Four weeks ago was one of the very best days of my life. In the early morning hours my wife zoomed down the stairs to the couch where I had passed out on the night before, with something in her hand. I knew what it was right away and I knew what it meant. After over a year of trying, she was carrying a positive pregnancy test (as well as a "I'm pregnant!" look on her face). We embraced in complete joy. As I held her I looked to heaven and said thank you to my God and Father above for making me a father too. In morning prayer I sang songs and read psalms, culminating in Psalm 113, which begins with "Hallelujah" and ends with "He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children. Hallelujah!". We were ecstatic like never before. Two blood tests that week confirmed what we already knew: our long wait was over. Only of course to be supplanted by a new wait. Wait to tell family, wait to see if it's a boy or a girl, wait eight more months for a little cookie to come out the oven. It was hard to conceal our joy.
One week ago was one of the very worst days of my life. We had just gotten home from Christmas with my in-laws. It was a great holiday, we had shared the news with them that we were pregnant. My sister-in-law, also expecting had found out the day before they were having a girl. We were going in for our ultrasound, with the question of whether it would be one child or multiples (because the doctors had told us we had an increased chance of multiples). We were seven weeks along. That morning we were in good spirits and sharing all our hopes and excitement. When the ultrasound started, my heart began to sink.
"We're not seeing what we should," the doctor said. Nothing more at first. I didn't know what it meant, but I was afraid of what it meant. On Sunday and Monday nights each I had dreams that we lost the child. And a fear had been growing in my heart. Now it was not fear, it was grief. The minute the ultrasound tech/nurse/doctor (I'm not sure what the title is) stopped and said quietly to my wife "I'm so sorry" I knew. We had lost our baby.
In the conversations, blood tests, and another ultrasound that followed this last week we got more details, but the outcome is always the same. We lost our child. All those hopes, joys, and smiles. I went from waking up to dreams to waking up to nightmares. And I learned just how much those who have never gone through it will never understand. You know it's bad, but you don't realize how bad. And it breaks my heart to think of all the people I know who have lost their babies, and have experienced this hell, and especially those who went through it more than once.
What follows are some reflections on the experience this last week. If nothing else, so that those who face such hells themselves might know something of someone else's experience, to at least not feel so alone in this, which you can, I know because I felt very alone that day. Like my wife and I stood grieving on an island.
In the language of stages of grief, I've been depressed, angry, and sad. Not in that order, not in any order. Just depressed some times, angry others, sad most. But none of those words really do justice to what I've been. The tears I felt stream down my face in the doctor's office were but cracks in a dam that burst not long later. And I wailed this last week - several times - like I've never wailed before. I wasn't sad, I was broken. And broken without a way to be whole. My anger surprised me, and it has not been particularly strong, as genuine anger is something I have worked years to suppress (since those who may have known me as a child may know the holy terror I could become). But it nonetheless has been there too. I noticed it yesterday at the store. I was walking towards a section and all of the sudden realized I had been cutting through the baby section, and that triggered the anger. For weeks that section was one I secretly stopped by, peaked in on, smiled over. So when I walked through there only reminded of my grief and loss, I was angry. Not at anyone in particular, just angry.
Though we were grieving differently, my wife and I felt the need to spend an inordinate amount of time together. Being together, and being occupied with entertainment became our coping in the days to follow. We went to movies, rented movies, watched movies we owned. We sat on opposite ends of the couch - me watching something with headphones on, her listening to an audiobook - just needing to be distracted and yet be together so that in those moments the grief snuck in we could hold each other.
We decided to name our baby. It was important to validate and express that this was a real loss, it was our child. I have felt defensive against the claim that I didn't lose a "child" (even though no one has made it). I loath the term miscarriage, almost as much as fetus. Both to me sound like ways of downplaying what we are actually talking about. I wanted to give the baby one of the boy names we had come up with (boy, since in my dream was a boy I "knew"this baby would be one). My wife was reluctant. I wanted to use the name to indicate it was not wasted, because my baby was not wasted. My child was real, and had already given us perhaps the happiest month of our lives without even being born yet. In the end we decided to go with a symbolic name. Something we felt honored and spoke to what we felt we lost. A name worthy of such a blessing. So we named him Isaac, baby Isaac. Isaac was a long awaited child of Abraham and Sarah, promised long before he was conceived (as Isaac was to me). Abraham and Sarah struggled with doubts along the way (as did we), even laughing at God. But Isaac finally came. God also then presented Abraham and Sarah with the greatest test they ever faced, being asked to sacrifice Isaac. Now in that story God spared Isaac. But not in ours. Yet we too felt tested in a way we never have, and we felt in some manner we were being asked - forced - to offer our child back to God. Not to have to kill him as that choice was not ours, but to have to kill everything he meant to us. It was equally lost. And in fact, only Abraham was asked, we more like Sarah were subjected to the test without knowledge or will of its undertaking. Phyllis Trible gave a lecture at Valpo once on Genesis 22 which she called "The Sacrifice of Sarah", and it was from that perspective, of waiting, finding blessing, and it being taken away without voice that made Isaac such a fitting name for us.
My Christmas spirit was totally sapped away. The upcoming Gospel reading for that Sunday was the slaughtering of the innocents of Bethlehem from Matthew 2. And believe me, it is not easy when you are so stuck in grief of losing a child to be expected to preach on Herod slaying children. I really hated Herod for that. He made mothers and fathers experience what we were going through. There's too many Herods in the world today. I did have other options. Epiphany was the upcoming Friday, I could have merely gone with that Gospel story. That Sunday also happened to be the festival of the naming of Jesus. And I could have just gone off lectionary. But that wasn't my style. And the truth is, for how hard it was to have to preach on Matthew's telling of children dying, I was unable to divert my attention from it. My mind had been on really nothing but losing a child all week. So I dared to do so, to say something of what it was for Rachel to weep for her children and refuse to be consoled because they are no more. I preached what was probably the hardest sermon of my life. Not hardest to write, but hardest to speak, because I was as much in the pew that week as I was in the pulpit, and I was as much in need as I was in sharing towards others' spiritual needs. But I don't know if I could have really preached on anything else. Thankfully the text lended itself to the occasion, and therefore allowed me to do more than just talk my own thoughts, but to illustrate and engage God's own action in Jesus Christ, to share promise even when promise refuses to comfort. Because it did. Scripture was a mild comfort, and a short lived one this last week. But not because it does nothing or offers nothing. Rather I too refused to be comforted. For some things are too great a trespass to not be so grieved.
My faith in this time has been greatly blessed by being a pastor, because I have walked with people in grief. I've known something of its stages and character, even if from afar as opposed to what it is to be in it. I still know healthy habits, I still can identify much of the stages of grief. And I know and teach that being faithful is not the same as being all put together, always happy, always feeling blessed, or always polite and tame in my prayers. Thanks to things like the Psalms and professors like Dr. Nysse who at seminary pushed for the value of raw lament and expression in dark places without a token answer or breath of air, these influences let me be very open in my own grief with God. I have found, if you will, three H's that really put well what has been important for me in my faith with God in this time: honesty, humility, and hope.
Honesty: I was honestly hurt, and lost, and despairing. I had to share it. I was honestly doubting, not so much the foundations of my belief but you might say the goodness of it. The hard truth is that contrary to what many nonbelievers may think, losses like this actually fit well into the Christian world view. I wasn't playing some theodicy in my head. Things did not seem incompatible, they simply seemed dark and despairing. And there still were the questions of Why? Why not do something? Do something now! There was still cries of loss and a begging to be remembered in the light of his countenance again. There was still a begging to not let me lose my faith in it all, for although I challenged or disbelieved nothing, I was broken, and felt too broken to hold on so that I just needed to be held by the Spirit. Cries for answers, cries for help, cries for healing, cries of how I really felt about it all and God within it. I don't think I bared my soul anywhere quite like in prayer.
Humility: This sounds unnecessary, and at times it was not there. But I think overall I really needed it to maintain my faith. I just listened to a video of an atheist who said if he died, came upon the pearly gates and realized God was real he would chew him out. And when the interviewer commented he might not be let in he said he didn't want in. Humility may be at moments the only thing that separated me from that man. In my anger, in my grief, in my self-centered world (and believe me, this grief closes the world around you fast), in even my idolatry of Isaac, I at times stood toe-to-toe with God, only in the midst to back down, to bow my head, to say with a broken heart "into your hands I commit myself: my body, my soul, all that is mine." At various points within my honesty, I still realized I was a man and God may question me like a man (a la Jo)b. I know there is more that I don't know, I know that before God I approach by grace not by entitlement, I know that I am the clay and not the potter. And I am thankful for it, to those who see subservience, or weakness, or folly within this, just know that I see grace, because humble men (and women) are the ones who rely. Humility did not let sin take such control of my honesty that it could build the great lie that there is no God. Humility let me surrender my judgment, which sounds defeatist, but is actually an important victory in my grief. Surrendering my judgment on the matter has let me accept something of God that is actually quite good: it has let God be God. God is the judge, but then God is also the benevolent judge, that is, the heavenly Father, the incarnate Savior, the sighing Spirit. Not taking from God the judgment has strangely kept a wider faith intact, a faith that ultimately let's me keep being honest.
Hope: I have needed hope and Gospel. It has not "moved" me, it has not "fixed" things, it has not taken away my sorrow over Isaac, but it has promised something I can hope in. That as Isaac shared in all things with his mother, baby Isaac might share then in the faith and grace and baptismal hope that she herself lives in. That if God knew Jeremiah before he was in the womb, and from there the baptist could leap for joy at the approaching of an expectant Mary, from there my child too could have been touched by God. Before Isaac had ears to hear or a heart to "give to Jesus", I believe Jesus really gave something to Isaac. And one day, the child I never held or beheld, I will find is in some way held and holden to God. Jesus has always been able to do more and go further than I with every person I have ever known, so I will hope in him one more time. I have hope for myself too. I thought of Psalm 51 asking God to "restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain me with a willing spirit." I have hope he will.
I put it that way, because right now I don't have joy - in church or elsewhere. It is returning. But in those first days I scarcely laughed or smiled (hardly my default mode, as those who know me can attest). My wife and I had a wonderful moment on Monday, where we held each other down for the dogs to kiss. We were laughing and smiling and fooling around, and I realized after I had not had a moment like that since I first heard the news. I am joking more with people and more able to be by others, which for a while I was not. And I am moving more towards this joy in faith too. Last week, one day I was at church trying to do some work and I went to pray and pray and pray with open tears. And finally in desperation I was calling out to God for something, to tell me something, and I noticed a pew bible sitting next to me. Desperate I opened it in search of a word and on the first page I was hooked. The bible was bookmarked in Job, and I found myself reading Job's laments, his feelings. Things like "Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes." That was where I was. And reading it, finding momentary comfort even in sections of the words of his friends (such as "How happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up; he strikes, but his hands heal"), but also Job's refusal to settle for their words. I was at home. And by the time I was done reading I was oddly peaceful. Not comforted, yet peaceful. It was therapeutic to my grief as a person of faith to read those words and find something that expressed my loss of Isaac. In fact, my first you might say "God reflection" within all of this was in the car from the doctor's paraphrasing slightly Job's words "The Lord gave, and now he's taken away." Perhaps when we are in our dark places, when we are feeling lost, when we are hurt, it isn't the comforting passages that lead us back, but the crappy ones. The laments we normally don't get, don't read, or don't like. But that is why they are so powerful, because when I lost Isaac, I didn't get or like much of anything going on.
In the realm of unexpected comforts (or at least being drawn to unexpected places), I was drawn this morning in prayer to the famous Wesley hymn "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing". I didn't know why, I didn't want to sing it at first. The song begins with this call to sing the Redeemer's praise, something I was struggling with doing. But it was the following verses that drew me in. I knew I was struggling with praise and joy, and verse two reads quite appropriately, "My gracious Master and my God, assist me to proclaim", it was a verse I played and prayed over and over, and with more and more gusto in the music, passionately praying through a hymn of praise for help praising. But there were also helpful words in verse three, "The name of Jesus charms our fears and bids our sorrows cease" and verse four "He speaks, and list'ning to his voice, new life the dead receive; the mournful, broken hearts rejoice," all words that spoke very deeply to me. If you have any doubt that you cannot preach to yourself, just be in grief. But the words of others, like Wesley there, like Job's, or in a myriad of other places, like in a commentary I read on the Isaiah reading for last Sunday which said, "We are comforted in knowing that the Lord shares our distress and pain. He is not distant, detached, or remote from any of his people. In all our afflictions, God himself is afflicted." For all the random places that have reminded me of Isaac, from the little onesie on a dresser, to the children's section in a store, to the mention of a baby on tv, to looking at a baseball and lamenting I will never play catch with Isaac, for all those reminders, God has been placing reminders too. Counter-reminders. Comforters. And though the comfort fades fast, or offers little actual comfort, they all hold on to me. They all also remind me of the Father above and Christ below. That gives me some form of hope, that God has not given up on comforting me even when I am not comforted.
If there has been a turning point for me, it has been Sunday. On Sunday, teary-eyed I told my church what happened, and as I mentioned preached on something of what I went through. I knew I had to tell them, if nothing else so that they understood why I was not myself, and seemed weary and not cheerful, why my energy was low and why at any given moment I could tear up. And if I didn't there would be the endless stream of well-intended "How was your Christmas?" like any normal, conversation would expect. And we would have to think of how to answer. For the practicality of it all I felt I had to tell them. But really it was for the support. I decided very early, saying that Wednesday as we made the long drive home from the clinic that I needed my people. I needed the church. And as I told them with teary eyes, they listened with teary eyes of their own. As they left the sanctuary that day they, like at a funeral, each offered condolences, gave me a hug, shed tears with me. In a week that had been so very alone, finally we didn't feel alone. If ever there was a place where God reaches out and reminds us, there it was.
What was also apparent from that moment was how many people too shared this pain themselves. How many, either themselves or their families suffered the same and worse yet sometimes suffered it over and over. I don't know if they all had the support they felt they needed or if they felt alone. I don't know what their grief is like, we each really do grieve differently. But I knew in that moment, that this is not something we should be silent about. It's why I write this. I write to process for myself, but also to speak up, to share with others. To again say how real the grief is because Isaac was real. I was reading a book for those in grief this week and it most succinctly described the uniqueness of loss by miscarriage, stillbirth, or early infant death, saying it isn't as simple as saying you can have another or at least you weren't too attached because I was attached and I wanted to have this baby! I wanted Isaac. And others may not know how many times in a month you can cup your wife's stomach and celebrate that you are having a baby. They may not know how often I said goodnight to Isaac even though (as my wife regularly reminded me) he didn't have ears yet. Others will never realize how much of our future we began to plan and alter for Isaac. I was very attached. And should I ever father another child, that child will be a blessing in her own right not a replacement for the blessing Isaac was. I'm fortunate no one said anything quite as ridiculous to me. But I'm still afraid they will. I'm still certain no one understands! That's why it feels so lonely. As much as Isaac's world was only his mother's womb, so our world felt small in a way, because one of the greatest parts of it was confined to our family and a few friends with inside knowledge. That's why I felt the need for the world to know my grief, that if nothing they may know Isaac through it. When I was a boy, I would acolyte for funerals, even of people I never knew. But you learned something of people at funerals. I liked funerals for that reason. That Sunday, in the love and care my people showed me, they let me open Isaac's world a little bit more. And that meant the world to me. Perhaps no one said anything bad because of that, maybe because they all know that if scripture was not comforting me those stagnate platitudes would not do the trick. Maybe too many of them suffered at the hand of those platitudes themselves. Either way, I have grieved with fear that my child will be dismissed by the world, and my grief will be expected to move on. And even with all this evidence to the contrary, I still carry that phobia.
December was the best and worst month of my life. Isaac has been promised and given back to God. Faith has been on a roller coaster of God moments amid the vast dark void that dominates the ride. And fear remains even as people continually offer the support I desperately needed. I am finding more light each day, and with it, I'm able to smile and laugh, something I previously felt guilty doing. I still cry. I've only gone one day without tears. And small things still set me off in sorrow and depression at a drop of a hat. I was going to say "but," except I don't have a but at this time. Buts may make for better writing, but they don't always exist. Some things just hurt, and they aren't worth the "bright side" talk. And losing Isaac was one of them. There is no bright side right now. Even the talk of God and faith and God moments are less a bright side and more being able to find God in the dark abyss. "if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there...If I say surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night, even the darkness is not dark to you..." but it is to me.
Four weeks ago I woke up to a dream. A week ago I woke up to a nightmare. I don't know what there is to wake to next. Thanks for reading. Thanks to all who are patiently walking with me.
Thank you Isaac for the brief time we had. Daddy loves you, and he will always remember.
*note: I have followed this post up with later Reflections for any who wish to read them
