Guest Post by Tara Shafer
We all understand loss in our own way and the path towards understanding is a deeply personal one. As such, the newly launched Reconceiving Loss, an online resource for pregnancy loss and healing, offers personal and communal refuge. It is for women and men and relevant to pregnancy loss occurring at any stage. It is intended to steer people through loss on their own terms using video, exercises and articles and then on to a community that shares their experience, while still recognizing it as unique. All sections may be used anonymously. The website is moderated and user privacy is guarded as a matter of the highest priority. The genesis of this website: the stillbirth of my son in December 2005.
In the months after our loss, my husband and I struggled to make sense of events. I recall that winter a profound sense of isolation and of solitude wrapping around me. It became quickly apparent that our society often lacks the communicative tools for the discussion of any form of pregnancy loss, and this I say without judgment or anger. I do understand that speaking to sorrow is difficult. During this time, we found love and friendship in places both expected and surprising; sustaining gestures of sympathy appeared from nowhere and often at my lowest moments.
Nonetheless, we struggled to find tools to process our loss and reengage the world in a meaningful way. In hindsight, the isolation we suffered was one part self-inflicted wound, given that we felt so nullified it was hard for people to know how to find us, and one part a lack of vocabulary about pregnancy loss.
It became apparent that I needed to understand how to integrate the loss if I wanted to truly take possession of my experience. Using writing and yoga and many other endeavors I had never actually attempted, I found myself weirdly and wildly able to grasp things I could not have before. To all this clung an urgency, as though my third eye had been pried open and I had to understand a whole new level of existence before my sight closed again.
When time had afforded us sufficient perspective, we began to think about bringing helpful resources to a wider audience. Given that geography, finances, shame, and a whole host of other factors might limit access to services and information about pregnancy loss, we saw the need to create a website that speaks both to the personal and to the communal. The Internet, in all its strange intimacy, seemed to be just the right place to create an accessible resource.
Considering that twenty percent of pregnancies result in losses, the need for such a resource is great. And, while we might think otherwise, a strange phenomenon exists online. While you might think that the affected constituency might already have found a way to gather to help console, nurture and encourage one another through such trials, a muffled silence or an inadvertently unconstructive dialogue exists. Conversations are often halting, sometimes misunderstood. In contrast, the mission of Reconceiving Loss is to offer concrete and meaningful support to women and men coping with grief. The aim: to comfort, inform, and help (re)construct a life after such common and devastating loss.
We began to produce content suitable for anyone with online access, featuring among other categories a writing primer by renowned novelist Edie Meidav. This primer includes privacy mechanisms, unusual within a social community. These allow the user to experience the site in different ways: privately, semi-privately or publicly. The goal is that people learn and have a safe place to tell their stories, and in the telling of the story, the healing starts to occur. We have also adapted the work of MacArthur Genius grant recipient and photographer Wendy Ewald, which guides users in the creation of self-portraits. Reconceiving Loss additionally offers restorative yoga and meditation videos, nutrition and recipes, articles on health by doctors and practitioners renowned in their fields, and music sharing.
A few weeks after my loss I asked someone who had walked in my shoes if there was a way forward, an “other side” to the grief that felt to me at that time, pervasive. When she hesitated and then said “yes,” I remember being comforted without understanding why. I know now that the work that may sometimes accompany the work of pregnancy loss is both lonely and revealing. It is our hope that this site will help spark similar healing and abundance for those who find its resources helpful.
Please visit us at www.reconceivingloss.com.
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