Further Reflections on My Lost Child

No post has come close to the wide spread nature of my one about the experience of losing a child early in our pregnancy. It should be no surprise considering how sadly common an experience it is for so many people. The club you never want to be in has a lot more members than the rest of the world realizes. I still wonder at those who have gone through it two, three, even four or more times. That is strength that the rest of the world does not know, that is suffering that the rest of the world does not know.

I thought I would share, it now being 17 months later some of what I've experienced since that post. As you can imagine the raw grief is gone. I'm not crying every day still, but I have had some really painful moments. Like any grief, it just takes reminders. Here are some moments that have been particularly hard for me:

• When people ask me do I have any kids. They mean well, they are just making conversation, but it hurts something terrible. What is more is every time I hear that question I have to think about how to answer it. If it is with someone I anticipate seeing and talking with in the future I will tell them how we lost our child in pregnancy. Which is admittedly awkward for people (I mean what do you say besides maybe 'I'm so sorry'?) but I don't care. Part of the grief of losing a baby before he was ever born is he died before the world got to know him, he died in a world where many don't even count him as alive. So I say something because I want people to know him. Now if the conversation is with someone I don't really anticipate talking to again, in which they don't necessarily need that information I simply respond to the question of having kids by saying, "No, none living" and leave it at that.
• When people tell me really stupid well intended thoughts. And no one is worse than this than a lot of conservative Christians who I swear must have invented the "you can always have more" response like that makes it all okay. When someone tells me "There's still time" or "God will bless you with children some day" I kinda wanna stick food in their mouth so they will stop talking. I'm reminded of a blog I once read from a woman who could not understand how her church that was so caught up in teaching that abortion was murder because a baby in the womb is still a child could fail so massively at treating lost pregnancies as actual losses. I had mentioned in my original blog how much whatever blessing a future child will be does not change the blessing my Isaac already was. I mean, who goes to someone who lost a parent, "Don't worry, God might give you a new mommy" or to someone who lost a spouse "There is still time to find someone else"? There is a reason the ending of Job unsettles a lot of people. The idea that all I'm grieving is not having a child is incredibly ignorant to the grief I'm suffering over this child. The other reason that looking ahead to future children is not a good response is it assumes that we are going to try again. Losing a baby during pregnancy was traumatic for us, I know other people who going through it have stopped trying. I know other people who tried again and lost another child. Some go through IVF and cannot afford to go through it again. All that is to say, we can't always have another, or we won't always have another, and even if we did it should not be seen as replacing what we lost.
• When Christmas came. Not only did we receive the news of the loss of Isaac shortly after Christmas, but it was heartbreaking to realize this last year that it would have been our first Christmas with him. Both in the family gatherings with little kids running around because our generation is all procreating and in the quiet of our own home and my hiding of the German pickle ornament even though there is still no one to find it, Christmas had shoots of sadness in it. It was perhaps the most prominent time of feeling the "What if". It also became a time to realize again how lonely that grief is, because if it is hard to bring up how you miss someone everyone knew some time after they passed because you don't want to be that person who always mentions your grief it is doubly true with a child lost in pregnancy. I feel like people want me to be "over" losing Isaac. And when the grief is the worst I am left alone with my wife as my only comfort.
• When I see precious moments. Not the stupid knick knacks but the actual real life moments you sometimes witness that happen to be super precious. Several weeks after we lost the baby I recall seeing my nephew - who was about 18 months old at the time - with his grandpa and watching this precious bonding moment they had in a mall child play area. I almost burst into tears. And it was hard because it was hardly their fault, and I love that little guy to death. Usually I am able to hang with kids and love kids without any sense of seeing what I could have had in them but in some moments all I see is what I lost. When I see a kid who is crying cling hard to mom and rest his little head on her shoulders, when those precious picturesque moments pop up, so does my grief. And I hate those the most, because they feel selfish. It feels like I'm only grieving what I missed out on not who I missed it with. I hate those moments most.
• When I remember that month of joy we had. When I remember bonding with Isaac before you could bond, loving him before he could know he was loved, lying beside my wife just to be close to her tummy. When I remember that, I smile and then look off somewhere in the distance as if stuffing the memory at a distance before my eyes do go wet. That little peanut may not have been able to do anything but live but that was enough. I was able to love him for no other reason than that he was mine...which, by the way, puts a profound thought to the words of our catechism regarding the work of Jesus Christ for our redemption - "All this [coming into the flesh and dying] he does that I may be his own..." 

It's also worth noting something else, I'm extremely humbled by the response there was to my first blog on losing a child. The messages of others who lost a child coming forward, the massive sharing, the people who found it helpful in their own experiences of losing a child, sibling, etc. I couldn't have imagined just what an impact that post made for so many, or the impact publishing it here would make for me personally in the conversations and support it led to when I posted it. If there is one thing I hope it is that it will continue to be a resource for people going through similar grief. 

Please also know that not all grief materials are created equal. For example, When You Baby Dies Through Miscarriage or Stillbirth by Louis A Gamino and Ann Taylor Cooney was in no way helpful for me and even angered me enough to throw it down at one point (although some of that anger may be grief more than their writing). Yet Kenneth C. Haugk's Journeying Through Grief series, especially book one A Time to Grieve was very helpful for me. The point is not to say read this one and not that one but that some material just said stuff that didn't help me. If others are going through grief I'd say if you encounter the same don't give up on reading just find something different to read. Some stuff just hits me hard and brings up the pain while others leads towards coping and healing. 

I also would like to share this, which was one of the most healing moments for me since all this happened (and came from an unexpected place). It reminds me why we have preachers and what it is to hear the Gospel truth articulated to specific situations.

It comes from the tv series Father Brown, which are mysteries solved by a brilliant and stubbornly inquisitive priest who also happens to be quite compassionate and pastoral. It happened in one episode in particular which unfortunately I could not find the clip on Youtube so I will have to suffice with posting this summary/vertabim from another blog:

Early in the first season, Father Brown was speaking with a mother who had lost a baby girl years ago to a birth defect. The unresolved grief had destroyed her marriage and now taken her nearly to the point of suicide. At the climax of the story, she cries out to Father Brown to give her a reason not to take the pills in her hand. I love the honesty of his response:

“I don’t know why your daughter died. And I don’t know why God allowed it to happen.”

“Then what do you know?” she cries out in anguish.

“I know that God knows what it is to lose a child,” he says, looking into her eyes. “And that He’s standing next to you…that He loves you. And that He loves your daughter. And if you let Him into your heart, you will see Olivia [her daughter] again.”

I don't know why...but I know that God knows what it is to lose a child. That is profound and powerful. And it takes the cross and places it into the grief. I once wrote very early in the history of my blog after the Sandyhook Elementary shooting (I believe) that God doesn't do nothing in the face of something as terrible as children dying, but what he does is he dies for them. The gospel is the response to a broken world, and we so often forget it when the brokenness has broken us. But preaching is precisely the act of placing that story and all it means into our own shattered lives. It means that whatever reasons led to the loss of Isaac, God still loves him, my wife, and even me (no matter how cursed I feel, and believe me when I say I felt at times cursed). And God didn't do nothing. He didn't do what I wanted him to do, though God hardly acts that way at all. But what he did has far greater reaching effects, and in its wide reach it also reaches into the grief, pain, and turmoil of loss.

What Father Brown hits at is the difference between the hidden God and the revealed God. God is hidden in this world. His will and purpose, just what part he plays is not always easy to comprehend or notice. But God is revealed in Jesus Christ! I may not know why God let Isaac miscarry. But I know that he loves me, and I know that he knows the grief of losing a child, and I know that in losing a child he has done something precisely for me and Isaac. I know that much amidst all that I don't know in regards to what happened. 

And for all the steps along the way, God is there too. Whether it is Christ saying "I am with you always" or Paul writing that the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words, it is also a promise that reveals even in the hard moments of grief that follow God is standing next to you through it all.