And there's going to be a lot of stuffing stuff down, because you don't want to be judged," she says.īoth Rand and Smith decided to come face-to-face with their grief in a ritual that more and more American Zen centers are offering: mizuko kuyo. She explains that she carried around her grief for a long time, but felt as though she couldn't talk about it. Katherine Rand is a chaplain who had an abortion in high school. "And you're not even really sure how much you're supposed to be grieving.Įven when that loss is a choice, it can still be a hard one.
"The pain of miscarriage is very private," she says. Once that stops, something very large has stopped for you," Smith says. "There's always a part of you that goes into the future, and starts to build a little idea of what your life's going to be like. But, she explains, you can't always help yourself. With each pregnancy, she tried to keep her hopes in check. When photographer Ali Smith was trying for a second child, she had four miscarriages. It's different in Japan, which has a traditional Buddhist ceremony that some Americans are adopting as their own. But when that loss happens before birth, it often isn't marked.
When parents lose a child, there are rituals to mark their grief - holding funerals, sitting shiva, bringing casseroles.