grief

Be there for your friend, but be very careful what you say.

6 Things You Should Never Say To A Mother After A Miscarriage

Whether this is news to you, seemingly irrelevant to you, or deeply personal to your experience, this truth remains that statistically speaking, one in every four pregnancies will end in miscarriage. Some of you are vaguely familiar with this, many of you have suffered this loss yourselves, and the likelihood is high that almost all of you know someone who’s lost a child in utero, whether or not they’ve ever spoken publicl about it.

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Image Credit: Kate Williams via Unsplash

Post-Election Care: What To Do After You’ve Lost Your Faith In Humanity

The bottle of champagne I had chilled and ready to pop in celebration sits untouched. My 21-year-old daughter sits near me, solemn. She has lost hope.

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Aaron. Image: author.

The Police Shot And Killed My Friend Aaron

The only people who paid the price for Aaron's death were his family and friends. This must stop. Police should never be above the law they have sworn to uphold. There can be no more hiding, conspiring, obstructing, or delaying swift justice for officers who do not act according to their training...

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Support your local brick-and-mortar bookstore! Image: Jody Amable.

A Grown-A** Woman Reads Harry Potter: The Magic of Death 

So far, Deathly Hallows is, to me, about the divide between the living, the dead, and the living who have seen death. Harry and I are part of an exclusive club: Those under 30 who have experienced death. And when I say “experienced,” I don’t mean “witnessed.” I mean really, really felt it, all the way through.

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There are so many of us who look at blood-drenched underwear and see nothing but hurt. Image: Thinkstock.

A Love Letter To Those Whose Periods Make Them Cry

[CN: pregnancy, miscarriage] Plenty of period-positive activists point out that the beauty of menstrual blood is that it’s the only blood that doesn’t arise out of trauma. What we discuss less often is the ability of menstrual blood to induce trauma.

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What’s in a name? I don’t really know. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes everything. Image: NBC.

David Sedaris Named The Baby I Miscarried

It wasn’t the name I would have picked — not originally, at least — but as days turned into weeks, it grew on me.

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I had no belief that my babies were in heaven, nor that they would ever be born into this world.

I Don't Believe My Babies Are In Heaven

I had a lot of well-meaning friends and family searching for the right words to say after my back-to-back miscarriages. So many offered solace by guessing at where my lost babies resided in the ether: taken away to Heaven, perhaps forever, perhaps waiting for a better moment— an unknown, destined time these small souls were meant to break into the world. I accepted these comments silently, because they did nothing to comfort me.

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