One of the upsides to our year of living in a tiny house on wheels is that we could pack up and leave the place we associated with our pain.
We drove the long way home across Australia after losing our third baby, Ruby, in Perth. It was autumn and still warm enough for us to be enticed to the beach. Thistle Cove seemed like a fitting place to release our goodbyes. There’s nothing romantic or warm and fuzzy about thistles, and they spring up in places you wish they wouldn’t, but even there among the thistles was an ocean of beauty.
The cove itself was brilliant—clear turquoise waters and frosty white beaches fit for a calendar spread. We found beauty where it shouldn’t have been. It seemed the more we experienced pain with our eyes wide open, the more we noticed beauty was amplified too. Somehow it’s always there in these ugly-beautiful places, dependent only on our willingness to see.
We released balloons scrawled with messages of farewell and sat on the shore with our sadness for a while. And then, as our hearts settled into another layer of acceptance, we stripped to our undies and went for a spontaneous swim in the deserted cove. As you do.
Relationships after loss can feel a bit like Thistle Cove: ugly and beautiful. They hurt and they help. Sometimes you feel deserted, while other times you are spontaneously healed in their embrace.
When You Feel Forgotten
A few days after my second miscarriage that started in Italy and finished in Oregon, I wrote this in my journal:
When we announced this pregnancy we had over 700 likes and comments and messages of celebration. The world loves a baby! We love a happy twist after a hard slog—a “rainbow baby,” they call it! But where are those people now that we’re hurting? Buried under schedules and screens? We have no idea how to enter into one another’s pain and so we don’t. We whisper, “Oh God, help them! Comfort them!” And these prayers are good and right, yes, but when do we start answering those prayers? When do we start being the help and comfort that we pray for? I went to church this weekend, and as soon as I walked in the door I was confronted all over again with all the people who didn’t show up. To make me feel even worse, not a single person acknowledged our miscarriage. I left as alone as when I walked in.
Clearly an angry, hurting person wrote that journal entry, and I can see now that some of the things I wrote weren’t fair, but this is how my grief felt. Ryan’s too. We felt abandoned and disillusioned. Betrayed, even. It was heartbreak upon heartbreak.
We offered our crushed expectations to the Lord and sensed his grace to forgive. It still hurt, but we knew we’d give bitterness the upper hand and wind up hurting even more if we didn’t commit to actively walking in forgiveness. We also knew it wasn’t fair of us to presume why people didn’t show up like we thought they would. As hard as it was, we couldn’t let our feelings be the judge and jury.
Still, we needed our faith in humanity to be repaired.
This Is What the Gospel Looks Like
The following year, when we lost Ruby, the way our friends rallied was so restorative. Even though we were only visiting Perth for a few weeks, I had lived there before marrying Ryan and still had a remnant of dear friends who not only loved us deeply but demonstrated it. The way they loved us through our shock and pain felt like redemption, like a glimpse of heaven.
Also during that time, other friends invited us to come and rest and heal with them, so we detoured south after Thistle Cove before driving back home to Sydney, on the other side of Australia.
We spent more than a week together in their home, and all we did was receive their love. They tended to our hearts as they tended to our bellies. They bought us gifts, pampered us, and created space for us to breathe. They prayed for us. They loved our kids. The women took me to get my hair done and out to eat at a posh restaurant; the men took Ryan to the pub for steak and beers and then out to watch football. They cried with us and laughed with us and prayed with us and sang worship songs over us. This is what the gospel looks like, Ryan and I agreed, these Jesus-people with real hands holding us.
To mourn when others mourn and rejoice when others rejoice is the hard way, but it’s the Jesus way.1 We’re learning how to walk in his way together.
But life gets busy, we know. It’s easy to think someone else is caring for those who are suffering, we know. It’s easy to feel inadequate to care for broken people, we know. Ryan and I have felt all of those things at times—we are guilty of letting our friends and loved ones down. We prayed a lot in those tender days of grief that we wouldn’t lose the sense of urgency to care for others when it was our turn to tend to the brokenhearted. We prayed God’s grace would help us become friends like our friends had been to us after we lost Ruby.
You see, the truth is, people will hurt you when you are grieving because you’re already hurt. Grief is just hard. But you can be restored by people too. Community, especially our church communities, can wound us deeply but can heal us even deeper still. God himself is relationship—the Triune God—and as his image bearers, we are created to be in relationship too.
The Cloud of Witnesses
Years ago I heard YWAM2 Bible teacher Maureen Menard preach on the body of Christ, and she gave the most simple yet profound visual presentation by asking four people to come up to the front. The first three she named “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” and asked them to link arms, representing the perfect communion of the Trinity. She dragged them around the stage to show that wherever the Holy Spirit was, Jesus was too. And wherever Jesus was, so was the Father. And wherever the Father was, so was the Spirit. They do not exist as separate from one another; they’re united in perfect relationship.
Then she invited the fourth person to stand inside this little Trinity circle. She described the position of believers as being in him and had them walk around the room, tripping on each other, giggling, to show how we can’t ever escape the love of God. (God is love, remember? And we exist in him.3)
But then she told us the illustration doesn’t stop there. She asked us to imagine the entire congregation within the circle as well. (Thankfully, she didn’t ask us all to literally squish in.) As we began to imagine ourselves in that divine circle, in community with one another, she interjected to instruct us to now imagine all the saints—past, present, and future—in the circle. All in community with each other and with the perfect community of the Triune God. Remarkable.
It’s hard to wrap our brains around this kind of sacred community that encompasses believers throughout the ages. In our individualistic Western society we have an epidemic of me-centered Christianity. (All you have to do is listen to the songs we sing on Sunday mornings to see that they are almost all centered around me and my relationship with God.) But this was never meant to be the core anchor of our faith. God came to save a people (the nation of Israel) so that all people (all—plural!) could be saved through them. God didn’t come to save or redeem me. He came for us.
At the very core of our being we are wired for relationship with him and with each other. Mourning was never meant to be done alone. Rejoicing was never meant to be done alone. Even salvation was never meant to be done alone—he came for the world.4
But we get this wrong, friends. We just do. I do. You do. Your friends do. Your family members do. Usually, we don’t mean to. Grief and loss and pain are hard and confusing and uncomfortable. We’re clumsy and we mess up community over and over again, but that doesn’t mean we can give up on it. Please don’t give up.
To you whose village didn’t show up: I can relate.
To you who’ve been the recipient of insensitive comments: I can relate.
To you who’ve felt misunderstood: I can relate.
To you who’ve been hurt deeply by relationships while you’re already grieving: I can relate.
The ache is real, and I’m so sorry you’ve been wounded. I want to stand in the place of every person who has inflicted more pain in your grief—intentionally or unintentionally—and ask forgiveness on their behalf. I wish I could!
But consider this, friend: Jesus can relate. His village abandoned him. He was the recipient of insensitive comments. He was misunderstood. He suffered deep wounding in the midst of his own loss. And at the height of his agony, Jesus said this: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34 ESV).
Forgive them. They have no idea.
When Words Wound
In between my first and second miscarriages, I sat around a table eating burgers with several others discussing the day’s sessions after a small conference we attended. The woman across from me ordered a beer. “Thank God I’m not pregnant,” she laughed. “I can’t imagine anything worse right now.” I’m not sure what spurred her comments—maybe an inside joke I wasn’t aware of—but what I was aware of was the color draining from my cheeks. A year after my miscarriage, I hadn’t worked up the courage to try to get pregnant again, but there’s nothing I wanted more. Her “harmless” jest was salt in my wound, not put there by her but present nonetheless.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Whenever I’m asked how many children I have, I almost always say “two” but what I really want to say is “five.” People have no idea how painful this simple question can be. I’ve answered honestly a few times, but then people usually get super uncomfortable. I have to choose between making others feel awkward or being awkward myself. Either way, it hurts.—Jessica
The day I shared about my miscarriage on social media I had someone comment that I should “just adopt,” as if my miscarriage was like going to the store only to discover they were out of the color shoes I hoped to buy. It was so insensitive. Adoption is a huge deal, and although we would consider it, the suggestion (and its timing) was completely inappropriate.—Lori
People often say things like, “I’m so glad you finally got your baby” now that I have a newborn. I know what they mean, but I guess they have no idea how offensive it is as they imply she is a replacement for the baby I lost.—Dominka
The worst is when friends ask me when we’ll start trying again. They have no idea we’ve already been trying for almost a year. We grieve all over again each month that goes by with no positive pregnancy test. I just wish people would consider their questions a little more.—Tessa
My mother-in-law refuses to acknowledge my miscarriage, because in her mind it wasn’t a real baby yet. She even asked me to stop mentioning it publicly because it was embarrassing her to see me “stuck” in my grief in front of her friends.—Anonymous
After my miscarriage, I asked my husband to take a few days off of work to drive me to medical appointments and just to be with me for comfort. His boss refused to give him sick days or bereavement days and said he needed to take his vacation time or work over the weekend instead. It hurts when people don’t recognize miscarriage as the loss of a real person.—Tabitha
When I told my best friend we had lost the baby, she said she knew how we felt and then proceeded to talk about how upset she was when her cat died. I understand losing a pet can be awful, but the timing and comparison was so inappropriate. This little child was a person I expected to far outlive me. I had imagined living my whole life as his mother and, if I was lucky, as a grandmother to his children. I know my friend was trying to relate, but she really hurt me in the process.—Racheal
I declined to attend a baby shower for a friend the week after my miscarriage, and sent a gift along with another friend instead. I felt bad, but I didn’t think I would be able to hold it together and was afraid of crying all the way through it. She texted me later to accuse me of making her big day about myself. It was awful.—Tiffany
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
We can let these types of encounters cause us to reel in indignation, or we can realize they help illuminate one of the deepest problems surrounding miscarriage: We generally don’t know how to respond when people around us are suffering. Perhaps the response is made even more difficult when the suffering comes from a loss that feels abstract to others, such as miscarriage.
I believe part of the reason we find it hard to know how to cope with this type of loss, much less relate to bereaved parents, is because it’s so rarely talked about except behind closed doors. In an age where new parents are born into a world of compulsive confession and social sharing, the silence surrounding miscarriage is deafening. Parents of the social media age, who generally feel free to share whatever they’d like, suddenly feel like they’ve got to keep secrets. Gone is the unmitigated permission to share their parenting journey and in its place is silence and abandonment—perceived or real—that can feel debilitating and isolating. No one talks about it. Or if they do, it’s often with a timid “me too” or “I can relate; let’s talk privately.”
Now please hear me correctly: I’m not saying it’s wrong to be private about miscarriage and loss, but what I do want to point out is the perpetual hush surrounding miscarriage also creates a perpetual secret grief. Grief left in secret isn’t given the opportunity to breathe, receive, and heal in the presence of hopeful, supportive, loving community.
I had a miscarriage almost fifty years ago when I was five months along. One week I was at church obviously pregnant, the next I was obviously not. No one ever said a word. It’s just the way things were back then. All these years later, I’ve begun to let my heart go there again. Strangely, it feels good to feel the grief. It’s lifting the burden, even. I’m glad young people are starting to talk about these things more freely. There’s nothing to be ashamed of and we need each other’s support when we’re hurting.—Alice
I have faith that things are rapidly changing, thanks, in part, to our digital age and the emerging culture influenced by social sharing, and I hope this part of the conversation surrounding miscarriage will be obsolete by the time my children become parents. But for now we’re still grasping for a new cultural blueprint to inform the grieving process after miscarriage and other types of pregnancy and baby loss. The culture is still shifting; the stigma is still lifting.
While the cultural conversation is still so new, we can continue to expect awkward and painful encounters. Unfortunately, you and I might never be on the receiving end of an apology from the ones who cause us pain while we grieve, but if we follow the way of Jesus, that pain doesn’t have to consume us.
Will you forgive? Will you let go of those unmet expectations? Will you accept that you only see a slice of the story and can never know what your friend or family member went through as they watched you grieve? Will you choose instead to believe they did the best they knew how? Or that even if they didn’t, it’s not a reflection of how much you are loved and adored and valued by God?
The painful truth is, people rarely know what to say or how to act around those who are suffering and grieving. Death is complicated, especially in cultures where we don’t tend to make room for expressions of grief and lament. The intangible death of an unborn baby is that much more complicated because it feels so abstract to most people unless they’re right up close.
With all this potential for heartache, you might wonder why it’s worth opening up to others at all, but I’m telling you it’s worth it. This ugly-beautiful mess of community is all we’ve got, and I wholeheartedly believe the world tips toward beautiful because it’s made up of people created in God’s beautiful image.
Community can hurt, but it can heal even deeper. Don’t let the thistles scare you away, or you’ll miss out on something powerful. Opening up to others and allowing them to respond in love will not only help you but change our future. One small conversation at a time, we are shifting culture in an area where we need to grow—where even the church needs to grow: the ability to love and be loved through all of life’s seasons. In rejoicing and mourning, in life and death, humans were created for connection.
Let Forgiveness Change Your Future
Before I close this chapter, I want to ask you to invite the Holy Spirit to examine your heart while you consider a few tough questions.
1) Is there anyone you need to forgive?
If we’re going to grieve with hope, then we need to grieve in community. I know you may feel weak. I know you may feel vulnerable. But can you give your broken heart to Jesus one more time? Can you release this pain to him? Can you grant forgiveness to those who have hurt you even if they never even know they caused a wound? Can you forgive your best friend? Your husband? Your mom who shrugged it off? The doctor who used insulting terminology? The acquaintance who made an insensitive remark? Your boss who didn’t give you time off to recover? Your pastor who didn’t visit? Your sister who never called?
2) Do you need to ask for forgiveness?
Have you been the source of any broken relationships in the wake of your loss? Have you let your sadness cause a wedge between you and a friend? Or let jealousy manifest through harsh words? Have you let your pain justify alienating someone who was trying to help? Have you been quick to judge someone’s response (or lack of response) to your grief? Have you resented your husband for grieving differently and let your feelings harm your intimacy? Have you held bitterness toward an unsympathetic family member and started giving them the silent treatment? Have you pushed your living children away? Have you given up on community, on your church, on family, or on friends because they didn’t meet your expectations?
3) What about God?
Do you need to ask his forgiveness for the way you assigned blame to him? For assuming he doesn’t love you? For accusing him of taking your baby? Or not intervening when he could have? Or believing he doesn’t care about your pain?
4) And lastly, friend, do you need to forgive yourself?
I won’t qualify this question, but simply place it before you to pick up if you need to.
If you answered yes to any of these, I hope you’ll realize that part of God mending your broken heart depends on your willingness to forgive and be forgiven. He is absolutely committed to your healing, but there are things he can’t do for you. He will never force your hand in order to liberate your heart.
The hard and humble work of forgiveness is always worth it.
Note: If you are reading this book to better understand your friend or loved one’s grief, there is a special section at the end of the book for you that delves a bit deeper into how you can care for them while they grieve. Please see appendix E.
Part IV
Invitation
Journal Prompt: Has grief helped expose a need for some soul work so you can be freer to heal? Ask the Holy Spirit if there are issues of shame, guilt, jealousy, comparison, entitlement, or unforgiveness you need to attend to. Have you harbored attitudes or judgments that have shut down God’s work of grace for your grief journey? If applicable, write Jesus a letter of confession and invite him to work within your heart in whatever specific areas he shows you. (If nothing specific comes to mind, don’t force it.) After you’ve confessed to Jesus, ask him if there are any relationships you need to mend, and in your own words ask him for humility and the generosity of spirit to be a minister of reconciliation.5