Too Many Shades of Gray

I obviously have too much time on my hands... or thoughts in my head. I've been analyzing and re-analyzing and looking for arguments against or for the stance that I have taken on the grief issue, that somehow got meshed in with the loss terms issue, that somehow came from somewhere else??? And even more fun? It's a debate that I'm having with myself.

While I stand by my blanket statement that a loss is a loss, it's really not that simple.
Grief is not black and white.
There are so many shades of gray that it can make your head spin trying to determine bottom from top. It's not something that can or should be argued and debated because grief is a very personal emotion.
It's an emotion that ebbs and flows.
It gives you a break some days and other days breaks you.
Sometimes stuffable and sometimes unstoppable.
It's such a contradictory emotion in and of itself.
I just can't look at one story vs. another and compare the two. Although I know many people do, especially women and dare I say it, there in lies much of the "problem". It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when people try to down-play my losses (plural, very plural) because of a label they have given them. I would probably offend a full-term loss mom if I told her that I know how she feels, or a SIDS mom, or the mother of a teenager shot in a random act of violence. I don't know. But I also don't know how the mom who had a blighted ovum diagnosed at 8 weeks after IVF feels. It's not just about how long the child was with you, or how long you carried the baby, or how you birthed the baby whether by choice or not, or how many times you've had failed pregnancies or how long it took to get to the point of getting pregnant just to have the child die. The only person who can speak to the intensity of their loss is the person going through it. I think that just like people have different physical pain thresholds, they have different emotional pain thresholds.

Anyway, I had a much better grasp on what I was thinking while I was doing dishes earlier. Now, not so much. It sounded much more lucid in my head at the time. Maybe that means I should go finish them. Hum, maybe I'll look through the EOB's (explanation of benefits) that Jim just handed me, from my primary insurance company first... so far, $2,467.00 before insurance for surgery. Not bad. Even better? Double insurance.

As I was cruising the Internet this afternoon (not neglecting my children, they were napping) I came across this short excerpt from a book that speaks to the impact that loss, at any stage of pregnancy, has on a mother:

“A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven’t. Most don’t mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn’t happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she’ll know.”
-Barbara Kingsolver “Animal Dreams”