The most surprising thing about my grief was how surprising it was. I would be cruising along fine one day and then feel run over by a monster truck the next. I never knew what to expect.
Annalyn
While researching this book, I surveyed more than 750 bereaved moms and dads.1 One of the open-ended questions I asked was What surprised you most about your grief? Two common answers emerged: how isolating the experience felt and how deep their sorrow was. After those two, the rest of the answers ranged as wide as the Nebraska plains. Here’s just a sample:
How much I blamed myself
How uncontrollable my grief felt
How bonded I felt to a baby I never knew
That I didn’t feel entitled to grieve
How all-encompassing it was
How relieved I was
How much I felt at peace even while being incredibly sad
The amount of things that served as triggers for my grief
How embarrassed I felt
How much I wanted to cry but couldn’t
How angry I was
How let down I felt by my friends
How differently my husband/wife grieved
That I felt like an utter failure
How much I longed for a substance to numb the pain
How much guilt I had
That I struggled to feel much at all
How much I hated my body
How little I grieved until the birth of my next baby, when all my grief came pouring out
How close to God I felt
How far from God I felt
That I still cry years later
How ashamed I felt
How dismissive people were
How much it affected our sex life and intimacy
How much grief made me yearn to be a mother
The way I struggled with normal things like cooking dinner and taking the trash out
How afraid I was to get pregnant again
How obsessed I was with getting pregnant again
How annoyed I felt by my living children
How much healing my living children gave me
How quickly I questioned things I had always believed about God
How common it is and how many people I know who’ve experienced the same thing
That I had an intense need for privacy
That I had an overwhelming need for company
How tired I felt all the time
How thankful I became for the other good things in my life
How distant I felt from my husband
How close I felt to my husband
How uncomfortable others seemed to feel around me
How much I hated people who had never experienced this
How depressed I became
How quickly I wanted to move on
How awful I felt around pregnant mothers and babies
How guilty I felt to laugh
How much I wanted to hurt myself
How alone I felt when going to church
How much I grew in my faith
As you can see, these responses are all over the place. My point here is there’s no neat and tidy grief box we can pack our experiences into. Having lost three babies to miscarriage myself, I can personally attest to the fact that there’s no uniformity to grief, even within the heart of a single person, much less spread throughout the human experience.
When we lost Scarlett we were blindsided. It was the most sad, tragic, unexpected event of our lives. That loss was characterized most by sorrow.
When we lost Oliver we were blindsided again. We genuinely thought our first miscarriage was a one-off and were truly shocked to be thrust into the pain all over again. Although there was sadness surrounding our loss, we felt more anger than anything else. We felt robbed and violated by what seemed like such injustice. We were angry it had happened at all, angry it had happened in Italy while I was on the “trip of a lifetime,” angry people around us didn’t show up the way we thought they would (or should), angry we had to go through the grieving process again, angry we had no understanding—no physical explanation of why this was happening. The whole thing felt like a mounting avalanche of anger.
But losing Ruby, our third miscarriage, was different yet again.
When Grief Feels like . . . Nothing
My first miscarriage was in Australia in far northeast Queensland, and my second was split between Italy and Oregon (where we lived during our ministry sabbatical). The third happened when we were living in a 95-square-foot caravan2 in our friends’ driveway in Perth, on the other side of Australia.
So as you can see, my family was rootless at the time—in a seismic transition from one ministry and state to another—but tragedy doesn’t wait until a good time. It interrupts without discretion.
While visiting friends on our long drive west, we took communion together and ended our time in prayer. During prayer I sensed God’s whisper that he would give us another baby girl. We would name her Ruby to remind us of God’s promise from Isaiah 54 to rebuild Jerusalem with precious jewels. I kept this to myself, and again we entered the emotionally fraught territory of trying to conceive.
When the pink lines appeared soon after, I was terrified and anxious. I was excited to be pregnant—believing, again, that our baby was a gift from God—but two miscarriages in a row had left me feeling like a statistical misfit. Deep in my bones I felt like my body wasn’t responding as it should.
Though I wanted to, I struggled to free-fall into love or dream of a future with this baby. Instead, I put my energy into finding a doctor willing to order early pregnancy screenings.
I booked a dating scan and had my hormone levels checked. The scan measured me as five weeks along; I knew I should have measured seven. My pregnancy hormone levels were far below what they should have been. They sent me home to wait, so, like the obedient patient I am, I went to the emergency department at the women’s hospital and pleaded to see someone who would take my suspicions seriously. Perhaps there was no blood to prove it, but I was losing the child and I knew it.
They admitted me, and it was true: another little body without a heartbeat. Before I ever started to bleed, I booked another D&C. I couldn’t bear to wait in limbo, possibly for weeks, for my uterus to catch up to what the rest of me knew. I needed my dead baby out.
I felt numb, like an empty shell of a woman whose body had fallen apart without giving notice.
The Best of the Worst
The D&C went smoothly and easily—I was assigned a good surgeon who was as skilled at bedside manner as she was at scraping me clean. I can’t even remember her name, but when she kneeled down to eye level by my chair to go through the presurgery protocol, I immediately loved her and felt safe with her. She was gentle and compassionate and made me feel human, not simply another woman in a robe lined up for a common medical procedure.
It seems strange to say, but my third miscarriage was the best of the three. I realize best is a ridiculous term to use within these circumstances, but something about having “known” things were wrong from the start helped ease the trauma. That, coupled with a straightforward hospital experience, helped me come to terms with the fact that I had become an anomaly—I was now classified with “recurrent miscarriages” and plopped by the medical profession squarely into the infertility camp.
There was something wrong with me. I had no idea how to process that.
Of all my miscarriages, this one was the most expected, most swift, and most well cared for. I didn’t know how to feel the sorrow and anger in the same way I had before. Mostly I just felt defeated. Why bother trying to grow our family, regardless of what we believed God had said?
Genetic testing confirmed our baby was, indeed, a girl, and we smiled at the news, having already named her Ruby Hannah. (The boys chose Hannah, which we liked; it seemed fitting to name her after a woman of heartache and hope.3)
Tests also confirmed there was nothing wrong with her. For the third time we had no answers.
Small and Hushed
While losing Scarlett and Oliver left me with a compulsion to write volumes, by the time I lost Ruby my well was dry.
What does a mother say after the third death of a baby? There were no words left. I had already begun work on this book, but in my despondency I put it all away, leaving the manuscript to gather dust on the shelf along with my dreams.
If there were words in my heart, they must have been buried deep, because nothing surfaced for months. In fact, six months passed before I could pick up a pen, and even then it was reluctantly, knowing my soul needed room to breathe and that my soul-breathing often took the shape of writing. I needed to write in order to grieve.
Writing wasn’t the only thing that went quiet over that time. God seemed quiet too. I didn’t know how to hear him. I didn’t know how to speak. I grappled with the “shoulds” of prayer but felt no desire to push past the silence and try to connect in that way.
I barely prayed during those months of dull grief, at least not in the “Dear Jesus” way. When I did it felt like dragging a wheelbarrow through mud—heavy, slow, difficult. I had to learn to make peace with the silence and believe God was still present even when I didn’t know how to feel him. (I had not yet learned how to pray the liturgy but I imagine this spiritual practice would have been life-giving to me during this period.4)
God continued to show me goodness, so I knew he was there, but everything was shadowy. Those long, muted months taught me that honest prayer can sometimes be formed with no words at all as we lean in and embrace the comforting knowledge that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us.5
I was tired—overwhelmingly so. My grief was buried under fatigue, and I realized that weariness is a form of sorrow disguised. I needed to give permission for my quietness to be without trying to manipulate it into something productive or “helpful” to the grieving process. Being quiet and tired made me feel numb, and feeling numb made me feel tired. I wondered if I was depressed.
During that time I visited a professional counselor. Surely there was more buried under the surface, I thought to myself. Three miscarriages in three years is a lot of heartache. But as I shared pieces of my story with the counselor week after week, I felt removed—like the story included me but didn’t move me. I just didn’t feel the grief like I had before. I kept hoping to, as if feeling something would make me feel better.
After four or five sessions the psychologist said she didn’t need to see me anymore unless I wanted to. She thought I was coping and healing “just fine.” I left in agreement with her—I was “fine”—but I still wondered if there was more to it. I wanted to feel deep sadness or hot anger—anything that would stir my soul. I wanted to give better expression to the void in my mother’s heart. Didn’t my daughter deserve that?
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I had mild depression. I’m not sure why the psychologist couldn’t see it, but I stumbled along, quiet in my grief and caring for my soul the best I could. I continued to give God the “faintest yes” while he stayed with me in my grief.
This was the only way I could grieve the loss of Ruby: small and hushed. I could only grieve the way I could grieve. And so can you. We can’t force an expression of grief; we can only live the one that’s authentic.
So tell me: What is it your heart longs to give expression to? Is it loud and large? Small and silent? How can you own your grief in this season and let it run its natural course in the safe presence of Jesus? There is no “right” way forward, but there is a way forward.
Let Grief Transform You
I’ve come to learn that grief must be swallowed—not to make it disappear but to let it absorb into us, become a part of us, change us, and nurture us from the inside out. It will change the way you relate to others, the way you watch the news, read your Bible, pray. It will change your expectations of yourself, your marriage, your work, your parenting, the way you see God, even the metaphors you use for your life. In all of these things, turn toward Jesus and let grief shape you like him. This, too, is spiritual formation.
The Bible teaches us that anything (your grief included!) can be redeemed for our good if we’re willing to cooperate. “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28 RSV, emphasis mine). The original Greek word we translate into work here (sunergeó), actually means “coworking; being a partner with; or working together,” meaning God isn’t just going to rescue us from the mess and make something good out of it, he’s going to partner with us to see good come about.6 We aren’t his project to fix; we’re cocreators of something good. We’re in this together. What hope we have!
No one can prescribe the way forward for you, but there is a way forward—ask Jesus to lead you and do what brings peace to your soul. You can’t expect to simply “get over” the loss of your child, but you will get through the days of heavy grief—not by skirting around them but by stepping straight in and embracing the process with Jesus. Grant yourself permission to go at your own pace. Allow yourself the freedom to feel what you feel without trying to quantify or qualify your pain. Your humanity isn’t a burden to God; it’s a gift that will keep you tethered to him. Stay close. Dive deep. Create something good together.
Grieving Well
As I close this section, I want to pose a few questions and offer some suggestions, but you’ve got to know this whole thing must be immersed in grace. There is no “right” way to grieve, but I believe you can find a way to grieve well. Remember: Grief is a process, not a project.
Let’s start here: What might it look like for you to grieve well? How might you make peace with your grief while it works its way through your mind and heart? Are you willing to deep dive into the presence of Jesus in the midst of those pounding waves, knowing that sometimes you can’t hear him under there? In what ways do you need to give yourself grace as you heal?
There are healthy and unhealthy ways to grieve—healthy, constructive coping mechanisms and unhealthy, destructive ones. Giving yourself permission to feel sad and depressed is not the same thing as refusing to get out of bed for weeks on end. Confessing your feelings of anger or rage is different than unleashing them on loved ones. Running to relieve tension is different than running away from the people who care about you most. Eating comfort foods that nurture you from the inside is different than medicating your pain with a freezer full of ice cream. Having a glass of wine and a heart-to-heart with your girlfriend is different than hiding a bottle of gin in the closet.
How will you cope when the grief feels consuming? What are the things that might bring life to your soul?
You might find, like me, that writing helps you to process your grief, or that listening to (or playing) music feeds your soul. You might need to join a support group or Bible study. You might need to make a memory box, or leave the baby things out until you’re ready to say goodbye, or pack them up straightaway. You may need to speak to a professional counselor or take antidepressants so you can process your grief with a clearer mind. You may need to commit to a practice of scripture meditation or regular journaling or centering prayer. Do you need to arm yourself with scientific and medical knowledge? Do you need to dig into the Bible to solidify your theology of heaven? Do you need to join an online support forum and walk alongside other grieving mothers?
Remember, grieving “well” is not the same thing as grieving “right.” To grieve well means to find yourself within Jesus even when you’re taking these intentional steps of self-care.
Live your grief. If you are willing to embrace your loss and heartache and pain, you’ll be able to own your grief without letting your grief own you. God’s grace doesn’t heal you from grief; it heals you as you grieve and then right through to the other side.
You Are Not Alone
Be honest about your pain and your grief—with yourself, your loved ones, and God. Walking through grief together with trusted loved ones is a disarmingly powerful fellowship—a joy entangled in the pain. I pray you’ll discover the fullness of that experience. We were never meant to grieve alone.
Even Jesus himself needed his closest friends while experiencing profound sorrow.
They went to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and Jesus said, “Sit here while I go and pray.” He took Peter, James, and John with him, and he became deeply troubled and distressed. He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” (Mark 14:32–34)
There are a thousand shades of grief, but Jesus understands every single one. He will meet you in the deep and will stay there with you as long as it takes. Forever, actually. You will never be alone.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Ps. 73:26 ESV)
Part III
Invitation
Journal Prompt: Write a letter to yourself, granting yourself permission to let go of any unrealistic expectations you have about grief, and to feel and grieve in the presence of Jesus. If you’re able, identify things that might stifle your grieving process and bring them before the Lord. This is also a good time to consider what will help you grieve well. Do you need to share your story with a friend, with a support group, or more widely (such as a personal blog or social media post)? Do you need to speak with your health-care provider about seeing a counselor or to assess the need for other health measures (such as medication)? Do you need to reach out to your husband and be more honest about how your miscarriage is affecting you? Even if you’re still looking for the answers to these questions, write yourself permission to explore your grief and find your way within it.