Feeble words

Miscarriage is a killing frost that drives a woman in on herself. It pushes her life into her roots, deep into private soils. It drives her into isolated darkness, wherein she meets and is measured by all that she has ever trusted, all that she has ever loved.

Miscarriage stands each woman apart on her own small patch of earth to grapple the brambles of death. It bids her to bleed alone; there is no other way. It bids her to cry alone, and to mourn alone. It traps her alone in a tomb of confusion and doubt, pain and anger, circumstance and superstition.

Miscarriage rends asunder, but Christ is risen from the dead. He is close to His daughters, much closer than death. He breathes upon them a Spirit of Life which cannot ever die and which cannot be driven down by the cold. He pours healing wine into their wounds and places into their mouths His Flesh, whereby He joins Himself to them in their very bones. And in His Church, He gives His daughters unto each other, that they might carry their burdens together. Alone in space, each is never alone in Him.

Sisters, it is dark where you stand, and so very terribly cold. But you are not alone. The morning comes which brings with it His blessed Eucharist, whereby we, His daughters, stand together and cry in our misery before Him who regards us so tenderly. And in the Morning (the signs abound!) we will each be called forth by name, never again to be alone in the tomb. And our children will be returned to our arms. And these tears, stored by God in His bottle, will be found credited to our accounts, already overfull with the merits of Christ Jesus our savior.

How long, oh, Lord? How long?

Fallen

Disclaimer 1: I don't want to come off all First Girl Ever To Learn [Greek] here, so let me say upfront that the basic fact I present below came to my attention via the very much English Concordia Commentary on Ecclesiastes, which I was reading for a thoroughly  non-erudite reason with which I will not bore you.


Disclaimer 2: I hesitate to address this as one who has graciously been spared the heartbreak of losing a baby without having seen his face. But experience is neither equalizer nor guarantor of consensus, and every woman who has carried a child or hoped to knows the dread of this shadow.





I ponder endlessly the sadness of my friends who have endured a miscarriage, particularly the sentiment expressed by my dear Reb. Mary:  "'Miscarry. Mis-carry. Like, “Whoops! I dropped the baby! Next time I’m carrying a baby I really should try to be more careful!'" Ah, friend. :'(

Ecclesiastes 6, Job 3, and Psalm 58 speak of a miscarried or stillborn child, but not in the way we speak of him. For where we call him "miscarried," which so many mothers I know cannot but understand to place the blame particularly with themselves, the Hebrews use the simple word nephel, "fallen."

No special term for it, and no fault beyond that which we all bear. Fallen like every last one of us.

And so do we

I am occasionally disheartened by an assumption people seem to make about me that I have no awareness of or care for the matter of infertility and other procreative crosses. I am very, very aware, and I very, very care. :( I pray always for the many couples I know (some quite well and some hardly at all) who have not been blessed as I have, for all the Hannahs and Rachels whose tears are contagious to me. Ever noticed how the Bible talks a lot more about women without kids than the other kind?

So I commend to you He Remembers the Barren. I have not yet had the privilege of reading Katie Schuermann's book of the same name, which is scheduled to come out in July, but two ladies of fine judgment who previewed it have recommended it to me strongly.

One frustration I have is that none of my favorite prayer books have a petition on behalf of the barren to guide my intercession for them. What I usually pray for them is that God's will for marriage would be fulfilled in them. I don't always know the details of their situations; whether their cases have been declared inexplicable or impossible. I don't know if a baby is God's will for J and C or B and R or any of the others, but I know it is God's will for marriage. So that is what I pray. I hope that's OK.

Strange grace

Warning: melancholyish musings. Recently came across this, which I wrote shortly after miscarrying the baby who’s been particularly on my mind of late, as he would have turned one this month.

My reflexive reaction to the simultaneous discoveries of my pregnancy and miscarriage shows that I have in fact learned nothing at all. Children of the Heavenly Father, I confess with my mouth, but...but…

But it’s not fair, I shouted heavenward, as the initial shock wore off. I lost him before I knew I had him! I didn’t even have a minute to be happy before I was sad! He was never mine!

I never got to feel his squalling, squirming warmth against my skin; never had him burrow and shudder happily in the instant postnatal recognition and quiet contentment of knowing his mother. He was so small when he died that, like most women who miscarry, I never got to feel him move, never had the satisfaction of knowing when he was awake and lively, or whether he had the hiccups. My especial reason for complaint was that I never had even a day of that peculiar maternal joy of being the only one in a crowded room who knows about the secret world within. He was never mine!

No. He was never mine.

Nor are my living children mine. Praise God; they too are safe in His hands. Neither is my life my own. Praise God; it is hidden in Christ.

My perfect idiocy of somehow attaining two months of pregnancy unawares was, after all, a blessed idiocy. Even in that, I can say, with scarcely a stutter (most days), “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” God is good. How could I say otherwise, when I search the faces of my living children, and know that I will one Day, in a world made new, trace their likenesses in another child as well?

Learning to love a child only through the losing of him—this is a strange grace indeed.

Advice, worth precisely what you paid for it

The quotations from misguided people included in this post have never been uttered by any of our dear readers. I understand. I wish to post this anyway.

It has recently come to your attention that someone you know just lost her baby in miscarriage. You feel compelled to address the bereaved woman, but you don’t know what to say. You don’t know what to do. Here, dear folk, let me help you.

Let the only words you say from your heart be, “I am so sorry for your loss. You are in my prayers.” Then stop talking and hand her a plate of your best cookies.

That’s it. Trust me on this. Miscarriage is a death so sudden, so emotionally blanking, so bloody and perplexingly painful, that there is almost never anything more to say of your own accord than, “you have lost someone you loved and you have suffered; for this, I am sad with you.”

Because, you see, the bereaved mother has a confusing and complicated back story about which you will likely never know. Her pastor might not have called her, let alone visited her. Her husband might not know what to do with her. Her parents might have blown her off. Her doctors might have lied to her. Her hospital might have stolen the baby’s body from her and sent her home to bleed out the rest. Her mind might be in prison. Her heart might be in shards. Her faith might be seriously strained. She might feel angry, desperate, and alone. She might think that God does not love her anymore, that maybe He never did, that maybe she isn’t part of the Elect after all. She might feel like a murderer. She might want to die. She might feel dead already.*

In such a circumstance, to such a person, it is never, ever appropriate to say, “God knows best, honey.” Or, “God has a way of working these things out.” Or, for the love of all things holy, “This was supposed to happen.” Think for a minute about what these lines communicate to a mother in mourning: God aborted your baby, honey, because there was something wrong with it. God didn’t want your child to live.

That’s not the intent of those lines, but intentions do not matter. Words matter. No, better keep quiet and let God reveal what He knows. You might coordinate dinner drops on her doorstep for the next couple of weeks, instead.

Likewise, it is not wise to say something along the lines of, “You poor dear. Lucky you’re so young! You’ll be able to have another.” This may be statistically factual, and she has likely already heard it from her heartless, secularist doctor. It is not comforting to hear it elsewhere. The dead child is an actual person, lost to his mother who wanted him very badly and misses him very much. You would not approach a newly widowed woman, her dead husband’s grave still round and bare, and say, “Lucky you! Now you can marry again!” Neither should a much beloved baby be so casually brushed away. No, better keep quiet and let God reveal what the future holds. You might write Words of promise on index cards and send them to her in the mail, instead.

Because here’s the deal: death, all death, under any circumstance, is tragic. It is always bad. It is never OK. In every instance, a person, a human being, a miraculous conglomeration of flesh and soul has ceased to live and begun to decay. A body whose nature it is to endure has failed to endure. Death is unnatural. It should not be, yet the earth groans under the burden of a swollen belly stuffed full of our beloveds who shall breathe no more, who perhaps never breathed at all.

The miscarriage happened, any miscarriage, because the baby was conceived in sin and thus he died. All babies are fully human, even when sick, even when the victims of fatal genetic errors. Don't be misled: the death of an unborn child is no different than your death will someday be, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There aren’t any good intentions or well-meaning words that can make this less true, less horrible, less inevitable. There is only Christ. There is only His Sacrament. There is only His Church.

So do not unintentionally abuse the bereaved with the awkward phrases of this dying world. Allow Christ to comfort her, and submit to Him to serve your sister in pain. Pray for her without ceasing. Feed her your best foods. Be sincerely patient. Remind her gently and lovingly that Christ died once and for all for her and for her precious baby, that He rose the first fruits of all the living, that He is coming again in glory with all authority in heaven and earth in his hands. Though the people laugh and scoff, Christ has said that our dead are but sleeping. One short sleep past and we shall wake eternally, all of the Elect, together in perfect love, perfectly comforted, and mothers shall receive into their arms all of their children, never to be parted from them again.

Tell her this, friends, because this is really all you know on earth, and all she needs to know.

*Of course, this is not the universal experience of all women who suffer miscarriage. Some are richly comforted by pastors and families. Some are allowed to bury their babies. Some are able to move on quickly. Some don’t mourn until decades after their losses. However, my observations and experience have taught me that the majority of women suffer crises of faith and family in the midst of mourning a miscarriage, crises exacerbated by our sick, death-loving culture. Whatever her reaction to her own loss, each mourner should be treated carefully, out of love for Christ.

One, two, three, five

Wise reader Moore Mama observed that the paths of pregnancy following miscarriage are not clearly marked. And how.

Exhibit A: “How many children do you have?”

I list off our three children and say, “And another baby is due in May,” not, “We’re expecting our fourth child.” I haven’t corrected anyone for referring to this baby as our fourth child, though I never hear that without a moment of painful inner confusion. I just don’t like making people feel sad and awkward, especially since it’s not their fault that the numbers are all screwed up.

Truthfully, I don’t really know how to count, especially publicly, from here on out. Maybe this gets less weird over time, but maybe not (?). There will always be a gap, a silent skip, in the numbers. Since this baby will be but 26 months younger than his toddling brother, there’s not even a dramatic pause to mark the lost one. Miscarriage can be a silent sorrow, indeed.

For now, if I feel like it, I mention the lost one in my baby list. If I don’t, I don’t. But I always, always think of him when I name off my children.

‘Tis an unmarked path indeed. I’m grateful for the guard rails (and fellow travelers) that keep my wandering missteps from tumbling me over a cliff on the dark nights: Ultimately, it matters not how the world, or even I, number my children. No matter how I count them, they count for nothing, unless they’re numbered with the saints. Thank you, Jesus, for choosing, excruciatingly, to etch your love for my children on your very flesh, indelibly.

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands
( Isaiah 49:15-16)

Fearfully and Wonderfully

God has presented us with the imponderable: a child who would not exist if his slightly older sibling had survived. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about being pregnant again. Have we forgotten the little one we lost? Is this child, who occupies the space that would still have been his sibling’s, some sort of replacement? Any mother knows how foolish those questions are—and yet I inarticulately feared that carrying another child “too soon” would somehow lessen the worth of the one we lost. Alternately, I yearned to be pregnant again (by no means a usual state of mind for me), and then felt vaguely guilty for hoping to find healing through another pregnancy.

God in His mercy, in His time, has fearfully, wondrously consoled us with this gift. Even as we long to live in the presence of the Lord with all our children, we look forward, God willing, to the tender awe of holding a squalling new baby in our arms on this groaning old earth.

Amid our joy, my heart aches anew for those who have lost a child and whose wombs and arms are yet empty. May our Lord hear the cries of the brokenhearted and answer according to His infinite wisdom and compassion.

Your joy to know

You know there’s been too much sadness in the family lately when the 5-year-old, praying for pregnant friends and relatives, feels compelled to add, “And please don’t let their baby die.”

This prayer, however matter-of-factly uttered, is heartwrenching. The lad is tough, but with a tender heart, and he has shed tears for babies loved and lost. Did we err in sharing grief with him?

No. We have shared not only our grief, but the reason for the hope that we have—the reason that we do not grieve as those who have no hope. This kid gets it. He knows the race isn’t over yet. He knows we’re waiting on That Glorious Day. We’re listening for the trumpet blast that heralds the One who brings an end to all strife and the beginning of life made new.

More: He’s five, and he knows that even a teeny, in-utero sibling or cousin or friend that he’s never seen is a person, created and loved by God, whose existence is cause for rejoicing and whose temporal loss is cause for sorrow.

When it comes to topics like death, the truism is true: each mother and father can best discern the information that’s appropriate for their children. (For instance: We’re not totally sure where the three-year-old is with all this. We haven’t talked quite as much with him about it, but neither have we hidden anything from him. Also: we don’t dwell extensively on the topic with our older son, but deal with it as it comes up.)

Sometimes, the suddenness of grief forces a parent’s hand. Misguided protective instincts might tempt us to wrap our children in cozy euphemisms, or else cut them out of the loop altogether. Let’s not be misled by a world that grieves without hope into thinking that we should “love” our children by insulating them from sadness. Let’s not make our children’s happiness into an idol that usurps the place intended for a more profound joy. True Love, after all, is stronger than death.

Let us suffer here with Jesus, and with patience bear our cross.
Joy will follow all our sadness; where He is, there is no loss.
Though today we sow no laughter, we shall reap celestial joy;
All discomforts that annoy shall give way to mirth here-after.
Jesus, here I share Your woe; help me there Your joy to know.

If he snatches away, who can stop him? Who can say to him, “What are you doing?”

Miscarry. Mis-carry. Like, “Whoops! I dropped the baby! Next time I’m carrying a baby I really should try to be more careful!”

I don’t like that word.

I woke early, to the unmistakable pains of labor amidst a rush of blood. Since I wasn’t pregnant, this confused me. But then, in a collage of startling clarity, a hundred small happenings of the previous weeks crashed across my mind and I realized that I was indeed pregnant.

And then I wasn’t. Before I could comprehend that I carried a child, I had mis-carried him. I was left cradling, in hysteria-edged bewilderment, the nearly-intact miniature world that had been his home for the blink of his mortal life. All men are like grass. . .

I didn’t really need a second opinion to tell me that I had miscarried, but I visited my doctor anyway, to see what else she could tell me. She estimated that I had been 7-9 weeks along: a January baby.

We would have complained cheerfully about the “poor planning” of a child who entered the world in the least tax-practical month and in the middle of flu season. Instead, we ceased to speak of things too wonderful for us to understand. We put our hands over our mouths and returned to the dust: We visited a cemetery.

In the diocese of a largish city, we walked among the graves in the section reserved for little ones. Even without the weight of fresh personal grief, this via dolorosa would have been overwhelming. So many stones bore only a single date: babies who, like ours, had never drawn a breath. Babies who had lived a day, a week, a year. Infant and toddler siblings, buried together. Flowers, fresh and faded; toy trucks, both new and rusted; stuffed bears, some fluffy, some already rain-bedraggled. Crosses and verses scattered throughout grass salted by the splash of a million tears.

I could almost feel the groaning of the overburdened earth—its lovely surface gashed open and shoved full of the carnage of the Curse.

Our baby isn’t buried there, and the June memorial wasn’t yet erected (the tissue of early miscarriages is gathered, then buried together every few weeks in a joint service—oh, how many tears in each small, shared grave!). So we left our flower, as our Brephos, at the feet of Jesus. Those love-scarred feet! How painful the resolve, how deliberate the act of will by which our Lord turned those feet down the Via Dolorosa that must have seemed endless, to win for us an end to our way of mortal sorrow.

Surely, surely, the Day is coming when we will no longer weep our way along this grave-gashed, weed-wrecked ground.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Hasten the footsteps of your return. We long to shout together for joy at the sight of your feet, your most beautiful feet, returning to proclaim the death of Death our foe, to reclaim forever the life of your creation.

Hiding in my room/Safe within etc?

Back to that Father Rick post from a while back. This was the thing that hit home hardest for me, even though it's a downer:

I have also been aware of my weakness in response to this new life. For weeks my sinful heart hardly dared to believe the news, but held itself in check and hid, for fear that I would have to mourn another loss, another death.

I'm always hesitant to announce we're pregnant (don't get excited, we aren't that I know of). I've never had a miscarriage, but I live my first trimesters in constant fear. I had a terrible scare with our first baby that I've never really gotten over. As excited as I always am and as much as I would love to tell all the world, I can't get past the awful prospect of having to un-tell everyone if the worst happened. So I keep it a secret.

Of course couples aren't under any obligation to tell people they're pregnant. But I detect some distrust in my own motivation for our usual course of action, not telling until we're out of the first trimester and forgoing the prayers our faithful friends would offer for us. As much as I love our yet unseen baby when we have one in the works, I'm too afraid of sharing any grief that might come my way. So I also hold my joy in check, and diminish it in the process. This vale of tears, it's lame.

Mothers of the Living

My 14-month-old recently kicked the nursing habit. I am 25 pounds lighter! Rejoice with me!

But in the dark of my mind I’m uneasy. Freedom demands payment: Now that I’ve brought up the one the laws of natural spacing dictate that I’m very likely to be blessed with another, DV, and I’m scared.

Pregnancy is very, very hard. Delivery is harder. The first months with a new baby try the best of us: the nursing is protractedly painful, the diapers are awful, the nights are miserable and long. But the source of it all is a child who curls on your shoulder and shares with you his warm, wrinkled, subtle self. As you wither he grows stronger, and come what may you do not really begrudge him for his needs. Quite the opposite.

During my third pregnancy, the baby died a mere nine weeks along. His tiny body washed from me in a flood of pain three weeks later. The pregnancy was hard; I had never been more sick. The delivery was harder, an act of violence I committed alone on the cold hospital floor. The first months without my baby almost killed me, with nights miserable and long.

I cower under the very possibility of it happening again. Lord have mercy.

In this kingdom of death, the loss of a life so short and small is regarded as something so completely insignificant it is better left unmentioned. Few mourn your loss. Many roll it around in their mouths like something bitter and spit it back in your face. They cannot, by reason or strength, believe in that which they cannot see. As the months unravel even your husband forgets. And alone on the cold kitchen floor in the dark of a protracted night you feel the silent emptiness of your womb open up to swallow you, hungry as the tomb. For that is precisely what it is.

From dust you are made, and thus your body became both grave and gravestone to someone you barely knew. As flesh of your flesh he took his share of your heart as his grave clothes. When the tomb spat him out without celebration or ceremony, his share went with him.

I miscarried my little one over two years ago. I have, as you know, been blessed with a baby who survived my womb since then. When the memories of my loss tremor through my brain, when the anger emerges, I tell myself I should be past the pain by now—that I should be whole again, glad for what has come and for what lies ahead. But I am weak. I cannot make myself forget. Instead, I linger on the ashes of guilt, anger, fear, and doubt.

While I may never be pregnant again, or while I may never lose another child, in weakness I pray for mercy and prepare with fear and trembling for the very real possibility that another pregnancy may yield another loss:

Soon afterward, he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep." Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother (Luke 7: 11-15).

I am not a theologian. I am a simple minded idiot, and it is as a idiot that I read my Lord’s words. With the devastated mother of Nain, Christ bids me not to weep. Should you have survived the death of a child, He bids you to do the same. Though covered with ashes and unclean, Christ regards us, the Mothers of the Dead, and comforts us. Dear Christian mothers, do not despair. The compassionate Christ who raised the woman’s long dead boy, who is Himself triumphant over the tomb, knows our babies. He sees them, loves them, and with us remembers them. They are not lost forever for He is coming again soon to make seen the unseen, to fill their lungs with the breath denied them in our bellies, to sanctify them for life everlasting in the Kingdom He has promised to reveal.

The dead man sat up and began to speak. Jesus gave him back to his mother. Thanks be to God.

In the meantime, we cling to Baptism and remember that the Son humbled Himself to be born of a Virgin, taking up residence in her womb, turning a place of tenuous life and imminent death into the very House of God. Mary was changed. We are changed with her. We are not empty tombs and crumbling grave stones. We are the Mothers of the Living, now and forevermore.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Strengthen us as we wait. Have mercy upon us. Amen.