Pieces of a Woman

Dear Mark,

The death of a baby is a harrowing force in the situation of grief, and Pieces of a Woman taps into the specificity of this loss. The death of a loved one is often described metaphorically as a physical absence, like the loss of a limb or a shutting down of a chamber of the heart. However, in the case of neonatal fatality, the physicality is real: the breasts leak milk, the tummy remains swollen, and the waddling gait of pregnancy persists...but there is no baby. This film brilliantly and brutally opens up the all too often muted dialogue surrounding this particular kind of grief, offering hope to women and their partners that they can move on alongside this experience, rather than exhaustively suppressing the trauma.