You were so new, still more dream than person.

A poetry submission hits a personal chord.

photo by Susanne Nilsson/flickr

As the column coordinator for AJN’s Art of Nursing, which publishes poetry, flash fiction, and visual art related to health and health care, many poems cross my desk. I always appreciate the creativity and emotion in these poems, even when they aren’t quite a fit for our journal. And then there are the ones that not only fit, but that strike a personal chord and stay with me.

“Carrying,” by Katie Manning, PhD, MA, is one such poem. (Click on the PDF for the best version.) It immediately touched me because of the powerful way it described a sensitive topic: pregnancy loss. As a mother who lost a pregnancy in my second trimester, I found myself nodding with tears in my eyes at her elegant descriptions of grief and loss.

The poem received universal praise from our peer reviewers, and when I wrote to Manning to tell her we’d accepted it, I added a personal note about my own experience (something I had never done as an editor). We exchanged words of comfort and spoke about how the topic is not nearly discussed enough.

An often solitary grief.

It can be hard to know what to say to someone who has experienced a pregnancy loss. It can be easy to say something unintentionally not comforting. It can be difficult for someone who hasn’t experienced such a loss to understand. But it can be equally hard for the person suffering the loss to be unable to talk about how they feel and to navigate their grief alone.

Which brings up the feeling some of us experience as to whether or not we have earned the “right” to grieve—a feeling eloquently expressed in this poem. How do you describe the pain over the loss of someone you (and others) have never met? How does one grieve in a society that expects people to “get over it” and move on, and try again? How does one navigate one’s own feelings of inadequacy or guilt . . . of not having protected, of “miscarrying” what was so precious?

After I lost my baby, a grief therapist told me that losing a baby in the second trimester was akin to losing a spouse. I remember numbly repeating this line to people as a sort of defense mechanism when I still found myself grief-stricken months after the event. But why did I feel the need to defend such feelings?

A poem’s power to console.

“Carrying” was shared on social media, and from the outpouring of comments, it’s easy to see that it touched many who have shared such an experience.

“This poem is stunning, this totally speaks to me and my own experience of an ectopic pregnancy . . .  ‘still more dream than person’,” wrote one person on Twitter.

“Beautiful and sad. ‘Grief is not earned,’” said another.

As Manning said to me in an email, “I’m honored that this poem is able to bring other people comfort and permission to grieve too.” And Manning is right when she writes in the poem, “Grief is not earned.” We certainly do have permission to grieve. For that life that was loved but not lived.

For another blog post on perinatal loss with links to articles, blog posts, and poetry on the topic published in AJN, please click here.

Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and an associate professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. For more on her writing, visit her website.