Death of a Child
Silent Grief
Today I’m privileged to feature a post by Erica McNeal.
Ever since I wrote “Learning from Michelle Duggar”, I’ve come to recognize that there needs to be voices for the many women and men who struggle through the silent grief of miscarriages and still births. I’ve come to realize that for many it’s hard to share for fear that no one will listen; after all — as I’ve heard too many times — “it’s no big deal … it’s just a miscarriage”.
It’s even harder to mourn in that loneliness; but it needs to be done. The pain and grief needs to be vocalized. That’s why I’m so glad that there’s people like Erica who are both sharing and mourning. Thank you, Erica. We need your voice!
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Erica McNeal
As I sat in the church pew yesterday, there were little babies all over the place. Two to my left, two to my right, two behind me and one in front of me.
I thought of Kylie.
Deep breath.
As the music played, I fought my tears.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed movement and saw two little girls, playing with their brother. Two little girls and a boy… what could have been…
I looked up at the lighted cross in hopes of distracting myself.
I thought of a concert my husband and I went to as Steven Curtis Chapman bravely sang, “Cinderella”; the very song he had written for his own daughter before her tragic death. My husband had looked up at a similar cross in hopes of distracting himself from the emotion of this song. But, instead, when he saw the cross that day, he envisioned Jesus holding our little girl.
This is what the cross reminded me of today. And, the tears began to form.
At the exact same time when I thought about how empty my arms felt and how much my heart ached, my husband handed me a seven-month old baby girl to hold for our friend who needed a hand.
“How Great is Our God” began to play. The very song that kept me on my feet after our failed adoption of JT, and the song that became our adopted son’s namesake.
Tears flowed as I snuggled this sweet little girl. What a beautiful moment and gift from God.
Those of us that experience the loss of a child don’t just grieve their death. We grieve the broken hopes and dreams we had for our child and our family. We grieve all of the moments that will never be. We grieve the empty crib, the clothes that may never be worn, and the toys that may never be played with. We grieve the day we will never walk our daughter down the aisle, or watch our son hit his first baseball. We grieve the empty void that lives on and remains in our family. It is an ongoing, silent grief, that comes without warning every time we realize that another dream or hope has been crushed.
Our grief journeys through jealousy of others to bittersweet joy; from gut-wrenching heartache, to helping those who have experienced a similar tragedy. And yet, our journey is highly unpredictable and deeply personal. We often grieve silently so as not to make others feel uncomfortable or awkward. We take deep sighs, ponder our thoughts for a moment, and press forward, hoping that the tears we shed are not too obvious. Because, in reality, our grief really has nothing to do with other people, and what they do or don’t have.
Our grief is about what we wish we could still hold, and talk to, and hug, and snuggle, instead of what is solely imprinted in our hearts and minds.
And yet…
I find HOPE in a Redemptive Savior whose own silent Suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane caused Him to sweat drops of blood. He’s been there!
He understands a silent grief more intense than I will ever know.
And this fills me with COMFORT knowing that my deepest sighs and silent tears will never go unnoticed by God!
(Psalm 139:1-22, 2 Kings 20:5)
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ERICA’S BIO: Erica McNeal is a three-time cancer survivor, who has also experienced the loss of five children, two of which she held in her arms. She is the author of Good Grief!, a resource guide that stands in the gap between people who are hurting that don’t know what they need, and their loved ones who have no idea how to help. Erica has also shared her life experiences as a guest speaker in ten different states to churches, women’s groups, and military leadership groups.
Erica’s vision is to challenge the Christian line that states God will not give us more than we can handle because she believes that God will allow us to be stretched beyond our human capabilities in order to show us our need for Him, to deepen our faith, and to show us that HIS strength is limitless!
You can subscribe to her blog and follow her on twitter.
Turtles, Trees, and the Spiral of Time
Today’s guest post is from bereaved parent Joy Bennett.
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Joy Bennett
I’ve always pictured time as a line, with me an unchanging dot moving from moment to moment from birth on one end to death at the other. I have an almost visceral reaction to thinking of time, and myself within it, like this. In this model, I am static. The dot that is me remains unchanged as it moves through each moment. And at points of loss, the vision of me moving relentlessly farther and farther away from the person lost aches to my core.
I read something recently that describes time as a spiral. The spiral illustrates how then is very much a part of now and it all influences what’s next. It describes how dynamic and alive we are as we move through life.
I think time-as-spiral is a better model. It recognizes that we are more than a static pile of cells. We are constantly being shaped by the interaction of our individual characteristics and choices, our past (the full spectrum of joys and pains we’ve experienced), and our future (our goals and plans and dreams).
I am the person I am today because of my past experiences, my joys and pains, and the quirks that make me me. You are the person you are today because of what makes you you, what you’ve experienced already, and what you hope to do in the future.
I am fascinated by the ways each person’s experiences shapes them, and how much they control that shaping. A lack of depth of experience renders a person less developed but less scarred. A wide and deep range of emotional experience can ripen a person into a rooted maturity, or it can singe them into a scarred, cynical shell.
My own life experience was relatively unremarkable before the birth of our first child. I overcame a handful of hurdles growing up: a few small heart-breaks, the deaths of two grandfathers, a cross-country move, the crucible of working as a resident assistant in a conservative Baptist college’s dormitory. (Two words: not fun.) Engagement, wedding planning, and the first year of marriage were mostly euphoric, with a few requisite lows, some tears, and a lot of talking things out. I remember sensing that life had been too calm and that something big was coming.
Then Elli arrived. We were catapulted into what seemed like an alternate universe. Hearing words like, “I wish I could say, ‘but the good news is ___,’ but I can’t” fires depth charges into your soul.Kissing your infant goodbye before surgery, knowing that the odds are 1 in 5 that she’ll survive for you to kiss her again, is one of the darkest paths one can tread. The sleepless nights caring for a child too sick to catch a breath or stop coughing or who just can’t sleep confronts you with darkness that you never dreamed lurked inside yourself.
That alternate universe wasn’t all dark desperation, though. We uncovered the pure delight of watching a child learn how to laugh, discovering how to make her smile, and celebrating each hard-won milestone. She redefined what was important and what was worth our energy.
Elli carved the raw material of us and left a distinct contour on everyone who met her. She’s been gone nearly three years, but the mark she made on each of us is permanent. We are now faced with what we do with it — how to move forward. What we choose each day is shaping us.
We all leave marks on the people with whom we interact. Whether those interactions provoke dark valleys or euphoric highs is often out of our control, but we can determine how it shapes us.
But how? How can the things which wound and scar us so deeply become the very things that strengthen us and equip us to help others?
Jesus.
This is one of the many beautiful themes we find the Bible. Terrible things happen. I will not say that God causes tragedy, but I will declare that God is not thwarted by it. God can take natural disasters and the evil schemes of people and make those things produce good, in spite of themselves. This is what happened when Jesus was killed — people murdered God’s Son and yet, that very thing that was meant for evil became the greatest good ever accomplished on earth. In the worst betrayal ever recorded, Jesus defeated death and made peace with God for us. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him and meant to do him harm when they sold him as a slave. But God used it to save Joseph’s family and preserve the nation of Israel through them. We see it in nature, in the rejuvenation of a forest ravaged by fire. Over and over, we see God redeeming tragedy.
When I remember this, when I trust God to bring something beautiful out of my pain (even if takes years), I grow stronger. When I forget it, when I’m overcome by the circumstances and see only myself and what was lost or damaged, the pain burns and scars and my heart withdraws into a cynical bitter shell. (And as one who has hidden in my turtle shell and licked my wounds many times, hope is never lost. God can redeem even that, and he can transform the most recalcitrant turtle.)
How do you think about time and yourself in it? Who and what has shaped you? How are you responding to it?
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Here’s Joy’s bio: “I am a writer, thinker, asker of questions, mother, wife, bereaved parent, walking by faith, still in process. I’ve blogged since 2005, writing on faith and doubt, family life (which is always humorous even with the medical spin), grief, and the depression that I only recognized a year after our oldest died at the age of 8. Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of me yesterday.”
Send your love and likes her way on Facebook, add yourself to her Twitter tribe and check out Joy’s incredible blog!
“They’ll be happy”
Says my grandfather as he looks at the handsome face of a 13 year old boy lying motionless on our stretcher.
The last time the family saw him was a couple days before Easter.
Now, a day removed from Easter, they will view the body of their son one final time before he’s taken to the crematory.
Mothers dread walking into their son’s room and finding their boy making out with a girl. They don’t look forward to walking into their son’s room and finding them with cigarette in hand.
But few mothers have experienced this: walking into your son’s room to find him lying on the floor with his face distorted and discolored from livor mortis. It was a heart problem that the doctors said was under the control of proper medication.
The mother came through our door with a laugh, trailed by her husband (the father), their son and a couple friends.
They couldn’t have done this alone. “Thank God for the blessings of friends and family” I think to myself.
Those laughs are now tears as they cut some of the locks of his hair and place them neatly in our small keepsake bags. My dad walks past me and says, “Hardest thing I have to see today.” That after he embalmed a 47 year old cancer patient in the morning and then held the hand of the cancer patient’s wife while she made arrangements.
Silence.
10 minutes pass.
15.
Tears communicate instead of their words.
My dad walks past me again, this time exhaling a massive sigh.
“He looks so good”, one of them says.
We’ve done what we can to remove the livor, leaving his facial skin looking like that of a china doll. And once they begin walking away from the stretcher, the laughter begins again.
I go back and forth with myself in my head:
“It’s got to be unhealthy for them to be laughing.”
“Maybe, but how would you feel when the last time you saw your son’s face it was discolored?”
“But this is so unnatural! The whole thing … the death itself, the way they found him and now … laughter?!?”
“Imagine all the darkness they’ve seen … and now this little glimmer of light … small as it may be … they can see their son one last time the way they remember him. Something as simple as his cleared up skin may be the brightest thought they’ve had for days. Let them laugh now … there will be plenty of crying to do later. They’ve confronted their fears just now. They remember the love they shared. Let them have this moment.”
And with that I consoled myself; reassuring myself that when a child dies, sometimes, somehow … it can be natural for parents to leave the funeral home happy.
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As with all my post, circumstances have been changed and rearranged so as to protect the privacy of this family.
A Tiny Casket, A Hole in the Ground, and Heaven
Bill Stauffer is a pastor in rural NJ, where he mostly chases around his eight-year-old twins. He likes to chase his wife, too.
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It was a terrible tragedy – unspeakable – and it was making the rounds on Facebook: a local two-year-old boy killed in a house fire. As the details came out, there were a number of families in town sharing in the grief of this boy’s death. A little boy, lost to his father, his stepfather, his mother (sedated and in the hospital still days later), and all types of extended and blended families and relationships. A number of them in the church where I am an associate pastor.
The weird thing about death for me is that it was so present in my early life, that even the worst of tragedies now require me to step way outside of myself to feel them for others. It’s like a scar with no nerve endings. By the time I was ten, I had lost all of my grandparents, two uncles, a number of family friends, and my father. Death shaped me. I knew it was shaping these people, too. It was carving out new chasms of pain. They were becoming more human.
Because one of the boy’s cousins was in my youth group, I was asked to lead the graveside service, as the Catholic priest who was presiding at the funeral mass could not be there because of a prior commitment. Whenever you get asked to preside over death, something happens. You sense a seriousness come over you. It’s involuntary. You will have the final say in people’s interaction with their loved one. Perhaps more than that, you will have the outrageous privilege and responsibility of helping them bridge this world and the next. In this case, it was connecting the infinite with a little boy in a tiny casket suspended over a gaping hole in the ground.
I was raised Catholic. When I step inside a Catholic Church building, unlike most other ex-Catholics I know who went over to the protestant dark side, I have a sense of coming home. My uncle, a priest himself, was one of the finest men I ever knew. He was the constant in my family when death reigned during my early years. The smells, the sounds, the liturgy, the bad music – it’s like putting on your favorite pair of comfortable, but woefully out of fashion shoes. You would never wear them in public, but in private, you miss them and occasionally slip them on to knock around the house in.
What struck me this day as I entered the narthex of the church was the open grieving already taking place. That was familiar, too. I can clearly hear my Aunt Peggy crying and screaming over the open casket of my uncle, her brother, Billy, dead in his early 40’s. I was five. It was surreal, but very emotionally honest. We button down Protestants need some of that in our emotional mix – honesty. This little boy’s family was grieving like that, and strangely, it gave me a sense of hope for them. It certainly gave me love for them.
During the funeral mass, from my vantage point in the back row, I viewed a room full of people full of sorrow, hopelessness, pain, and anger, with no outlet but flowing tears. My friend Sue was next to me in the pew. When she saw the tiny casket, she wept. “That’s not right!” The father and the stepfather carried their little boy up to the front of the church. Impossible to fathom.
At the graveside we stood at that intersection, the visible and invisible, and tried to make sense of what we could. I told them that little Zack was safe in Jesus’ arms. I told them that Jesus hated death; that it frustrated and angered him. I told them Jesus knows. He knows. He knows.
About their anger. I told them to take it to God in full force, that he was big enough to handle it from them, that is was real and needed to be voiced. God is such a pragmatist. He uses what’s at hand to grab hold of us. He uses pain and suffering to draw us to him. He uses joy and pleasure. Anything, really – whatever is in the emotional cupboard at the time. And that’s when it struck me.
Death is a spiritual ear opener. It unplugs the hard, waxy buildup of mundane, self-consumed life and lets us hear eternity calling. And in that moment, standing by that tiny casket over a gaping hole in the ground, it happened. There, in the cold, listening to the weeping and sniffling and occasional outbursts of tears, heaven spoke. It was Jesus saying, “Come to me, and bring your suffering. Bring your sorrow – I know. Bring your anger – I know. Bring your hopelessness – I know that, too. I’ve got what you need. Me”
Jesus was there, in Zach’s most frightening hour. He was there to comfort and take Zach home.
And I pray that Jesus — as Zach’s family grieves in the months and years to comes — takes this broken and beautiful family in His arms and ravages them the only way a good God can. They, and we, can live in the love of a God who wants nothing more than for us to simply “Come.”
The God Who Remembers
I’m a funeral director. Have been for the past 10 years. And during those ten years, I’ve helped numerous families memorialize miscarriages and still born babies.
As a male who often finds himself in that “insensitive” category, I used to secretly wonder why there’s a desire to memorialize those not yet born.
After all, what’s to memorialize?
When I first became a funeral director, I struggled to understand how I could write an obituary for one who has no biography. After a year or so, I developed this three sentence template:
_____________ the stillborn son/daughter of ___________ and ____________ passed away on ____________________ at “so and so” hospital. Left to grieve this loss is the maternal and paternal grandparents, as well as the uncles and aunts. A memorial service will be held on ____________ at the __________ Funeral Home.
That’s it. No job occupations to write. No hobbies, memberships or significant others to be included in the obituary. In place of the age, the obituary will suffice to say, “infant”, or “stillborn”.
Being both insensitive and hardheaded, it took a pretty intense situation for me to see and feel the “what” and the “why” of memorializing those who weren’t afforded a chance to live.
I used to think that one of the most in house controversial topics for Christians related to the “eternal security” and/or “perseverance of the saints” discussions. I’ve seen artery popping, fist clenching, impassioned arguments over whether or not you can walk away from God and lose your entrance ticket for passage through the Pearly Gates.
I was wrong. There’s another topic that’s even more sacred.
I learned my lesson in a Degree Completion Class at Lancaster Bible College. There was a large cross-section of students in that class, with ages ranging from 25 to 62 and an even broader array of experience.
The professor breached a topic that he wished he hadn’t when he said, “There’s no absolute biblical evidence that fetuses and infants go to heaven.”
That was it. He had touched some major buttons that I don’t think he even realized existed.
Without even raising their hands, two outspoken women in the class – who, as we were soon to learn, had lost children – burst in with utter defiance. “How dare you speak to something so sensitive when you’ve never lost a child!” one said. Another burst into tears, asserting how God had spoken to her, reassuring her that her lost children were indeed with Him.
I’ve felt tension in classrooms, funerals and churches, but this was a tension that was raised to a level I didn’t know existed. Without knowing it, that Prof. had tread on one of the most sacred realms of Christian doctrine … the belief that ALL lives are loved and known by our Maker … that ALL are children of God.
Mother’s day is today.
This is the time of year that many mothers carry a silent grief. This is the time of the year when mothers remember, when they memorialize lost lives that the rest of us (their friends and family … especially us men) have unintentionally forgotten. And, specifically, it’s a time when men can be exceptionally insensitive to the grief that can reemerge during this holiday.
And there’s some women who will not only carry their silent grief this mother’s day, but who also NEVER had the chance to memorialize lives that God knows … because I know that for every one woman who has memorialized the death of the unborn or still born, there are many others who have not.
Today, God remembers you and your losses. There’s a scripture that says God bottles our tears, a word picture that says, “your tears are too precious to fall to the ground” … that when a person cries, it’s such a valuable experience to God that he stops what he’s doing, bends over and carefully watches every tear flowing down our broken faces. It’s as though he keeps those tears so he can remember what you have gone through … the same way we save items of sentimental value so those things can help us remember important experiences.
I invite you to remember that God not only remembers, but he also grieves with you.
