Please forgive me...
Love,
Kathie Lee"
Why did I include Ms. Gifford's apology? I wanted to use it to prove the point that the grief of miscarriage is different for everyone and does not remain static. Many persons who responded on that message board assumed that Kathie Lee had never experienced a miscarriage but she clearly stated that she had suffered two.
At the time her miscarriages occurred, she probably experienced a profound and deeply sad grief process. In the years that followed, her healing was affected by her ability to give birth to live babies and to become a mother. Her grief had been completely resolved when she made that comment on the Today Show. She was not remembering her loss.
There are as many kinds of losses as there are ways to grieve. I personally do not believe that a person can really understand the grief a mother feels when she loses a baby in miscarriage, unless she has also lost a baby in the same manner.
Even then, the experience may vary greatly depending on whether the person wanted the baby, if a fertility problem existed and the couple had been trying for a long period of time to conceive, and if there had been previous miscarriages.
I also believe that women, who have suffered miscarriages, have little understanding of what the father of their baby may feel as they go through their own private grief process. In my case, my husband never talked about his feelings. If he cried, it was never in front of or with me.
His flurry of activity afterwards, made me think that he wasn't affected and hadn't really cared. He later was to confide in me that keeping busy was the only way he could keep from thinking about it.
He became very short tempered and impatient, when my grieving continued longer than he thought it should. He avoided spending time with me. Later he also shared that he carried deep feelings of guilt over making me pregnant. He felt responsible for the physical, mental and emotional pain I went through. I think I blamed him too.
I discovered in my research that the differences in the way that men and women grieved, over the loss of a baby, actually pulled the couple apart. Many ended up divorcing at a later time, as happened to us even after we were successful at being able to have children.
