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Music

Said The Whale Share the Somber Realities of a "Miscarriage"

“It’s a lonely kind of loss."

Photo by Taby Cheng Miscarriage is a difficult topic to broach; sometimes brought up in whispered conversations and with trepidation. The experience is traumatic for families. Vancouver trio Said The Whale—Ben Worcester (guitar, vocals), Tyler Bancroft (guitar, vocals), and Jaycelyn Brown (keyboards)— discuss the difficult subject in their latest song "Miscarriage." The track starts with a hesitant keyboard, eventually building into an explosive synth-backed outpouring. The song is from Said the Whale's forthcoming album As Long As Your Eyes Are Wide, out on March 31 via Hidden Pony Records. Bancroft wrote the song while he and his partner went through a miscarriage in 2015. "When you put on a brave face for my family, and we had Thanksgiving," Bancroft's devastating lyrics reflects.

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Bancroft wrote about the experience and the song for Noisey: "Miscarriage is a unique kind of loss in that you're mourning what could have been. It's a lonely kind of loss, because miscarriage is rarely discussed. And it's a loss of control—realizing that the future may not turn out the way you had imagined it. For me this was especially disarming since I didn't realize how much I wanted a child until I was faced with the possibility of never having one. Miscarriage strips the joy from pregnancy and turns it into a source of grief and anxiety.

But whatever sadness and anger I was feeling was only a fraction of what my partner was experiencing. The shame associated with her body not doing what it's 'biologically designed to do,' the loss of control, and the uncertainty about reproductive health-—these things are all devastating. Watching the person you love go through that is heartbreaking, and it took everything I had to comfort her along with trying to comfort myself. I wrote this song in the throes of our experience. It was cathartic and therapeutic, and a lot of tears were shed.

I won't say I'm glad we went through what we did, but I will say that our experience has provided me with a perspective and an empathy that I may not have otherwise had. Our experience also makes me feel like the luckiest person on earth because our story has a happy ending—our third pregnancy was carried to term and our son was born in the summer of 2016."

Listen to "Miscarriage" below:

Devin Pacholik is a writer in Saskatchewan. He is on Twitter.