I remember the silence most. The kind that fills a hospital room so heavy it feels like the air has been stolen from your lungs. I was 14 weeks pregnant with twins—two tiny lives I’d already made space for in my home, in my heart, in my future.

When the ultrasound technician went quiet and the screen stopped moving, I knew. I didn’t need to hear the words, but they came anyway: “I’m sorry, there are no heartbeats.”

What followed was a blur of medical terms, paperwork, and condolences. I left that hospital with an empty belly and a full heart—one breaking under the weight of what would never be. Nobody prepares you for the emotional afterlife of a miscarriage, especially one involving twins. Nobody teaches you what to do with the names you’d already picked out, or how to answer when someone cheerfully asks how far along you are.

And if you’re a Black woman, there’s another layer: silence.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month is supposed to bring visibility to this kind of pain, but for many Black women, it just deepens the reminder that our losses rarely register in the national conversation. According to the CDC, Black babies are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday as white babies, and Black mothers are nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes. Yet even when tragedy strikes, the health system’s response to us is too often one of disbelief or dismissal.

It’s not just about mortality—it’s about humanity. When I told my doctor how I was feeling physically and emotionally after the miscarriage, I was met with a sterile “You can try again” and a referral sheet. That was it. No emotional support, no follow-up, no acknowledgment that I’d lost two lives.

For weeks, I felt like I was grieving alone.

Then I read The Guardian’s October 2025 profile of Ebony Bonds, a Chicago-based support network founded by Rachel Burrell and Gina Reeves to help Black parents navigate pregnancy and infant loss. The Guardian described Ebony Bonds as “a lifeline in the silence,” offering therapy, healing circles, and memorial events rooted in community and cultural empathy.

Reading that article felt like exhaling for the first time. Someone had finally put language to what I’d been feeling—that grief for Black parents is too often solitary, when it should be collective. What Ebony Bonds is, echoes what so many of us are yearning for across the country: spaces that see Black grief not as pathology but as testimony. Where our mourning is not a mark of weakness, but evidence of our love and humanity.

In Black families, we’re raised on resilience. We’re told to pray, to push through, to be grateful for what remains. That strength has kept us alive through generations of trauma—but it also keeps us silent. When I miscarried, people meant well. They said things like “God’s got a plan” or “You’ll be a mom again.” But those words made me feel like I had no right to linger in my grief. I didn’t need optimism—I needed space to unravel.

The truth is, strength without softness is survival, not healing. And Black women deserve both.

Social media has quietly become one of the few places where Black women can name their loss. Hashtags like #BlackMamasHeal, #1in4, and #SayTheirNamesToo create digital sanctuaries for mourning. Women post ultrasound photos, light candles, and write love letters to the babies they never got to hold. These posts are radical in their honesty. They challenge centuries of conditioning that told us to hide our pain. They also reveal something deeper: that grief, when shared, can be a form of resistance.

When a Black mother says her baby’s name in public, she’s refusing invisibility. She’s demanding to be seen—not just as strong, but as human.

The Guardian article on Ebony Bonds noted how participants use everything from storytelling to song as therapy. It reminded me that grief has always lived in our culture—in our hymns, our poetry, our art, our mothers’ sighs. We’ve been mourning out loud for centuries; we just haven’t always called it healing.

If there’s anything my miscarriage taught me, it’s that grief needs witnesses. We need medical systems that treat Black mothers’ pain as urgent, and communities that let us sit in our sorrow without rushing us toward recovery.

I’ll never stop wondering who those twins might’ve become. But I also know that by speaking their existence into the world, I’m giving myself—and maybe another mother—the permission to grieve without shame.

Because silence may be what the system expects from us. But storytelling? That’s how we survive.