The grief that doesn't have a name

When people ask how I am, I say fine. I say it quickly and I mean it as a way of closing the conversation, because the honest answer would take too long and probably make them uncomfortable.

The honest answer is: I don't know what I lost, exactly, but I lost something, and the world doesn't have a word for it.

The specific strangeness of this grief

Pregnancy loss has a language now — more than it used to. People are beginning to talk about miscarriage with something closer to the honesty it deserves. But IVF loss exists in a different category, and I'm not sure it has language yet.

"There was no funeral. No card from the office. No casserole on the doorstep. The world didn't know there was anything to mourn."

What I was mourning was the possibility. The almost. The embryo that made it to day five and then didn't make it further. The idea of a person that existed in my head fully formed, with a name I'd half-chosen, and then didn't exist anymore.

What I needed that I didn't get

I needed someone to tell me that what I felt was proportionate. That it was allowed to be as large as it was. Instead, the emphasis was immediately on next steps — what the results showed, what we'd do differently, when we could start again.

Forward motion is useful, eventually. But first I needed to stand still for a moment. I needed the grief to be witnessed.

What helped

Finding this community helped. Reading other people's words and recognising myself in them — that helped more than I can say. Not because it made the loss smaller, but because it made me feel less like I was inventing something that no one else understood.

If you're in this right now: what you feel is real. What you lost was real. You're allowed to take as long as you need.