Together Yet Apart: Navigating Love and Loss After a Miscarriage

Reflections on the complexity of grief and the lessons I learned in honoring the loss of our first child.

“How sad is the right amount of sad?” my new friend Ryan asked me on our call. “How would you feel if you didn’t feel sad at all about the miscarriage?”

His questions touched the heart of what I’d been struggling with for the past month — a dissonance between how I expected my grief to look like, what my wife’s grief looked like, and how I authentically felt.

A month ago, in the beginning of December, my wife Candace miscarried at 11 weeks while we were traveling in Okinawa, Japan.

One day, we were at a hospital talking with Japanese-speaking doctors through translation apps, trying to understand what was causing some irregular bleeding she was experiencing.

The next, I held her hand as she went through the excruciating physical and emotional pain of passing the baby at our Airbnb.

As quickly as that, the pregnancy that had been the focal point of our relationship for the past few months was gone.

Surprisingly, the loss of the baby wasn’t actually the hardest part of this miscarriage for me.

The hardest part was co-navigating my wife’s and my different experiences of grief and staying connected in the days and weeks afterwards.

Here’s what I learned and what I wished I knew beforehand — my hope is that sharing my experience might be helpful to anyone navigating something similar.

The Challenge of Co-Navigating Grief

A miscarriage is fundamentally an asymmetrical event for a couple. Nothing I’m feeling can ever really compare to the devastation that my wife feels from losing a life she was devoting nearly all her life force energy toward. I can never truly understand her pain or how alone it must’ve felt.

For a few days, she stayed mostly in bed and let herself fall into the devastating grief that moved through her body. I felt so proud for how emotionally fluid she was and how she stayed connected with friends and family throughout the process.

She’d consciously chosen to break social norms and be very transparent with family, friends, and community about her pregnancy experience in the first trimester. And in the miscarriage, they reached out with love and support, sharing beautiful words, prayers, and music.

I, on the other hand, struggled.

I held space for her through parts of it, but I also wasn’t feeling the grief that she was feeling. I had trouble naming or creating space for what I actually was feeling.

I didn’t have a model for sadness growing up — let alone grief. A healthy connection with my sadness has been a learned skill for me as an adult, cultivated through years of inner work.

When both of my grandmothers passed away last year, I didn’t really grieve. I felt some sadness and shared some sweet memories of them in my eulogies. But I also expected to feel more for two women who I’d spent much of my childhood years around.

And when I learned about the miscarriage, I felt sad, but again not that sad. I kept expecting myself to feel more sad — because that’s what grieving should look like, right? — and then feeling frustrated when I didn’t and that I was feeling something else.

When I’d hit my capacity of holding space for her the day, much of me just wanted to go back to life as normal rather than sit around searching for a feeling of grief that wasn’t there. That dissonance created tension in our relationship.

And so, on top of what already would’ve been a challenging experience on its own, we’d find ourselves getting into fights and arguments that we didn’t want to be having, about how I wasn’t showing up in the ways she needed.

It was rough.

Making Space for My Grief with Other Men

The single, most impactful thing I did in learning to co-navigate grief and connecting with my own experience was to have one-on-one calls with four men who had also experienced miscarriages.

I didn’t realize how necessary that was until I’d had my first conversation with Ryan — and then it was clear I needed more.

Ryan and I had actually never talked before, but he’d read Candace’s post about our recent miscarriage and had generously reached out. We became friends after the call.

His questions about the “right amount of sad” helped me realize the expectations that I was placing on myself. I would feel really sad and frustrated if I didn’t feel sad about the miscarriage. And I could see how my expectations of my own experience blocked my acceptance of what was actually true and authentic for me.

I’d felt constipated emotionally — all my feelings felt so minor relative to what my wife was feeling. Disappointment about our Japan trip cut short. Frustration about not getting the food adventure I wanted. Pain around the loss of sexual intimacy for the whole pregnancy.

When I returned from Japan, my first request to my men’s group in Boulder had been to hold me as I threw a tantrum — to let myself move the frustration of not having space for my own experience.

My grief didn’t look like what I expected or what others expected.

Every time someone expressed their condolences — “I imagine it must be really hard” — I’d feel a contraction in my heart. I wasn’t feeling the “hardness” that they were alluding to and would feel myself pull away.

I wasn’t able to connect with what was actually true and authentic in my lived experience, and so I wasn’t able to keep my heart open to receive their care and love.

Even when Candace had organized a lovely grief gathering for us to be loved on and held by our close friends, I’d felt the warmth and love in it but also some dissonance. I’d felt more frustration in my body than sadness, more desire to punch a bag than to be held and cuddled.

In talking with other men, I learned that I wasn’t alone. Other men resonated with me around the asymmetrical experience — they’d also struggled to be with their own and their partners’ grief and had found that they didn’t co-navigate the experience in the most graceful way.

More than one man expressed that they wished they’d talked to more people earlier on — and it’s my wish for anyone else who’s navigating this journey.

Grief Is Both An Individual and Shared Journey

“There’s a grief process for you each to engage in on your own and a joint one as well,” another man I talked to shared.

I’m still new to grief, but what I’ve learned so far is that grief doesn’t have a pre-determined schedule or a shape to it.

Whatever I’m feeling is okay and 100% valid — even if it doesn’t look anything like what my wife is feeling or what I perceive others to expect.

There’s space for what I’m feeling, and if I’m not feeling that space in the partnership — which is reasonable given the gravity of what had happened — I need to create that space elsewhere.

In talking with other men, I finally created the space I needed for myself to express and be with my actual felt and lived experience — without the inhibiting judgments that the feelings I felt were too small to honor.

I was no longer alone.

And the more self-compassion and self-permissioning I felt for my own experience, the more resourced I could be in empathizing and feeling compassion for my wife’s experience.

I could see and own the ways that I’d fallen short in showing up during the loss.

I could see how all she wanted was to hear was “we got this” and “we’ll make it through this together” — an energy that was hard to tap into authentically when I hadn’t yet "got" myself.

In the absence of feeling connected to my own feelings, it was easy to want to go back to life as normal, and I can see how that led me to not show up in the ways she needed or wanted.

It’s taken some apologies and some repair, but I’m proud of how we eventually navigated through a rough month back to a deep sense of acceptance and connection.

What’s In a Name?

We were out having a brunch date — a rare and special occasion given how low-energy Candace had been feeling during the pregnancy — when we decided on the name Ava for our baby.

We’d both felt an inner knowing that she’d be a girl, and we loved the soft sound the name Ava made and also what it meant — “breath of life” and “voice.”

A few days after the miscarriage, when Candace first talked about losing Ava, I felt my heart lock up in resistance.

I didn’t want to feel the pain of acknowledging that the baby we’d lost was Ava — and I could feel my attachment to wanting to leave our unborn child nameless. That wasn’t Ava, I’d tell myself, a part of me wanting to save the beautiful name that we’d chosen for our next child.

If I could leave her nameless, I could stay in the intellectual realm that miscarriages were just a normal part of the parenthood journey. Twenty-five percent of known pregnancies end up in miscarriage [1], after all — our doctor had suggested perhaps even up to a third or more — and so it was nothing to get too worked up about, I’d told myself.

I knew that the resistance was just a protection mechanism — and that there was freedom for me on the other side. And so I’d titrate the feelings and cry here and there, while meditating or going through my day, letting the reality settle in my system that we really did lose Ava — and all the dreams and energy we’d poured into her short existence.

Really letting myself acknowledge that our unborn child was Ava was the most that I felt connected to my grief in the miscarriage — and also the most that I felt connected with Candace in hers.

In feeling through the resistance, I could see the gift of accepting Ava as the name for our unborn child. It was a way of honoring all the energy my wife had put into growing the baby, all the support and encouragement we’d received from family and friends, and all the love that my wife and I had put into dreaming about her — even for the short time that she was here.

Saying Farewell

The day before we left Japan, Candace and I stood in the light rain on the beach, as we sent Ava out to sea on a flower boat that Candace had made.

In Japanese, the phrase mizuko kuyō, meaning “water child memorial service,” refers to a Japanese Buddhist ceremony for those with a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion.

In our mizuko kuyō for Ava, we honored what was — a dream that was no longer. We danced. We sung. We cried. We played music that Candace’s friends had contributed for the ceremony. We honored nature for her cycles.

An intuitive reader once told me that my daughter’s soul wasn’t here to play small. And that I’m going to need to expand into the man, husband, and father that I’m meant to be.

And even in the short time that she’s been around, Ava has certainly done that.

She’s called forth a deeper and more primal part of myself to provide for the family. She’s expanded my capacity to feel love and be with a broader range of the human emotional experience — though not at all in how I would’ve expected. And she’s called me forth to show up more in this life, in my partnership, and in the world.