Processing reproductive grief as an atheist
[This article is a transcript of “Processing reproductive grief as an atheist“ courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
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For me personally, I found that things that helped me psychologically and emotionally were acknowledgment from the people around me that this is a significant event and that it is a very sad event, humanizing the children that I lost through miscarriage, and ritual, which is another tricky thing because that can mean a lot of different things when you’re secular.
I felt differently about ritual until I had my miscarriages, and all of a sudden I really felt like I needed to do something. I don’t mean religious rituals, but you can have plenty of secular rituals that people can go through to just help them process, whether it’s grief or other issues.
With my first miscarriage, I had a group of friends who I’m not even that close to who just sent me a candle with the name. They don’t know if I like candles. I don’t even care. I don’t even care if I like candles. I care that you were like, “What is something tangible I can do to show that this is important?”
Because I have a lot of secular friends that, when they have a death, a parent or something else, I know that I can’t tell them anything that will be comforting in the sense of, “Well, you’ll see them again someday,” that sort of thing. So my ritual that I do is I take this family recipe for these chocolate fudgy cookie bars, and I just make it, and I just send it to them with a card that says, “I can’t fix your problems, but chocolate never hurt anybody.” And that’s my ritual, and a lot of times they have reacted very strongly because I did anything. Just do something, you know.
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