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Part II extends the argument into territory that Part I opened but did not fully enter: the neurobiology of the maternal brain after loss, the phenomenon of “white tears,” the false pregnancy as psychosomatic prophecy, the continuing bonds model of grief, and the figure of Rachel weeping as the theological anchor for a body that will not stop mourning what it was designed to nourish.

What Pregnancy Builds Before Birth Destroys

Part I established the biological fact of fetal microchimerism: that cells from the developing fetus migrate across the placenta and embed themselves in the mother’s body, persisting for decades. But the research has gone further than most readers realize.

In 2012, a team led by autoimmunity researcher J. Lee Nelson at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center examined autopsied brains of 59 women who had died between the ages of 32 and 101. By testing for a gene specific to the Y chromosome, they found evidence of male DNA in the brains of 63% of the women. The male DNA was scattered across multiple brain regions. The oldest woman in the study who harbored her son’s cells was 94 years old. Her son’s DNA had been living in her brain for the better part of a century.

What startled Nelson’s team was the correlation with Alzheimer’s disease. Of the 59 women, 33 had Alzheimer’s. But women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from the disease. The fetal cells appeared to have a neuroprotective function. Nelson described it as evolution’s “original organ transplant.”

Diana Bianchi, now the director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was among the first to observe this phenomenon directly. Looking through a microscope at a piece of human thyroid from a woman who was chromosomally XX, she saw dozens of Y chromosomes. “Clearly,” Bianchi said, “part of her thyroid was entirely male.” The woman’s thyroid had been “entirely remodeled by her son’s cells.”

A 2024 review published in BioMedical Grid confirmed that fetal cells in the maternal brain can “undergo molecular and morphological maturation affecting brain neurogenesis, neuroplasticity and cerebral immunosurveillance.” In animal models, fetal cells have been shown to cluster at sites of brain injury, differentiate into neurons, oligodendrocytes, and astrocytes, and functionally integrate into maternal neural circuits.

Let this settle. The child does not merely pass through the mother. The child becomes part of her brain. The child’s cells differentiate into her neurons. They participate in her cognition.

Now consider what this means for loss.

Maternal microchimeric cell trafficking and its biological consequences depend on inflammation at the feto-maternal interface, revealing a fragile spatio-temporal “corridor” in which maternal immune cells can either sculpt fetal development or, when shifted by infection and premature inflammation, seed lifelong pathologies in the neonate.

When a pregnancy ends in miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, the microchimeric transfer has already occurred. Fetal cells cross the placenta as early as four to five weeks into gestation and settle into “just about every sliver of our anatomy where scientists have checked: the heart, the lungs, the breast, the colon, the kidney, the liver, the brain.” As Bianchi’s own research confirmed, a live birth is not required for a woman to become a chimera. The cells persist “up to 27 years postpartum,” and likely far longer.

The woman who loses a pregnancy does not “return to normal.” She cannot. She is, at the cellular level, a composite. Her body contains the genetic material of a person who no longer exists outside of her. The ghost is not metaphorical. It is histological.

Milk Without a Mouth

If the brain is one site of the body’s refusal to forget, the breast is another.

After delivery, the dramatic fall in progesterone removes the hormonal blockade on prolactin, and milk production begins. This process is not contingent on the infant being alive. Prolactin levels rise during pregnancy and remain elevated for up to six weeks postpartum, regardless of whether the baby survives. The signal to produce milk is not “baby is here.” It is “pregnancy has ended.”

This means that women who experience late miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal death will, in most cases, find that their breasts engorge and produce milk. The milk produced after infant loss has been called “white tears”: a term coined to capture the physiological phenomenon of a body weeping through the breast.

A 2023 study in Sociology of Health and Illness analyzed the experiences of 17 bereaved Australian mothers and 114 health professionals. The findings were devastating in their precision. All of the mothers found post-loss lactation emotionally painful. But many also found “redemptive meaning in their milk-production, as a bond with the lost child, as confirmation of their maternal competence and as a life-giving substance that they could donate to other needy infants.”

One mother described the convergence of milk and tears: both body fluids overflowing simultaneously as expressions of loss, both beyond her control, “their insistency driven by the perpetual absence of the much-wanted child.” Another described engorgement as so physically painful that “the experience of physical and emotional pain was fused into a single point converged on the breasts.” A third called it a “punitive betrayal by her body, whose obtuse lactation is wildly out of keeping with the grim reality of foetal or neonatal death.”

The study found that hospital cultures overwhelmingly regard post-loss lactation as “valueless and best dealt with through medical suppression.” Doctors prescribe cabergoline to suppress prolactin. The milk is treated as a problem to be solved, not a bond to be honored. Five of the seventeen mothers in the study were either not alerted to the possibility that their milk would come in or were told it was unlikely to occur. They were sent home, alone, and their breasts filled anyway.

A 2026 secondary analysis published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology examined the impact of lactation after loss on reproductive grief, marking the first randomized trial data to address this intersection. The research is still emerging. But the direction is clear: the body’s lactation response after loss is not a malfunction. It is the mammary system completing a program that was initiated by pregnancy, independent of the outcome of that pregnancy.

The Let-down reflex can be triggered by thoughts of the baby. Not the baby’s cry. Not the baby’s mouth. The thought. The memory. The absence shaped like a presence.

This is what Part I called “the body’s loyalty that the mind often tries to override.” White tears are the endocrine system’s continuing bond with the dead.

Pseudocyesis

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If white tears represent the body mourning a child who existed and was lost, pseudocyesis represents something even more uncanny: the body creating the symptoms of a child who was never conceived.

Pseudocyesis: What Is It, Diagnosis, and More

Pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy, is a psychosomatic condition in which a non-pregnant woman develops the full clinical presentation of pregnancy: amenorrhea, abdominal distension, breast changes, nausea, the sensation of fetal movement, and even labor contractions. The body acts as if it is pregnant. Hormonal changes occur. Prolactin levels rise, producing galactorrhea. The sympathetic nervous system elevates, creating the sensation of a kicking child.

The condition is rare in the developed world but reported with striking frequency in societies with intense pronatalist pressure. A 2014 review in Medical Hypotheses noted that pseudocyesis “occurs primarily in developing countries, and especially where there is strong familial and cultural pressure on women to be fertile.” The infertility is attributed to the woman, producing “substantial distress and discrimination.” A 2011 review in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology confirmed that most women with pseudocyesis suffer from depression, anxiety, or emotional stress, and that the condition “always occurs in the context of a simultaneous wish and fear of pregnancy.”

The psychodynamic interpretation is precise: the intense desire for a child, or the intense fear of not producing one, creates a feedback loop in which the central nervous system begins to generate the somatic markers of pregnancy. Anticipation and fear raise prolactin levels. Elevated prolactin produces amenorrhea and galactorrhea. The woman interprets these signals as confirmation. The belief strengthens. The body follows the belief deeper.

Pseudocyesis is, in this reading, the body’s attempt to prophesy a child into existence. It is the somatic equivalent of Lebovici’s “imaginary child”: a figure so powerfully constructed in the psyche that the body begins to prepare a room for it. The womb distends. The breasts swell. The hormones reorganize. Everything is ready.

But no one arrives.

When the woman learns that the pregnancy is false, she often reacts with severe depression. In some documented cases, the revelation triggers psychosis. The grief is real because the body’s preparation was real. The hormonal architecture of motherhood was activated. The woman was, endocrinologically, a mother. She simply had no child.

If we are willing to take the body seriously, pseudocyesis is not a psychiatric curiosity. It is proof that the maternal drive is so powerful that it can reorganize the entire endocrine system around an absent object. It is the most dramatic evidence we have that the body does not distinguish between a desired child and a real one. The longing is enough to change the chemistry.

Continuing Bonds

For most of the twentieth century, bereavement psychology operated on a “detachment model.” The grieving person was expected to “work through” their grief, sever the emotional bond with the deceased, and eventually “move on.” Successful grieving meant letting go. Failure to let go was pathologized as “complicated grief” or “prolonged grief disorder.”

The continuing bonds model, developed by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman in 1996, overturned this framework. They argued that “relationships with deceased individuals continue beyond death, becoming integrated into the ongoing lives and identities of the bereaved.” The bond does not end. It transforms. The deceased becomes an internal presence: maintained through memories, rituals, imagined dialogues, dreams, and sensory experiences.

This is not pathology. It is an adaptation. The continuing bonds model proposes that “rather than framing these bonds as attachments that must eventually be relinquished, the theory recognizes them as evolving extensions of pre-existing relationships.” The bereaved mother who talks to her dead child, who marks birthdays, who senses the child’s presence in certain rooms, is not failing to grieve. She is integrating the loss into her ongoing life.

For mothers who have lost children, the research is specific. A 2022 study of bereaved mothers who lost a child to cancer identified three themes: regret, longing, and connectedness. The mothers experienced “intense longing for the child” and reported “keeping the child growing in my heart.” One theme was especially haunting: the mothers described the child continuing to develop inside the mother’s internal world. The ghost grows.

Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief

Pauline Boss, the family therapist who pioneered the theory of ambiguous loss, offers the frame for why pregnancy loss and abortion produce a grief that does not resolve in the way other losses do. “Ambiguous loss,” Boss writes, “is the most stressful kind of loss because there is no clear verification of death.” There is no funeral. There is no body to bury (or, in the case of early miscarriage, the body is too small to be recognized). The loss is real, but the cultural apparatus of mourning does not activate. The woman is expected to “move on” because there is, officially, nothing to move on from.

Boss identifies the symptoms of ambiguous loss with clinical precision: depression, anxiety, hopelessness, helplessness, confused identity (”Who am I now?”), increased ambivalence, anxious attachment, and “frozen grief: sadness versus depression.” She explicitly includes miscarriage and stillbirth in her taxonomy of ambiguous loss.

The body, as we have seen, does not experience ambiguity. The body knows what happened. The microchimeric cells are present. The prolactin is elevated. The breast is engorged. It is only the social world that insists the loss is ambiguous, that it does not “count” in the same way as the death of a born child.

The continuing bonds model, when applied to pregnancy loss, reveals something that Part I gestured toward: the ghost baby is not a metaphor. It is a relational reality. The mother’s internal working model of attachment was activated during pregnancy. The bond was formed. The neural circuitry of maternal love was primed. When the child dies or is lost, the bond does not dissolve. It continues, without an object, searching for a signal that has been cut off.

An Inconsolable Mother

A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. -- Jeremiah 31:15

Rachel is the Bible’s archetypal bereaved mother, and the structure of her grief is theologically precise.

Rachel died in childbirth. She died giving birth to her second son, Benjamin, on the road to Bethlehem. Her tomb became a national monument. And one thousand years later, the prophet Jeremiah invoked her voice to describe the grief of the Babylonian exile: the children of Israel, taken into captivity or slaughtered, mourned by a mother who had been dead for a millennium but whose weeping, in the prophetic imagination, had never stopped.

Matthew quotes Jeremiah’s words a second time in Matthew 2:18, applying them to the slaughter of the innocents by Herod: the massacre of the young boys of Bethlehem after the birth of Christ.

The theological structure is worth naming. Rachel is:

• A mother who died in the act of giving life. Her death is not separable from her fertility. The cost of the child was on the mother.

• A mother whose grief outlasts her own death. One thousand years later, she is still weeping. Her mourning is not resolved by time, or by theology, or by the promise of future restoration. Jeremiah does not offer her comfort. He reports that she “refuses to be comforted.”

• A mother whose grief represents the grief of all mothers. Rachel becomes, in biblical scholarship, a symbol of all the mothers of Israel: north and south, past and future. Her weeping is corporate. It is the sound of every woman whose child has been taken.

This is not a sentimental image. It is a structural claim about the nature of maternal loss. The Bible does not present maternal grief as a stage to be processed or a wound to be healed within a predictable timeline. It presents it as a voice that persists across centuries, that refuses the consolation offered to it, that is heard from beyond the grave.

The early Church Fathers took grief seriously as a theological problem. Gregory of Nyssa recognized “the embodied character of our emotional lives” and the “powerful role that the emotion of grief plays,” demanding pastoral sensitivity from the preacher-theologian. Christ himself wept at the death of Lazarus, and John Chrysostom advised that his tears set “a measure and a degree” for Christian mourning. The tradition does not demand stoicism. It demands that grief be held within a frame that acknowledges both the reality of the loss and the reality of the resurrection. But it never pretends that the loss did not happen.

Mater Dolorosa (the “Sorrowful Mother”)

The patristic tradition also carried a tension between physical motherhood and spiritual motherhood. Some stereotypes are “extremely powerful and long-lasting,” notes a 2023 scholarly volume on mothers in the time of the Church Fathers: “that of the mater dolorosa and that of the mother eager and happy for the death of her martyred child.” The Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowful mother, stands at the foot of the cross. Her grief is sanctified, not eliminated. The church does not tell her to stop crying. It tells her that her tears participate in the world's redemption.

For the woman who has lost a pregnancy, whether through miscarriage, medical complication, or her own decision, the Rachel archetype offers something that neither clinical psychology nor reproductive politics currently provides: permission to grieve without resolution.

The body already knows this. The microchimeric cells will remain in her brain for decades. The prolactin will surge when she thinks of the child. The breasts may fill. The ghost will mark its own milestones in the calendar of her imagination.

Continuing bonds theory tells us this is not pathological. The body tells us this is not optional. And Rachel, weeping for a thousand years, tells us this is not new.

Maternal Body After Loss

Part I ended with an invitation: “It’s time we stopped living with ghosts and started inviting the living back into the room.”

Part II ends with a revision: the ghosts are already in the room. They are in the neurons. They are in the thyroid. They are in the breast milk that arrives for a mouth that will never open. The question is not whether the body will remember. The body has no capacity to forget. The question is whether the culture, the church, and the woman herself will consent to remember alongside it.

The medical establishment currently treats post-loss lactation as a side effect to be suppressed. The psychological establishment is only now developing frameworks for pregnancy grief that do not pathologize the ongoing bond. The church, in many traditions, has no liturgy for miscarriage, no funeral rite for a child lost at eight weeks, no naming ceremony for the one who was never born.

But the body has its own liturgy. The milk comes in. The cells persist. The hormones reorganize around an absence that the endocrine system does not recognize as empty.

Witch’s Milk, the phenomenon with which Part I opened, is the infant’s body responding to a maternal signal after the cord has been severed. White tears are the mother’s body responding to a fetal signal after the child has died. In both cases, the body acts on a memory of connection that the conscious mind has been told to release.

Perhaps the most honest thing we can say about maternal grief is what Rachel says: I refuse to be comforted, because they are no more.

Not because comfort is unavailable. But because the body knows that the bond was real, that the cells are still there, that the milk had somewhere to go, and that the only adequate response to a love that has been molecularly inscribed in your tissue is to let the mourning be as persistent as the biology.

The ghost is not a haunting. It is a habitation. And the body, with its strange milks and borrowed neurons and inconvenient grief, is the only temple honest enough to hold it.

Jordan Sadie Harrell is an independent researcher, AI governance consultant, and writer based in Brooklyn. She writes Spiritual Intellect.

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Works Referenced in This Essay:

• Bianchi, D.W. et al. “Male fetal progenitor cells persist in maternal blood for as long as 27 years postpartum.” PNAS (1996).

• Nelson, J.L. et al. “Male microchimerism in the human female brain.” PLoS ONE (2012).

• Bianchi, D.W. “Forever Connected.” Clinical Chemistry (2021).

• Chan, W.F.N. et al. “Fetal microchimerism and the human female brain.” BioMedical Grid (2024).

• Bastianello, T. et al. “Feto-maternal microchimerism: Memories from pregnancy.” PMC (2022).

• Henkel, A. et al. “The impact of lactation after loss on reproductive grief.” AJOG MFM (2026).

• Mahon, P. et al. “The meanings of breast milk after loss of an infant.” Sociology of Health and Illness (2023).

• Boss, P. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press (1999).

• Klass, D., Silverman, P.R., Nickman, S. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis (1996).

• Bianchi, A. “Biopsychosocial view to pseudocyesis: A narrative review.” PMC (2011).

• Mboya, E. “Pseudocyesis, delusional pregnancy, and psychosis.” World Journal of Clinical Cases (2014).

• Gregory of Nyssa, De infantibus praemature abreptis.

• John Chrysostom, Homilies on Lazarus.

• Pedrucci, G. (ed.) Mothers in the Time of the Church Fathers (2023).

A peculiar battle is waged on the sofa.

One partner, statistically though not exclusively the female, leans in with focused, almost surgical intensity, scanning the other’s skin for imperfections. She hunts for a blackhead, a stray eyebrow hair, or an ingrown hair.

The partner recoils, swatting her hand away. “Stop picking at me,” he protests.

She persists, driven by a compulsion she cannot name but feels deeply.

Girlfriends aren’t just annoying. If we peel back the layers of civilization and look directly at the mammalian brain, we see something else entirely; it is an ancient language of intimacy.

To understand the impulse of the “picker,” we must begin far from the living room, in the canopy. Among social primates, the act of allogrooming, or social grooming between members of the same species, is the fundamental currency of social life. It is not reducible to hygiene. If grooming were solely about removing ticks and dirt, primates would spend only minutes a day doing it. Instead, species such as the gelada baboon spend up to seventeen percent of their waking hours methodically picking through each other’s fur. This time investment is far too large to be explained by cleanliness alone.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, a foundational figure in evolutionary psychology, argues that grooming functions as the glue of primate society. It is the primary mechanism through which alliances are formed, trust is reinforced, and hierarchies are stabilized. When one ape grooms another, the repetitive, rhythmic touch triggers a substantial release of endorphins in both the groomer and the one being groomed. Heart rate decreases. Cortisol levels drop. The nervous system shifts toward safety and social bonding. At a biological level, grooming operates as a contract that communicates vulnerability and investment. One body is offered, another attends to it, and a social bond is materially reinforced.

This logic did not disappear when humans developed language, religion, or ritual. Instead, it was formalized. Across cultures, acts that involve tending to another person’s body have been treated as sacred gestures. The biblical washing of feet or the anointing of heads with oil are not arbitrary symbols. They are ritualized descendants of grooming behaviors, structured acts of service in which physical touch signifies loyalty, care, and shared belonging. Historically, to tend to another person’s body has meant more than comfort. It has meant recognition. It has meant, “You are mine, and I am responsible for you.”

The difficulty arises because modern life has radically altered the conditions under which these instincts evolved.

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Romeo and Juliet.

Candelit procession and the Virgin Mary.

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The thesis of the kiss is not romance; it is revelation. Whether we speak of the Roman transfer of pneuma (breath or spirit) or the modern exchange of microbiota, the act remains a critical boundary-crossing event. When a modern lover recoils from a first kiss, citing “the ick” or a lack of chemistry, they are not reacting to a lack of skill. They are reacting to an ancient, biological truth. They have received a failed lab report.

The Roman Triad: Taxonomy of the Mouth

To understand the gravity of the kiss, we must look to those who categorized it with legalistic precision: the Romans. They did not view all kisses as equal. Roman culture, obsessed with hierarchy and social order, distinguished between three specific types of kisses:

1. the osculum

2. the basium,

3. and the savium.

The osculum was the kiss of friendship, kinship, and social contract. Typically given on the cheek or hand, it was a public demonstration of a bond. It was the glue of the res publica, verifying status and alliance. Closed mouths, very brief contact, no hand involvement, for greetings, farewells, reconciliations. The osculum was distinct from the basium, the kiss of affection and erotic love, immortalized by the poet Catullus.

The Kiss by Francesco Hayez (1859)

Lips touch but remain soft. No tongue. Hands often on face, waist, or shoulders. Eyes often closed. Used between lovers, spouses, romantic partners.

Catullus demands of Lesbia: “Da mihi basia mille, deinde centum” (Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred). Here, the kiss becomes a currency of passion, a frantic attempt to defy the brevity of life. “He kissed me without speaking, and I clung to him.” — Jane Eyre.

However, the most profound category was the savium, the deep, soul-consuming kiss. Derived from the word for “sweet,” the savium was erotic, yes, but it was also invasive. Open mouths, tongue involvement, deep breath exchange, gripping hands, pulling bodies close, head tilt and prolonged contact, often a precursor to sex.

It was the kiss of the mouth and the tongue, the mixing of breath. In the ancient world, breath was not merely air; it was spiritus or pneuma. To breathe into another’s mouth was to mingle souls. The savium was a moment of ontological vulnerability where the boundaries of the self were dissolved. To engage in the savium was to risk a spiritual merger.

This belief that the kiss facilitated a literal transfer of the soul gave the act a weight that modern casual dating lacks. If you were mixing souls, you could not kiss indiscriminately. The act changed you.

From Here to Eternity, 1953

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Many men romanticize the “down-to-earth” woman because she minimizes friction in their lives. This figure overlaps with the Cool Girl archetype, a performance that rewards women for suppressing needs, standards, and interiority. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this fantasy reflects homosocial desire displaced onto a woman’s body: men seek male-coded relational ease with heterosexual sexual access. The cultural reward system trains women to erase themselves, while refusing this role becomes a symbolic refusal of objecthood and a reassertion of female subjectivity.

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