Duality is a strange, often difficult thing to embrace and carry through life. It exists all around us in big and small ways, and isn’t talked about enough. We can be both happy and sad. Excited and scared. Grateful and devastated.
For me, the month of October carries many moments of duality. It’s Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and I am both thankful for a month devoted to awareness and fatigued by constant reminders of my losses. I am a mom of four, but the world only sees two. Even fourteen years later, I still struggle to accept I’m only raising half of my children. It’s painful and poetic to have lost two children, and then have twins.
That’s the thing about pregnancy and infant loss: so often, it lives in silence. It’s still taboo. That’s what makes October an important month: to bring awareness, knowledge, and light to a subject that desperately needs it.
It’s an “out-of-order” loss. We’re not supposed to outlive our children. Because of that, it makes people incredibly uncomfortable. Friends and family often don’t know what to say, or they say the wrong thing. Sometimes, out of fear of saying the wrong thing, they say nothing at all. In October, loss parents take center stage, and that’s both frightening and freeing.
Holding Joy + Grief Together
My experience with loss started in August of 2011 when I was pregnant with my son Adrian. He was diagnosed with a fatal disorder in the second trimester, and I made the heartbreaking decision to say goodbye and protect him from suffering. Just three months later, I experienced an early five-week pregnancy loss. Adrian and my second baby changed me, and continue to teach me lessons even now.
In 2012 I found myself pregnant again, and this time with twins. Pregnancy after loss brings many moments of duality. Joy for new life, and despair for the ones lost. Excitement to meet them, and fear that won’t happen. I had become a mother a year earlier, but to the outside world, I was only becoming one upon their birth.
Even today, when someone casually asks, “How many kids do you have?” I feel the sting of deciding how to answer. Do I have the capacity to answer honestly at that moment, and do they deserve to hear my story? That moment of hesitation is a reminder that I live in both worlds: the visible and invisible, the celebrated and the silenced.
Living in the Duality
Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month matters because it sheds light on something too often held in darkness. It gives us permission to speak our children’s names, to share our stories, and to be witnessed. It educates the world, because the truth is, according to the World Health Organization, one in four pregnancies ends in loss, and every statistic carries a family forever changed.
And yet, October is exhausting. All month long, my social media fills with candles lit, names shared, stories told. There’s so much beauty in that collective remembrance, and there’s also heaviness. Every post reminds me not only of my children, but of countless others gone too soon. I find myself grateful that the world is listening, and at the same time, wishing I could escape the grief just for a moment.
That’s the duality of October: the month we are most seen and the month we are most reminded of what we’ve lost.
Finding Connection in Shared Loss
There is nothing quite like being in the company of other loss parents. There’s often an instant, unspoken connection of, “Ahhh, you get it.” When the world places expectations of “moving on” or “getting over it,” or tells you “Everything happens for a reason,” loss parents communicate silently with each other the knowing that those things will never fully be true.
Grief doesn’t end. It changes with time, but it always carries love and pain. What helps most is having it witnessed. That’s a gift loss parents give each other instinctively. A gift we’re both thankful to have and heartbroken the other can relate to.
Losing my children made me deeply aware of life’s dualities, and once I began noticing, I realized they exist everywhere. Life constantly gives us this “both/and” reality: new jobs that excite and scare us, relationships that bring love and vulnerability, milestones that carry pride and nostalgia.
Loss opened me up to that truth in a way I can’t unsee. It’s both a burden and a gift.
For Those Who Walk Beside Us
If you’re a loss parent: please know it’s okay to feel both gratitude and fatigue during this month. To want to participate in awareness and to need a break from it. To speak your child’s name loudly and to hold it quietly in your heart. Your grief doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, because it is uniquely your own.
If you’re walking alongside a loss parent: the most important thing you can do is to witness their grief. Say their child’s name. Send a text that simply says, “I’m thinking of you.” Don’t avoid the subject out of discomfort. Silence can be the loudest message of all.
October reminds us that life is not black and white. It doesn’t fit into neat boxes of happy or sad, present or past, love or grief. It is often both. This month reminds me to hold that truth close with compassion and grace for myself. To know that duality is not something to fear, but something to embrace.
–Guest post submission by Ashley Inclima
