Motherhood Lost: Impossible Goodbyes, Lessons From Grief
My son was vegan for his entire existence. From the moment of his conception
onward, death never entered his body. That is, until the day it finally did.
Veganism has long been an important part of my own beliefs and career,
something I decided to adopt after death entered my father’s body and I
awoke one morning, like so many mornings after his passing, filled with such
intense, unimaginable grief. I thought about how there were people
throughout time and space and all over the world who had felt this same
agonizing separation from someone they love. And then it occurred to me, in
a very tangible way, that so had animals. Animals throughout time and space
and all over the world were feeling this grief and agonizing separation,
too.
I decided after the loss of my father that I was not willing to be
responsible for causing anyone – any being – this immense pain, for causing
any family to feel the absence of someone they love, and so I went vegan
that day.
Sica during her pregnancy
People often think of veganism as a sacrifice, as having to do without, but
I’ve found it to be quite the opposite. I enjoy food in a way I never did
before, I feel whole in myself in a way I never did before. I appreciate
life in a way that I never did before. And so of course there was never any
doubt that I would have a vegan pregnancy, though I heard many protests
about it – “But where will you get protein?” “But where will you get
calcium?” Luckily my midwives – who were not vegan – can attest that I had
one of the healthiest pregnancies they’ve ever seen. Plenty of protein,
plenty of calcium, and plenty of all the other nutrients that you get from
plants. And I never once craved animal products, because I was never once
deficient in anything.
Inside my body, my baby was exceptionally healthy too, and exceptionally
active. He was always exactly the size he should be at any given week, down
to the ounce or inch.
I took great pride that he had never ingested meat, dairy, or eggs. That as
he formed, on a cellular level, he was never being built out of the pain and
suffering of other lives. That his life was created through the magic of
plants and not the sorrow of animals. I took great pride that death had
never entered his body. That is, until the day it did, when I started to go
into labor and my placenta hemorrhaged. It was rare, it was unexpected, and
there is no known cause, no known reason when this happens. My son died
almost instantly.
The death of a baby is unlike anything else because it crosses so many
levels – the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual. Because you’re
forced to grapple with death and birth and primal instincts, to overcome
nature, to confront the unnatural and unspeakable, all at the same time. And
even though I knew my son was dead, during my entire labor and even
afterwards, every ounce of me wanted to meet my baby, hold my baby, keep my
baby.
“Melancholy” by Albert Gyorgy
Of such a situation, you might be inclined to think that the hardest part
would be the moment you learn your child has died, or the long hours of
labor and birth afterward that you must endure in the grips of this
heart-shattering knowledge. But actually, it’s that first night without him
once everything is all over. It wasn’t just the howling silence, the
crushing grief, the unearthly exhaustion. It was that my body still
physically craved my son, sought him and needed him on a visceral level. My
body, my soul, every maternal instinct inside of me burned with the
insistence that my son belonged with me. My arms needed to hold him. My eyes
needed to see him. My nose needed to smell him. And my breasts needed to
feed him. They didn’t understand that he was gone.
As my breasts engorged over the next hours and days, I tried everything to
put an end to my milk as quickly as possible. Sage tea, lecithin vitamins,
frozen cabbage leaves painfully pressed into my bra followed by hot showers
to try and express the milk out. It felt punishingly brutal to be forced to
endure the discomfort of lactation without my baby. It felt punishingly
brutal for there to be this constant reminder that he wasn’t there, that I
wasn’t feeding him, that I wasn’t taking care of him.
And as I wept in this torture, my mind turned constantly to the dairy
industry, to the animal mothers forced to endure the loss of their own
babies over and over again so their lactations can be taken and
inappropriately sold and used by adults of another species. Only their
separation isn’t a tragic accident of fate, it is carefully planned.
This is the bad news but it is also the good news, because it means that we can plan for a different ending for them.
While there is so much in life that we can’t control, we’re given a chance
at every meal, every day, to choose life, choose rightness, choose fairness.
We can choose to ensure that we never cause other mothers to experience the
kind of loss I’ve been through.
I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I especially wouldn’t wish it on the most
innocent, the most vulnerable, the most gentle and defenseless of creatures.
I wouldn’t wish that any mother ever spend a night without her baby, or
spend a lifetime without her baby, or especially then be forced to lactate
through it.
I had hoped that my son would one day live in a world that is vegan. And
while that isn’t possible anymore, it’s still possible for someone else’s
son, someone else’s daughter, to inherit that world. And so I invite you to
join me in creating that world, today, and every day, starting with your
next meal.
Feel free to dedicate it to my son, my beloved Jon Daniel. Today would be
his first birthday.
Sica Schmitz is the creator of Impact Fashion (a non-profit vegan fashion show), founder of Bead & Reel (a sustainable fashion community), team member of Return To Zero: HOPE (an infant and pregnancy loss nonprofit), and volunteer with Yoga Behind Bars. She is a writer, speaker, and teacher of yoga and meditation, with an emphasis on healing trauma and grief by not inflicting more onto others.
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