Sewing Comfort
Out of Grief

I used my art to heal my grief. I made a mourning quilt to hang on my wall. On it a grieving woman held a small coffin and an angel cradled a tiny baby made of light. It wasn’t enough. I needed a baby to hold.

I made a tiny fabric fetus at the developmental stage mine had been lost. I dyed fabric to look like a placenta and quilted the baby onto it. I dyed more fabric to look like a uterus, and made a bag from it and tied it at the top with a blue thread blotched with red to symbolize the umbilical cord. Inside the bag I placed healing herbs including sage and cedar, which would smell soothing and comforting.

I wore my baby inside my bra, against the place I would have nurtured and nourished it. I named my baby and talked to it and kissed it, putting it safely back inside its bag when I was ready to. I placed special objects inside the bag, things which held meaning for the baby, to honor it. With every passing of the needle the pain of loss bit and began to ease.

Gradually I sewed comfort out of my grief. I now make these grieving bags for women who have lost children through miscarriage, abortion, and sometimes adoption. I make them at whatever stage their baby was lost and I will make one of these for any woman who needs one.

I have held grieving workshops in my home during which these babies were used to represent whatever trauma needed healing–loss of a baby, loss of self during childhood trauma, loss of any kind which could be represented by these tiny beings. I make grieving bags because they help. Grief is easier to heal from with something to hold onto and look at and shed tears over. I believe that all unborn babies, not carried to term, deserve to be mourned and acknowledged, and I believe that mothers of these babies deserve sympathy, support, and a tool to help them grieve. No matter how these beings left the world, they did exist.

We must remember that! It validates our pain. If the work of my clumsy fingers can somehow ease the suffering of loss, then I have done the universe a service. Sewing comfort out of grief is what I’ve been called to do at this moment in my life.

- Allie Alden