Journaling After Termination for Medical Reasons

2026-10-24 · Yesterself

There is a kind of loss that arrives with paperwork attached. A scan, a name for something you had never heard of, a room where someone explains prognosis in careful sentences, and then a choice that was yours to make and that you would have given anything not to have.

Termination for medical reasons sits in an awkward place. It is a bereavement. It is also a decision. Ordinary grief writing does not quite fit, because most of it assumes the loss simply happened to you. And decision journals do not fit either, because they assume you are reviewing a business call, not a child.

This is about the seam between the two: how to keep a record when the thing you are grieving is also the thing you chose.

Write the reasons down while they are still clear

In the first weeks, you can still recite it. The gestational age. The measurement that was wrong. What the specialist said the likely course would be, and what she said about pain. The second opinion. The dates you were given and the deadline they created. What your partner said in the car.

That clarity does not last. Not because you are careless, but because memory is not a recording. It is rebuilt each time from whatever material is currently available, and grief supplies a great deal of material. Six months from now, at two in the morning, a version of the story will arrive that is missing the parts that made the decision reasonable. It will keep the guilt and lose the prognosis.

A written record is the correction. Not a defense. A witness.

Write it plainly, close to the event, in the order it happened:

• The medical facts as they were given to you. What was found, at what point, by whom. Use the actual words if you have them. If you were given a printout, copy the language from it.
• What you were told about outcomes. Both the likely and the possible. What was said about survival, about suffering, about what treatment would involve.
• The options you were actually offered. Including the ones you did not take, and why they were not viable for you.
• The constraints. Time limits, travel, money, other children, the state of your own health. These are the details that vanish first and matter most later.
• Who you consulted, and what each of them said.
• What you were weighing. The sentence you kept coming back to. The thing you could not bear.

Date it. Do not smooth it. If you were unsure at the time, write that you were unsure; a record that pretends to a certainty you did not have will not hold up on the night you need it.

Hold love and choice on the same page

There is a pressure, often unspoken, to pick one register. Either you are a grieving parent, in which case the decision is not mentioned, or you are someone who made a hard call, in which case the grief is supposed to be proportionate and brief.

You do not have to choose, and your own journal is the one place where you certainly do not.

Some people find it easier to write both explicitly, side by side, rather than letting them argue. One page: what I decided and why I would decide it again. Facing page: who they were to me. The name, if there is a name. What the room looked like. What you would have wanted for them.

Others write letters. To the baby. To the doctor who was kind. To the doctor who was not. To yourself at the appointment, who did not yet know. These do not need to be sent or kept forever to have done their work.

If a sentence feels contradictory, write it anyway. "I am sure and I am destroyed" is not a contradiction; it is an accurate description of most Thursdays after this.

Guilt tends to want a job. Give it a page rather than the whole house. Write down the specific accusation it is making, in its own words, and then write what you actually knew at the time. Do this on the page, not in your head, because in your head it will simply repeat.

Keeping a private record when you cannot tell people

Many people who go through this tell almost no one. Sometimes it is family, sometimes it is where you live, sometimes it is a workplace or a community where the account would be relitigated rather than heard. This is a real constraint, not a failure of courage, and it changes what a journal has to be.

Practical things worth settling early:

1. Decide where it lives before you write much. A notebook someone else may open is a different object from one that is genuinely yours.
2. Avoid shared accounts and shared devices. Family plans, backed-up photo libraries, and a tablet the kids use are the usual leaks.
3. Prefer something encrypted, and understand what the encryption covers. If a service can show you your entries after a password reset, it can read them. If you want the mechanics, end-to-end encryption is worth understanding once rather than assumed.
4. Make sure you can get it out. A record you cannot export is a record held by someone else.
5. Decide, in writing, who could ever read this. Anyone? One person? No one, and it should be deleted? Ambiguity here becomes a burden for whoever finds it.

Yesterself was built for the version of this where nobody else is meant to see it: entries are end-to-end encrypted, there is no account, no email, and no password — your identity is twelve words you hold, and the server stores only ciphertext it cannot read. Nothing is used to train anything, and export is free forever, including on the free tier. The loop it runs is simple: each morning it brings back one letter from your own past writing, and your reply that evening becomes tomorrow's mail. If that is useful, the waiting list is the only door there is right now.

That returning is worth thinking about carefully here. Being handed your own words from a month ago can be steadying — the reasons, in your handwriting, at the moment you need them — and it can also arrive on a day you did not want it. If that is a risk for you, keep this particular record somewhere that stays put until you go looking for it.

What this does not do

Writing does not settle anything. You will not reach a final version of the story where it stops hurting because the file is well organized. What a record does is narrower and still worth having: it keeps the facts from drifting, it gives grief and certainty a place to sit together, and it means that on the worst night the argument is not only between you and your memory.

Some people find that the anticipatory part started earlier, in the weeks of testing before anything was decided; if that is you, writing during the waiting is its own thing.

This is not medical or clinical advice, and journaling does not treat or resolve grief. Loss after a medical termination is a heavy thing to carry, particularly in private, and a doctor, counselor, or a specialist bereavement service is the right place for support. If you are in crisis, please contact local emergency services or a crisis line in your country.

Common questions

Why write the reasons down at all?

Because memory edits itself under grief, and a bad night can rewrite a decision you made carefully. A record made close to the event is the fairest witness you will have.

What should I write first?

The medical facts as you understood them, who told you, what the options were, and what you were weighing. Feelings can come later; the facts fade faster.

Is it wrong to write that I still think it was right?

No. Certainty about the decision and grief about the loss are not in competition. Most people carry both, and writing them on the same page is honest, not cold.

How do I keep this private when I cannot tell most people?

Keep it in something only you can open, avoid shared devices and shared accounts, and decide in advance who, if anyone, could ever read it.

Is journaling a substitute for care?

No. It is a way of keeping your own record. Grief after a medical termination often needs real support, and a clinician or counselor is the right place for that.