Jessica Zucker > Quotes

“The weight of our losses might feel heavy one day and markedly lighter the next, but the memory remains. If it does, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Neither is indicative of being more or less "healed" or "healthy". Neither is right or wrong. There's not necessarily a linear path that leads us out of our discomfort and into an unaffected state.
We might also compassionately absolve ourselves of the inclination to search for a silver lining. There might not actually be one, and that's okay. We need not feel pressured into finding bright spots when we just landed in the dark ones, and we mustn't succumb to this binary vision of adversity. Sometimes things don't "happen for a reason" and sometimes there isn't a cheerful way to look at a horrific or heartbreaking situation. Sometimes when we try to make sense of why bad things happen to good people, we find ourselves searching for meaning where there is none, getting caught in a manufactured duality. We can hold both. There is room and necessity for nuance, complexity, and gradation. We can be hurt and healing simultaneously. We can be grateful for what we have and angry about what we don't at the exact same time. We can dive deep into the pit of our pain and not forget the beauty our life maintains. We can hold both. We can grieve and laugh at precisely the same moment. We can make love and mourn in the same week. Be crestfallen and hopeful. We can hold both. And so it goes. We grievers might stumble upon these notions the hard way (I'm not so sure there's any other way to come face-to-face with them), but nevertheless, we work to integrate them and, in time, deftly tuck them in to our pockets as hard-won wisdom we might just get the chance to impart someday.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“Anxiety has the capacity to temporarily steal joy. It can wrangle the mind—baiting it to singularly focus on negative possibilities, whether true or false. In so doing, anxiety surreptitiously stomps out a spectrum of other feelings that actually exist simultaneously.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“This is the post-traumatic experience—our past remains ever present. Encumbered by the weight of our traumas, we feel the sting of every terrifying possibility.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“We at least need to try. To grasp at words, convey love, communicate care. Something. Anything. Anything other than silence, avoidance, or disappearing altogether.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“Within a matter of days, it was time to leave the house;”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“One of the most insufferable and surprising parts of grief is that one moment we can’t stand to feel our sadness for another second, and the next we are scared of ever losing the intensity of that feeling. That somehow the passage of time, and the eventual lessening of the sting, is an affront to the memory of the one we lost.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“Trauma seems to provoke this dichotomy, this corporeal confusion, as it were. It’s both: gratitude for what is and utter despair for what isn’t (and what could have been).”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“Regardless of the reasons why I was able to sidestep this self-destructive line of thought, I never once considered that I did something to prompt this traumatic loss.
But I also kept thinking, through the maze of grief and despair, how much worse it would be to also feel ashamed, guilty, or self-blaming. Amazing, the places our minds go. How much more agonizing it would be if I subscribed to the stigma, bought into society's expectations of women, and considered myself some kind of a defunct model solely because I couldn't carry this specific pregnancy to term. I shuddered to think how exponentially worse my suffering would be if I chose to stay silent”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“The furthest thing from my mind following this incomprehensible trauma was to feel ashamed of it, as if I had done something wrong or like I should keep it a secret. But I quickly found - both in my memory of so many of my patients' experiences, and prevalent in the research on women's feelings after pregnancy loss - that somehow shame is expected. It doesn't exactly make any sense: One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage - and that's just of the pregnancies that are known.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“We aren’t necessarily meant to “move on” from these life-altering moments in a linear way. It is in fact normative, natural, and okay—more than okay—to sit in our grief, even when it feels as sharp as the day it first touched us. We aren’t supposed to “move on,” “be positive,” or “push ahead” overnight.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“Suspended in sheer vulnerability—wanting something so badly but not having a semblance of control, nothing to ensure it will come to pass—is the place of humanity. These are the heart-opening moments we wish we could evade, but can’t.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement