Reaching the unspoken grief: continuing parental bond during pregnancy loss

Abstract

This chapter shows how establishing a healthy continuing bond (CB) helps bereaved couples to make meaning out of their dire experience and reorganize their lives after loss, using a Value-Action-Sensation model of CB. It suggests that the experience of seeing and holding the deceased child, keeping memorial objects related to the child, philanthropic actions, and argues that the grief experience can foster healthy CB, and assist bereaved couples to transcend the abysmal experience into a precious lesson of life. The loss of the pregnancy may be discovered during a routine check-up or ultrasonography that shows no vital signs, or it can happen spontaneously with sudden heavy bleeding or pain. Pregnancy loss is often ambiguous and disenfranchised. Instead of severing the bonds with the deceased children or diminishing the intimacy of their parental bond, parents relied on the vivid inner representation of their deceased children to heal.