It’s said that having children is like having your heart walk around outside of your body. If that’s true, it’s no wonder miscarriage feels like having part of your heart missing.
My heart has been exposed to this phenomenon for over seven years now. First with the birth of two sons. Then with the trauma of three miscarriages. And then again during the physically difficult and emotionally fraught pregnancy and delivery of our youngest son. Six pregnancies to practice the deep dive. I’m still learning how to go deep enough.
When I became pregnant for the first time, my heart came alive with possibility. I loved being with child and was proud of my growing belly. I was healthy, happy, active, and full of expectation. I treasured pregnancy as the only time I wouldn’t have to share my little one with the world and enjoyed rearranging my life around this tiny growing piece of my heart. Motherhood was changing me already; it felt good and right.
Levi was born after twelve hours of labor and a swift emergency cesarean section. He was perfect and I was drunk on love.
Although the hardest, most exhausting work of my life, motherhood was everything I’d hoped for. My heart was ablaze. I was born for this.
A year later we conceived our next child, Judah, as soon as we began trying. Amazing. We were delighted to add to our family, and thankful it was happening so easily.
This was also the pregnancy where I first learned to deep dive.
Initiation into the Waves
For couples who choose to do so, one of the most thrilling moments in a normal pregnancy is finding out the gender of the baby during the mid-pregnancy morphology scan, but we knew something was wrong when the ultrasound technician rotated out for a more experienced sonographer, who then changed places with a doctor. We were stunned when a specialist pulled us into his office after the scan and began speaking about our baby boy in a foreign language: Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, “incompatible with life,” Trisomy 21.
Our baby had several markers that pointed to a chromosomal anomaly, but we couldn’t be certain without further testing. The specialist explained our options, and we left nauseated by the thought of our child dying in utero, or the alternative he was gently offering.
We left the hospital that day in a blur, begging God for the least severe option—Down syndrome—which the specialist said was our “best-case scenario.”
Devastation flattened us.
Against doctor’s orders, I googled way too much. I also asked friends and family to pray. I journaled. I poured out my grief and fear before the Lord. I cried. I blubbered and snotted. (A lot.) The thought of losing a baby horrified me.
A few days later we had a follow-up visit with another doctor. We entered nervously, desperately hoping for any news that might suggest there was hope for our baby’s life. As she unpacked the reports and stats and medical jargon, she clarified that the previous doctor had misled us. In fact, the chances of our baby having a life-threatening anomaly (such as Trisomy 13 or 18) were extremely low, and it was much more likely he’d be born with Down syndrome (Trisomy 21). Her assessment, though still difficult, was an enormous relief. We left thankful and weepy.
Through the anguish of the not knowing and the powerlessness we felt over our circumstances, we began to learn what grief and suffering can do to a human soul—it stretches it wide open to fit all of the anguish and confusion and sorrow and humanity that’s exposed. We had to dive deep in order to not be destroyed. And we did so, together.
Perfecting the Duck Dive
Surfers learn early on that unless they want to get swept back to shore, they have to learn to duck dive—take the whole surfboard and duck underneath the coming wave. Instead of trying to get over it or around it, they know the best way through is to go under. If they don’t duck dive properly, they’ll get pummeled.
I’ve been surfing a few times. I wish I could tell you I’m a surfer, but I’m not. My first day surfing was on a giant longboard off the coast of San Diego, California, when I was sixteen or seventeen years old. I understood the weight distribution from my days of snowboarding powder where I grew up in Oregon; this was just warmer and wetter, right?
The waves were small and consistent—perfect for a beginner—and my borrowed board was gigantic, making it almost impossible not to get up. (Honestly, it was probably more like sailing than surfing.) The only problem was, I couldn’t get out far enough to catch a wave; I simply couldn’t get past the break. I understood the concept of duck diving, but I had no actual experience. I didn’t have the technique, and I certainly didn’t have the muscle to sink that bus of a surfboard under the ocean’s surface.
After what felt like forever of paddling, paddling, heaving, and paddling some more, my friend finally told me to grab onto his ankle so he could pull me far enough out. He swapped my longboard for his shorty, and when it was time, I let go of his ankle and tried duck diving again. That time, I made it through in one piece, and, much to my delight, I was still moving forward. (And yes, I caught my first wave soon after!)
Here’s what I learned about duck diving from the few surf sessions of my youth:
Why all this talk about surfing? Because this duck dive became an important metaphor for me as I learned to navigate the waves of grief that started with Judah’s prognosis and continued through the miscarriages that followed. I had to find Jesus underneath the surface.
Before our lives were interrupted with grief, my relationship with Jesus was good, rich even. To stick with the surfing analogy for a moment, you could say I wasn’t a novice and yet had never faced big surf either.
I was practiced at spiritual duck diving—I knew my life needed forward momentum and that I’d drown without filling my lungs with God’s presence. I also knew that at times my head and my heart didn’t feel like connecting to Jesus, but if I just reached out my hands a little, my head and heart would follow. I also knew that once I was under the surface I could stretch out and trust the process, relaxing into the confidence that I would emerge on the other side.
But even though I knew how to go deep, my version of deep was about to be schooled. I needed to go way deeper; the break on the horizon was massive and I was on a heavy longboard.
The Faintest Yes
Here’s where we have to deviate from the duck dive analogy for a moment. The reason is simple: When we are grieving, we don’t need spiritual muscle to dive deep into Jesus. It helps if we’ve already developed muscle memory before being dropped into the North Shore, sure, but the grace of God means he isn’t dependent on our strength, stamina, and precision.
All it takes is our slightest desire, our faintest yes, and he draws us under. I suppose we’ve got to want to dive, but he meets us in the surrender—our weakness releases his strength. His might is manifest in our dependence. People have a remarkable ability to endure hardship when they tap in to their inner strength, but when the source of your inner strength comes from something—Someone—greater than yourself, the reservoir is more vast than you dared imagine.
You’ll find this as you grieve: Some days you’ll have the strength to dive deep—and Jesus will meet you there. Other days you’ll barely manage a nudge in his direction—and he’ll meet you there too. His grace is big enough for both.
As Ryan and I digested the prognosis for our son, the waves of fear and sorrow and grief came with crushing intensity—powerful and close together—but we learned to fill our lungs and dive deep into the safety of Jesus. We had no assurance for Judah’s life or health, but we did have God’s promise to stay with us under the waves.
We were on the edge of transformation, and we could feel it.
Grief invites us to a liminal space—a place to hold on to the comfort and presence of God while suspended between who you are and who you’re becoming. Liminal spaces feel disorienting because they are.
The word liminal comes from the Latin word limina or limen and connotes the idea of a threshold—a space between what was and what will be. The implication is a moving forward into something new, but not without first being transformed by the in-between.
Liminal spaces demand our attention, not just as a means to an end but as a place of transformation. Richard Rohr describes a liminal space as being “in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer,” and likens it to “Israel in the desert, Joseph in the pit, Jonah in the belly, the three Marys tending to the tomb.”1
“This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed,” Rohr says. It’s the “threshold of God’s waiting room.”2
It did seem as if our old world was falling apart, but we were only beginning to catch glimpses of the new one. We felt the movements toward a certain kind of coming of age of our faith—realizing that God’s goodness was not dependent on our assessment of our circumstances or the metrics we tend to use when life is comfortable. (I don’t know about you, but we are sometimes guilty of enjoying favorable circumstances or breakthroughs and proclaiming, “Isn’t God good?!” while conveniently forgetting to proclaim his goodness when life unfolds in ways that hurt.)
While this belief about God’s goodness through all of life’s circumstances wasn’t new to us, the depth of understanding was. It was like learning to open your eyes under water: Even though you know it’s possible, it feels awkward, frightening, and cumbersome at first. And yet the more you practice, the more natural and liberating it feels. Eyes wide open to God’s goodness—especially when it feels risky—changes the way everything else looks too.
Deeper, Still
We learned about Down syndrome in measured doses as Judah’s birth approached, attempting to cushion ourselves from overload or obsessing about what was still unconfirmed. I imagined myself as a mom of a child with special needs, and my thoughts slowly shifted from how it might affect our child and family negatively to how it might transform and enrich our lives as we learned to be changed by this little boy. We moved toward birth with expectancy and peace.
And then he came.
A week before his due date I pulled our gorgeous son to my chest in adrenaline-soaked euphoria after an arduous twenty-one-hour labor. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, when my brain caught up to my heart, that I realized he had been born without Down syndrome.
All of that. For what?
Those pregnant days of holding space for both grief and hope shaped us in ways as a couple and as parents that would become an anchor in the days to come.
We learned to dive deep into Jesus, and even open our eyes under the water, but we would need to go deeper, still.
Journal Prompt: Before moving on to part II, write out your own personal story of loss. Include as much detail as you can recall about what happened and how you felt. Don’t worry about your writing skills or stop to edit; this is to help you remember, and you don’t need to share it with anyone right now. Try to resist writing about lessons you learned or sermonizing to yourself with things you think you “should” write. Let this simply be an exercise in telling your story.