Healing from miscarriage with Mary

In Michelangelo’s Pietá, life and death lie in the arms of the Virgin Mary. Christ — Life himself — lies dead in the arms of his mother.

It is a posture which all women must, at one time or another, assume. Women are made in such a way that we can hold both life and death. We love deeply and thus are wounded deeply, as though with piercing daggers.

Nowhere is this capacity more clear than miscarriage. Miscarriage is the only time that humans experience the death of a soul in one’s body that is not one’s own. It is an experience unique to women — if a soul dies within a man, it is his own, and he dies with it. Only women can experience a real death in the body without themselves succumbing to death.

When I told my husband that he was a dad, he took me in his arms and spun me in the air. We celebrated our little life while I held him in my womb, and we mourned him after he left it all too early, suddenly and in a flurry of red.

In healing from miscarriage, I find comfort in the image of the Pietá. Like Mary after the crucifixion, women who have miscarried have held both life and death. We have experienced death in our own body, and yet we live. Our joy and grief is intermixed and at times indistinguishable. We rejoice that our child exists, yet we suffer that we no longer hold him.

Experiencing great joy and great suffering together is uncomfortable. We dislike ambiguity. But Mary shows us how to be at home in it: she rejoiced with her child Christ while her heart was simultaneously pierced for him. She is both Our Lady of Sorrows and Our Lady of Joy. She is our model for holding both life and death, grief and joy.

It is in a woman’s nature to hold great joy and great suffering together. We were made to do so.