became sex and I became pregnant. In the midst of an agonizingly turbulent few weeks, my little tiny embryo baby died.
After going through these traumatic events alone, I put what had happened into a state of suspended animation, locked it in a vault, and buried it deep.
During the past fifty years, I had not thought about or felt anything about or even remembered much about this tiny little baby who was the second great love of my life.
No longer protected by amnesia, I spent several days mindlessly running on instinctive grief. As I swung between minimizing and catastrophizing, I couldn’t stop crying. Then one morning I woke up remembering that I have founded a website called Continuing Loving Bonds and that I know how to transform grief back into the love it once was.
The past few weeks have been an intense time of rediscovering, acknowledging and reliving the sensational sense of euphorically falling in love with my tiny, invisible baby. By continuing my loving bonds with my unborn child I am resolving my grief, resolving my dissociative amnesia and filling in a hole in my life that was so vast and empty, I didn’t notice anything missing at all.
I’ve been reconnecting with nature, dreaming, meditating, contemplating, sensing, noticing, listening, praying, imagining, remembering, and seeking guidance from people I love and trust. Through a series of uncanny coincidences, artist friends have helped me create a memorial monument on their forested property. I’m planning a memorial event. This blog post is my first legacy project. The poem and music video within this post is my second legacy project.
With the help of the internet I have learned that over half of the women in the world lose one or more unborn children in our lives. Until recently, we were discouraged from bonding with or grieving for our unborn children. No matter what the cause of our child’s death, our profound, complex and universal grief journeys were shrouded in trauma, stigma, isolation, shame, guilt, sorrow, depression and fear. But this is changing. Mourning mothers are becoming a movement.
As the grief poet Donna Ashworth writes in her book “Loss,” mourning mothers are finding the courage and strength to embrace the pain of loving the lives that still live within us fiercely and forever, for that is how it is. https://donnaashworth.com/
The outcomes of continuing my loving bonds with my not yet child include a timeless sense that it is never too late to heal grief. I am experiencing spiritual growth, comfort, resilience, unconditional love, strength, wholeness, forgiveness, and a gradually calming of my nervous system, emotional system, physical system and spiritual system with the help of my sense of my child’s joyful and peaceful presence.
My name is Linda Hill. My memoir Together Still: Love Beyond Death is available as a paperback, e-book, and audio book. Now I am travelling the world virtually and in person sharing my story and listening to others’ stories about Continuing Loving Bonds.
My mission is to show ordinary people such as you and me how continuing our loving bonds helps transform our deep grief back into deep love. If you haven’t already done so, I hope you will subscribe to my blog by leaving your email below. And, you can click here for more information about how to sign up for our Continuing Loving Bonds Story Sharing Circles that will begin again in September.
CONTINUING LOVING BONDS 