Next time you want to grieve, make sure you run it by Jason Whitlock



Chrissy Teigan shared a few moments of grief on her Instagram. She recently suffered the loss of her unborn son, who she and her husband, singer John Legend, had been calling Jack.

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We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before. We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It just wasn’t enough. . . We never decide on our babies’ names until the last possible moment after they’re born, just before we leave the hospital. But we, for some reason, had started to call this little guy in my belly Jack. So he will always be Jack to us. Jack worked so hard to be a part of our little family, and he will be, forever. . . To our Jack - I’m so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn’t give you the home you needed to survive. We will always love you. . . Thank you to everyone who has been sending us positive energy, thoughts and prayers. We feel all of your love and truly appreciate you. . . We are so grateful for the life we have, for our wonderful babies Luna and Miles, for all the amazing things we’ve been able to experience. But everyday can’t be full of sunshine. On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out. But we will hug and love each other harder and get through it.

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She chose to share that loss on her Instagram. Her post opened up a flood of responses; words of kindness, words of condolences, words of empathy. Natural feelings human beings express when they see or feel others in sorrow.

Unfortunately, her post also opened her up to criticism.

Jason Whitlock, former football player, and current commentator took to Twitter to make commentary on Chrissy’s expression of grief, tweeting the following: Jason’s words reverberated across social media, not reflecting the natural kindness, compassion, and empathy that human beings express in sorrowful moments like this. His words only offer a barb of critique, in essence, examining Chrissy’s very raw expression of grief and writing it of as performative. Imagine telling a grieving mother, experiencing one of the worst losses of her life, “I don’t like the way you grieve.” How hypocritical is it to criticize a woman’s grief she chooses to express on social media by heading to social media? How cruel. How cold. How calloused.

He tweets “Help me understand.”, but then processed to argue across his platforms, even with people who have lived the nightmare where Chrissy and John currently find themselves. He doesn’t want to understand. He wants to argue, and that can be seen in his combative and flippant reactions to the responses he receives: His criticism lies solely on the “content”, or what normal people call photos Chrissy posted. Does Jason Whitlock not realize that photos from these very painful moments are actually extremely popular as some of the only tangible pieces of these memories families will have?

Just this year, The Atlantic published an entire piece on Stillbirth Photography. The author of the piece, Sarah Zhang, writes;
“For parents, these photographs document one of the worst days of their life. But they also represent the few cherished memories they will ever have of their child. Hospitals used to whisk stillborn babies away from their parents, but they now recognize the importance of memories in grieving.”

Zhang chronicles the heartbreaking work of Todd Hochberg, who has “photographed 500 to 600 families, including those whose infant died shortly after birth as well as those who lost an older child. He presents each family with an album with dozens of photos, sometimes as many as 130.”

1 in 4 women will experience a miscarriage, when an embryo or fetus dies before the 20th week of pregnancy, in her life. Stillbirth, however, is delivery, after the 20th week of pregnancy, of a baby who has died. 1 in 100 pregnancies ends in stillbirth.

With as common as these losses are, very few people ever talk about them. It is almost a silent shame for women who have experienced them carry, with no community. Many of these people actually take to social media to find a community where they cannot in their own reach, and there they find similar stories and experiences. Communities such as the Silent Women’s Club, with its bi-weekly podcast, led by author Kim Paris Upshaw, create active communities around this topic that so many others stray away from. Her work centers around mothers who have lost children, whether through infertility, during pregnancy, in infancy, childhood, or adulthood. Upshaw offers her site and podcast as a “judgement free zone” something those who have experienced such loss rarely receive. It is a place where she and her community highlight their own stories, connect with one another, and share local programs to help families to cope with loss. Upshaw says,
“Here, we offer empathy, prayer, and love to our sister, out of our shared experience of loss so that other Mums will know they are not alone and their story is not odd or anything to be embarrassed about. SWC is a judgment-free community. No matter how you lost your child, SWC welcomes you.

We do not condemn you. We do not judge you. We exist in order to lovingly walk along with you on this journey of the rest of your life.

We invite you to come in, read our stories, browse our archives, and share them with other mothers who need to know that women of every generation, culture, and faith have lost children and after shared their stores to comfort us.”
Invitations like this are rare. In a world that should embrace those who grieve, encouraging them, when they are ready, to share their story, people like Jason Whitlock would scare them into doing otherwise.

Many have raised their voices in active criticism of Whitlock’s cold and heartless reaction to Chrissy and John’s expression of grief:



Imagine if Chrissy had listened to the likes of Jason Whitlock, taking her pain and suppressing it, or deleting her post from her own Instagram. How many other stories of loss would not have been shared? How many other conversations around grief would not have started. After she shared her post, one after another, more and more stories of infant and child loss emerged, one after another, people listened to one another, connected with one another, embraced one another in a shared empathy.

Chrissy, by sharing her own story of loss and grief, opened the door to dialogue for others to share their own stories. Women who have been forced into carrying grief in silence were given a voice through her act and community through their shared grief. May those voices continue to be louder than those of the Jason Whitlocks of the world.

 

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