This episode delves into a subject that many find deeply uncomfortable: pregnancy loss. Whether through miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth, accident, or medical necessity, countless women, their partners, and families carry this profound pain. How can we, as a culture, become more literate and compassionate about pregnancy loss? How do we honor this vulnerability instead of silencing it? Pregnancy loss often feels taboo, perhaps because conversations about death are challenging for so many — and when it involves the death of a baby, the difficulty multiplies. My eloquent guest, Amy Wright Glenn, captures this sentiment beautifully, saying, “I strive to lift this from the cultural shadow and help us all become more fluent in its language.”

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Transcript:

Diane Hullet: Hi, I’m Diane Hullet, and you’re listening to the Best Life, Best Death podcast. And I’m talking again with Amy Wright Glenn, who I spoke with on Best Life, Best Death number 173. And I just think Amy’s got a wealth of information to share. Welcome back, Amy. Thank you. So good to see you. So Amy’s the founder of the Institute for Birth, Breath, and Death, and boy, I want to talk about like three different things.

First of all, for you, how do birth, breath, and death all weave together? Let’s start there. And then we’re going to talk more about some of the courses you offer because they really go in some really beautiful uncharted waters. So birth, breath, death, how, why those, that combo? 

Amy Wright Glenn: Well, I need to give credit because the, the terms birth, breath, and death, As a combination to name a book or to, you know, name my institute after is not something I came up with.

My first husband came up with that in my work. He’s like, Oh, you really should write a book birth, breath and death. I’m like, Oh, when I’m older, I’m not ready to do that right now. You know, at the time I was working as a chaplain in the hospital. And I’ve been, you know, a doula for about 40 different births.

And I would often speak to friends and to family about what I was learning and weaving these experiences together. At the time I was teaching a course on mythology and I had the first unit be creation myths and myths and rituals around birth around the world. And then the second unit was the hero journey.

And then that would do a unit on death rituals and, you know,

 Eschatology, that’s how you say it. Eschatology. You can edit that part out. I mean, it’s called Eschatology, the study of the end times and how different cultures have understood the end times of the world and death rituals. And so I was in my, academic mode, weaving birth and death together often, and then also hospital chaplain work, and then birth doula work.

So this idea, you should write this book, Birth, Breath, and Death. I love the title. I was like, oh, I love that, but I’m not ready yet. I need many more decades of experience before I could write that. And And it just so happened with the birth of my son. I’m like, okay, I think I’m ready. And I hope I have, I continue to deepen over many decades, God willing, of my life ahead.

But that book came after I you know, came forward in my heart and mind, my little boy would be sleeping and I’d get up and write it. You know, the words just started coming to me as I would write. So birth, breath, and death to me are woven together in every moment, every inhale of birth, every exhale of death, every breath.

The window into these thresholds, like mini birth and death every morning, every night, every opportunity to meet a person, you know, we meet right now, there’s a birth in our connection, we’ll say goodbye, hopefully we’ll stay in touch, but this birth, breath and death, small b, small d are woven into our days.

And then of course, there’s the, the birth of a body and the death of a body, which bookends all our human lives. So we have lots of birth, breath and death in the journey too. Between birth and death, 

Diane Hullet: right? Such a great way to sort of frame the whole thing. I think it’s this, yeah, it’s this beautiful way in which everything weaves together, the micro and the macro.

And I think when we begin to see it like that, it’s like everything has cycles. Everything has movements. I’m not the first one to say this, obviously, but I, I do think it’s beautiful when I tap into that place in my own life and feel the rhythm and feel the cycle. I don’t know. It slows me down and it makes me a little more present to what’s happening and it makes me a little less anxious about where it’s all going.

I think, well, it’s got a cycle to it in my life and in the bigger world. Right? All of that. So you you know, you’ve always been willing to dive into some less well charted waters. And for example, for listeners with that, I mean, like. There are courses at the Institute, including doulas and domestic violence, holding space for pregnancy loss, holding space for abortion, and understanding suicide.

And these are some of the, I think, the more difficult topics to talk about. You know, with a friend or with a cousin or with a coworker, you know, you find out somebody has had an experience with one of these difficult spaces and you think, Oh, I don’t know what to say, my God, you know, but let’s kind of, let’s dive into especially, I think a more common than we realize is pregnancy loss and abortion and miscarriage and how those fit in to this birth, breath, death, and just the experience of loss of being human.

Well, 

Amy Wright Glenn: doulas, and I speak it for myself, doulas need support when it comes to pregnancy loss. You know, my doula trainer was amazing. She ended up being the doula for my own son’s birth and a dear friend to this day. And when I did my doula training with her, we did spend some time on miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death.

And she was very clear, like, this is a topic of study that I can’t do it full justice right now, right? Most births don’t end in death. Those, those that do are so painful for the family and for the doula that it is its own course of study and, and while I was doing my doula training, it wasn’t long after I did my hospital chaplaincy training, and I would be called to the NICU, you know, I’d be called to the pediatric ward or the labor and delivery ward, and whenever a chaplain is called to labor and delivery, it’s not because there’s a birth that ends in life, it’s because there’s a death.

So I was with parents who, and held their little ones and was with them through. The, the immediate grief. It’s like a triage being a hospital chaplain is triage grief. It’s just the body’s in shock. And I started to feel like, wow, my hospital training as a chaplain has trained me. In a way, equipped me to approach this, but my doula training also did.

And I realized like, I will want to create a course to help doulas have the training I had as a hospital chaplain. So that when they’re in the room and the birth. Has this terrifying outcome, you know, at the death that for families that feel so terrifying, you know, they’re not preparing for that. Or if they’ve prepared, it’s still how do you really prepare right?

You may know your child could die. They have a fetal abnormality and and yet you can still hold to that hope of that 2 percent or 10 percent like it won’t happen. doulas can feel so shell shocked. And so I thought, I want to create a course where I take the best of my chaplaincy training and my doula training and, and stay there.

Not just touch it, you know, for an hour in a three day training, but like, that’s the three day training. Like, let this be the training. And there was such a hunger for it. And and even now, you know, I’m flying next month to Arizona. To lead in person holding space for pregnancy loss training. And I’ve trained people to teach it.

And I designed the course, so I created the curriculum around three topics. One, what does it mean to hold space? To companion someone in grief. So that’s like the first portion. Two, how do we strengthen the support network around a family? You know, how do we strengthen, as ourselves our skill set to support, you know, practical support.

So, we’re not walking in saying, well, God has another angel, or, well, at least you can get pregnant again. These are hurtful things. They’re not meant to be hurtful, but they are hurtful to hear for most people. And so, how do we make sure we find what’s helpful and not hurtful? And mostly it’s being present, right?

So, this is where that companion comes in to really listen. But then if we are going to speak, how can we speak in a way that at least It causes less pain, doesn’t add suffering to the suffering. And then the third portion is ritual. What rituals can we support the family doing, or even ourselves, like our own rituals around loss, that enable this child to be remembered?

That, you know, some people will I worked with a couple who got a tattoo on their forearm of the fetal heart rate monitor, of their daughter’s actual monitor a portion of it, and then a bird flying. And they made it like The monitor is like the, the telephone wire between two poles, and this bird flying, and they both have the same tattoo on their arm.

So this type of ritual of art, or tattooing, or a memorial garden, or naming the baby, you know, there’s so many types of ritual, religious or secular, writing the story, telling the story. So holding space, or companioning, support network, support, and then ritual. That’s how I designed the training. And so it’s accessible to people who are professionals or people who are bereaved.

And often when I teach, there’ll be people in the community that gather who have personal and professional experience of loss who are like, Oh, I had my own miscarriage, you know, or I have worked as a midwife with supporting people. So. This course has been so important to so many, and, you know, I designed it so that many stories are told.

There’s a wonderful book called What God is Honored Here, and it’s writings on pregnancy loss and miscarriage by and for women of color. And there’s an anthology, and so I interviewed the authors of this anthology. I feel like pregnancy loss is taboo because death and conversations around death are hard for many.

And then when a baby dies. It’s even harder, right? You don’t know what to say. And so I’ve had two miscarriages, early miscarriages. I’ve had my own experience, some with this. I’ve also been in the hospital room with families when a baby dies. I’ve helped train midwives, doulas, birth workers around this.

I’ve had people who work with end of life take my training. I had a hospice nurse from Canada take holding space for pregnancy loss. She wrote me and she said, I don’t, I don’t of any work in the birth work, but I work with dying women and men and people who are like in the end of life and I have had women say as they are preparing to die in those last few weeks, I miss my baby that died 50 years ago, or they still have this grief of a stillbirth that impacted their life so much.

She said, I want to train to understand pregnancy loss so I can better hold space. Or these elderly people who are remembering their pregnancy loss as they begin to make sense of their life story. So I hope that’s helpful. I spoke quite a lot there. There’s a lot to say. 

Diane Hullet: I think, I think it’s fantastic. I think there’s a lot to say around it.

And I’ve, I’ve just, I was just reflecting on What you said about why it’s so difficult. It’s difficult because death is already unspoken for many people. And then it’s difficult because it’s a baby and it’s just so tender. And so it’s a death that feels wrong. I think, you know, on some level, we just think.

We rail against it. We feel like that’s out of order. You know, that’s not the way it’s supposed to go, but, and I’m struck by what you just said in that the last piece of what you said about how it circles back at the end of life, if it’s been unprocessed grief, it’s been unfelt grief, or, or. Unheld by community and family grief is where I think often these pregnancy loss pieces go.

And I was thinking about Dr. Christopher Kerr, who’s a hospice doctor, had a really moving story. He was working in the field of, of helping people. Or helping to do research around people with mysterious experiences at the end of life. And a woman who had some dementia was dying and her family was gathering and she kept holding a baby and talking to a baby and nobody knew what was going on.

And finally the sister came and the family said, well, she keeps talking to this infant, but you know, she, we don’t know what she’s doing. She must be hallucinating. And her sister said, Oh, she’s not hallucinating. She’s talking to her first. Child who died and nobody in the family knew none of the siblings knew and it was this incredible kind of experience of that full circle of she was both, I think, now with that baby on some level in that in between space, and she was grieving that loss as part of her life and her family was then witness to this experience and I just found that so moving how The big pieces of our life come back to us at the end of life.

And so clearly a pregnancy loss, even a miscarriage, even an early miscarriage is such a loss. Infertility is a loss. And so there’s these places that around birth and fertility babies that don’t get spoken of because I don’t know, I don’t know where you’d go with it. You know it’s just interesting when, when I experienced infertility, there was such a.

A lack of understanding. I felt like I couldn’t really go there with anybody except other friends who were experiencing the same thing because people just couldn’t hold it and they couldn’t get it. So I think there’s something around this that’s just really powerful for people. 

Amy Wright Glenn: Right, right. And, and I’m hopeful that through courses like Holding Space for Pregnancy Loss and conversations like you had with friends who you could resonate with that.

This alchemy can be done, which will help our culture be more literate around not just grief, but pregnancy loss. So that means speaking more openly and sharing more openly in safe spaces and then finding rituals that resonate. Whether it’s, you know, your own ritual at home that you do every day. It could be that you have a place in your home where there’s a picture of your child and every day you put flowers, just something simple, right?

But this daily recognition that I’m honoring this tenderness in my heart, I’m honoring my love for this child. And so I’m hopeful we can create a normalcy around that instead of having to be quiet and quiet. You know, stillbirth babies, the doctors and nurses used to think they were doing the parents a favor by kind of just whisking them out of the room.

They wouldn’t even take pictures. Now we know, give hours and hours, you know, take, take the time, take the time. 

Diane Hullet: Take the time. And when you were describing the tattoo that the one couple got, I was thinking there’s such power in like, Naming it and claiming it, right? Not, not sweeping it under the rug, taking it out of the room, but really being with that grief.

I think that’s, it’s sort of the only way we can be clean with grief is to deeply be with it, right? And then there’s abortion loss. I mean, that’s this whole other piece that women have a sense of aloneness, a sense of isolation around. I know. 

Amy Wright Glenn: And the course for the Institute Holding Space for Abortion is centered around a text It’s called I I, I Never Told Anyone.

I believe that’s the title. I’m trying to remember it right now. And, and it’s about that quietude and the sense of shame or deep privacy. Like, I don’t want to tell, you know, the story. And, and the shame associated with being judged. Right, because there may be circles where you wouldn’t be judged, but there’s definitely circles where you will be judged.

And so it’s like, well, how safe am I to say this happened? You know, that I chose this. And for abortion, you know, it’s a whole lot of emotions can come. Relief. A sense of, thank God I’m not pregnant, I wasn’t ready, I didn’t want, you know, especially if it had been a pregnancy after an assault or a rape, right?

The sense of, oh, thank God, could be a real relief. But there’s also abortion that brings up a lot of grief and sorrow, where the child may have been wanted for a time and then, well, this doesn’t work, or I’m choosing to end this pregnancy because any multitude of factors, but there’s still this heartache around it, right?

So. That book is an anthology of stories, and each story touches on abortion through a different lens, and it helps the reader recognize it’s not just a, it’s a multifaceted experience, it’s not a monolithic experience. So is pregnancy loss overall but abortion, you know, choosing to terminate, and especially, I, I did a speci a specific course on termination for medical reasons.

Tfmr, where, where the child may be really wanted, but at some point in the pregnancy there’s a recognition that this child has such profound fetal abnormalities, right, or the mother’s health is at such a risk with pregnancy that terminating or aborting the baby is The right thing to do for that couple or for that family, and then the sense of judgment is also hard because then the pregnancy is usually further along.

Right. And then the grief is complicated because the child had been wanted and there’s all this time and there’s like, wait, have. I could choose to give birth to this child who might live a few minutes or who may live years but not be able to roll over or recognize me or ever eat on their own. Right?

And so that’s its own course. That’s its own specific course. 

Diane Hullet: I appreciate you naming that. Yeah, that there’s there’s even within a broad umbrella like abortion, there’s these sub pieces that have their own unique grief, pain, trauma, difficulty, loss. 

Amy Wright Glenn: And so my goal with the Institute is to create a safe place where Doulas can, and I don’t mean doulas, like only doulas people, can take courses that help lift up the maybe darker parts of our culture or the quieter parts that we don’t explore so much.

And, you know, for instance, suicide, which is the second leading cause of death for young people. So it’s common, but it’s hard to talk about. And so to be able to have a course, Where you might have 20 to 50 people in the class and you do small cohort work. You might take the time to read and discuss a book.

And, you know, I will present will have question answer, but it just lifts up from this. Cultural shadow, a topic that is impacting many and puts it on the table and says, let’s, let’s bring compassionate presence to ourselves and to this topic and become more fluent around it. 

Diane Hullet: Fluent is such a good word for it.

And I love that lifting it out of the cultural shadow because Yeah. Why, why we have some idea that not talking about suicide, either as someone is ideating about it or after there’s been a successful suicide. Wow. How is it helpful to not talk about it? I just don’t understand, but it is so painful and so in the shadow.

That it really is makes a difference. And yet, as you said, the second least leading cause of death for young people. And I, I feel that everyone has been touched by a suicide. It’s, that’s just the reality. You know, somebody who knows somebody, or, you know, it very directly. And it is really a challenging place of loss because I think like the, like you said, with the pregnancy loss, there’s so many mixed emotions.

It’s so multifaceted. And I think the same is true of suicide. Stating the obvious here. Stating the obvious. My, my children say I specialize in stating the obvious, so you know, it’s, it’s an important skill to have. But yeah, these, these are big, big places. Well, are there any other resources you would leave people with?

Any other you know, courses or websites or places that you found helpful in your own exploration of these topics? There’s certainly 

Amy Wright Glenn: books that I lift up, you know, Kay Jamison Redfield is a real scholar on suicide and the study of suicide in terms of history. I think her work is brilliant and she’s someone who has herself struggled with suicide as a professor at Yale, like she herself struggled with her own psychological health.

And so she has a personal experience and then she brings in this kind of scholarly mind. I love using fiction. You know, for that course, Understanding Suicide Emily X. Pan wrote this incredible young adult fiction about a young girl’s experience, a Taiwanese American girl who, whose mother dies by suicide, and it’s just It’s just incredible to read through another lens.

It’s one thing to read nonfiction that’s very intense, and it’s another thing to read through the eyes of an author who’s taking this painful topic and putting it in a story for young people to explore. So I try it in my writing. Teaching at the Institute to also pull from my best work as a teacher, high school teacher, university teacher, and right now middle school teacher, to bring in literature as a doorway for people to explore.

So anthologies are important to me nonfiction, fiction. And, and then having that conversation where we take the best scholarship. So I try to pull from some of the more cutting edge researchers and professors who are studying, let’s say, I teach a class on regret. And so what does it mean to regret and how can regret be a catalyst for growth, right?

How can we hold space for the parts of our lives that we wish we could have changed? 

Diane Hullet: Mm. What a topic. 

Amy Wright Glenn: So, it, it, it may sound so heavy, but the Institute also has courses that are playful and thoughtful and, you know courses where we gather to celebrate and express gratitude. Right? We have holiday raffles and, you know, we do joyful things too.

And every year there’s an Institute study trip where we go to a different country. and explore how birth, breath, and death are present there. So we went to Ireland one year, and we had people in Northern Ireland come, you know, midwives from Northern Ireland, or people involved in Irish Wake and crafting the history around Irish expressions of grief.

that are unique to the Celtic culture, right? And so, the Keening, for instance, you know, the loud crying. And, and just so interesting to read about one thing. But then to go. We had 20 something people go on this trip, and we traveled all through Northern Ireland. Every year, we pick a different place. Our first trip was Guatemala, then Ireland, then we went to Mexico.

This year, we’re going to Puerto Rico. So, so the goal would be to, Help people not only personally grow, but professionally grow in a very experiential way. 

Diane Hullet: Well, I just applaud, you know, Amy, your work. And one of the things I think you’re so skillful at and so has been really at the heart of your Institute is lifting up other voices.

So really it’s not you teaching everything you’re creating space where experts and and beginners even can teach a course through the Institute and really be in community. I think that’s a big word I associate with all your work. So you can find out more about all of the courses that Amy teaches and others.

Excellent, excellent institute leaders teach at, I should have written your website down and that would be right in front of me. Say your website. Okay. Birth, 

Amy Wright Glenn: breath and death. com. And I appreciate you and your podcast. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me and Share your wisdom, your stories. Thank you.

Diane Hullet: Thank you, Amy. You’ve been listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast. I’m your host Diane Holt, and thanks so much for listening.