Core Value Series: Bearing Burdens

By: Nick Carrington​ EPLA Editor

In the core value series, the editors of Hope Blooms seek to show the heart of the EPLA by describing our core values. We encourage you to remember the children we’ve lost and stand with families suffering from miscarriage.

Bearing Burdens
Miscarriage is a traumatic event that affects families physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Research confirms that parents mourn the death of their child in the womb with a similar intensity and duration as they mourn deaths of other loved ones. This pain makes ordinary activities a burden for families. 

They need to make meals, care for their other children, do house and yard work, and work their jobs. Most loss parents have little to no respite, and the everyday demands of life only deepen the emotional and spiritual turmoil they feel.

Many women also do not realize what their physical needs will be during and after a miscarriage. The entire experience is traumatic, including on the body of the mother. They bear a physical weight that is amplified by the pain within them.

EPLA Response
At the EPLA, we encourage a comprehensive response to the suffering of miscarriage. This response includes miscarriage kits to give mothers the supplies they need to deal with the physical effects of a miscarriage. We have created resource folders to educate suffering families as they try to make sense of the senseless. On our blog, we have suggested ways to encourage loss parents and help them with everyday needs.

Bearing burdens will not “fix” the problem or make loss parents’ grief go away. But, hopefully, it will allow them to come up for air and breathe, to keep from sinking deeper into the depths that sometimes swallow us whole when we encounter trauma. Parents need time to work through their grief, and we as an organization and as individuals play a role in the healing.

Stand with us as we seek to bear the burdens of suffering parents. They need our help; to carry their load is to offer them hope, and hope goes a long way as we grieve the loss of a child.

Miscarriage is a traumatic event that affects families physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Nick Carrington is an Editor for the EPLA and Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at Cedarville University​​.