For they shall be comforted

When someone dies, they are gone. Whatever our beliefs about the afterlife, nothing prepares us for the harsh reality that the person we knew and loved is not here on earth anymore, for the remainder of our natural lives. The finality of this is shocking and intense, at least it was for me when I experienced it.

Friends lost a loved one this week, and the familiar feelings are all haunting me again. The vacancy, the hole. The impossibility that a person can be here one day, gone the next. It is a reality altered, our world unhinged. It is a great mystery of the universe, how a life can profoundly impact others so greatly, yet be gone in the blink of an eye.

It's been over two years since Liza passed. And yes, I am still processing her death. In our society I could be blamed for wallowing, but friends, our society isn't so good at grief.

A book I'm reading featured this quote.

"Healthy are those who mourn. Only very recently have we begun to realize that to deny grief is to deny a natural human function and that such denial sometimes produces dire consequences.

"Any event, any awareness that contains a sense of loss for you can, and should, be mourned. This doesn't mean a life of incessant sadness. It means being willing to admit to an honest feeling rather than always having to laugh off the pain. It's not only permissible to admit the sadness that accompanies loss - it's the healthy option."

- Donald L. Anderson, Better than Blessed

Sometimes when I read the Sermon on the Mount, it brings feelings of anger. "Blessed are those who mourn," Jesus said. Mourning doesn't feel like a blessing. It brings about some of the most painful feelings I have ever experienced. It has been one of the darkest seasons of my life.

It seems to be an essential part of the human experience, though. It is necessary in a fallen world where things are far less than ideal. So I'm clinging to the second part of the verse, "for they shall be comforted." Whether in this life or the next, I believe there is comfort for all who mourn. And that is worth holding onto.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Some old Christmas carols have been giving me so much comfort this year. Thought I would take some excerpts and compile them together in a post. It's a meditative exercise for me, and I hope it brings you comfort and joy too.

Come to Bethlehem and see
Christ Whose birth the angels sing;
Come, adore on bended knee,
Christ the Lord, the newborn King.

See Him in a manger laid,
Whom the choirs of angels praise;
Mary, Joseph, lend your aid,
While our hearts in love we raise.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the Soul felt its worth.

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.
And in his name all oppression shall cease.

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface.
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy!

Merry Christmas, from our house to yours.

White Horse for Christmas

The other night while I made dinner, I heard a song called "White Horse for Christmas" by the group Over the Rhine. It's a wonderful lullaby that we played for Liza Jane while she was in the hospital. You can listen to it here.

The song took me back to the night in early December 2010 when we played it for our three-week-old baby girl. At the time she was doing fairly well, and although we knew she would need some difficult surgeries soon, we were still optimistic.

I held her in my arms that night in her hospital room, and later we gave her a bath. Those moments were and still are so precious to me. And I had no idea the horrible ordeal we were about to experience, culminating with having to remove her from life support several weeks later and say goodbye, as we sent her into the sky to meet Jesus on his white horse.

As the song played, I cried for missing her. I also cried for myself in that moment, because at the time I was still so innocent and unaware that I was about to lose her. And I cried because my baby is riding her white horse through the sky now, and I cannot be with her.

This past week there was a terrible tragedy in Connecticut. My heart is going out to the mothers there. When they packed their kids' lunch that morning, bundled them in winter coats and dropped them off for kindergarten, they had no idea they were about to lose them in a terrible massacre.

I pray for those mothers, that somehow their broken, shattered hearts will survive through this Christmas season. We never know if the moment we have with our loved ones will be the last one we will ever have on this earth. And this was a terrible, unfair way to learn.

I'll close with the words to the song, "I want to speak with the angel who said 'do not be afraid.'" It is a small comfort that we must not fear what comes after death. Those words, "do not be afraid," are what I cling to, now more than ever.

Two

Today, Liza Jane would have turned two years old. I woke up this morning almost exactly at the time she was born. We've had a weekend full of remembering her, crying for her, wishing we could will her back to this earth.

I'm so thankful to family members who spent time having a birthday rememberance with us on Friday night. Among other things, we made sweet heart-shaped ornaments in memory of her. My sister made a birthday cake. My almost-3-year-old niece offered to blow out the candles for Liza since she was in heaven and couldn't come to her party.

The whole night, I felt like I was seeing a shadow of a tiny two year old in the room. Since she had Down syndrome, she may or may not have been walking by this time. The low muscle tone that comes with the condition means everything takes a little bit longer. I would have been okay with her not walking yet. I love the soft, cuddly baby stage.

It's been a hard few days leading up to this. Today I think I'm just glad it's almost over. Anyone who has lost a child knows you spend a lot of time dreading the special milestones.

And now, I'm drained and ready to think about something else. So I'm signing off and saying happy birthday, dear Liza, happy birthday to you. I still love you, baby girl. And I'm glad that you are not struggling anymore.

We Go On

This weekend we had the privilege of interacting with some members of another family who lost a child recently. Their loss was under much different circumstances, but there are similarities in the way we moms and dads feel.

After conversing for a few minutes about our experiences of sorrow and pain, we both moved on to other activities at the picnic we were attending. Times of grief flow into motion, a choice to continue and to participate in life.

And so we go on.

The alternative to going on is to simply stop. It is tempting sometimes when the heart wrenching reality of the gaping hole is yawning within us. When a child is lost, there is an empty space in our lives that refuses to be filled.

But... stopping living, breathing, experiencing life is not an option. Choosing not to live, not to embrace life despite the pain, is the same as choosing to die.

Our children would not want that for us.

So we continue. We pause, we remember, we reflect and feel. And then we gather our scattered heart strings from the four winds and we put one foot in front of the other and choose to live.

This is how we go on.

The view from our seats at an outdoor concert the other weekend. One of the many ways that we choose to go on without our daughter. It was a gorgeous day.

The Loss of Motherhood

This post could also be titled The Loss of Parenthood or Fatherhood or even Grandparenthood, but it is almost Mothers day, and I wanted to share a quote by C.S. Lewis about motherhood.

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to 'glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.

- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I've heard stories of people who had lost a child being frustrated with the condolences that well-meaning friends offer to them. People often make statements like "well, he is in a better place now" or "at least we know she is not suffering any more." To many parents, these kinds of statements are a non-consolation.

For me, it did help to think of my daughter in a better place when she first passed. Her existence was so sub-par during the last half of her life as she lay still on her bed, unable to do all the things little babies are supposed to do. It came as a relief to me that she was free from the confines of her inadequate body. And it did and still does help to think that my daughter has not lost the end for which she was created, as I mentioned in this post.

In the long run, though, it was clear that my "specifically maternal happiness must be written off," as C. S. Lewis so elegantly said. And I would argue that it doesn't matter how many children one has. Even if there are other children in the home, there is a specific joy in that one single child that is lost forever when that child is gone. It is the loss of that child in the present as well as in the future. The loss of all the things that child may have done with his or her life, and the loss of what it would mean to be a mother to that child.

Elizabeth Stone said, "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." As we approach Mother's Day, which is a bittersweet occasion for those of us who have lost a child, I think this rings especially true. Although, when the child is no longer on this earth, our hearts sometimes feel more like they are wandering around in the emptiness of the universe instead, untethered, lost in a void.

This butterfly visited my back yard today, a sweet memory of her.

Learning to Survive

We talked with some new friends this past week about their experience losing their son nearly 18 years ago. He was only a day old when he passed into the next world at the hospital. We cried together as we shared our experiences with one another.

As we compared notes, we realized that both of us had a very similar experience when we left the hospital after the day our children died. The first thing we realized was that we were hungry, and we went to a restaurant to eat.

Looking back on it now, I think this was our first act of survival. And that is exactly what parents do after losing a precious son or daughter: they learn to survive. For many years, I've noticed in obituaries how they list the deceased person's family members who are still alive in this way: He/she is survived by.... and a list follows of siblings, children, etc. I had never realized how literally true this is.

The funeral home that made the arrangements for Liza Jane gave us a helpful pamphlet called "Surviving the death of a child: How to live when your child has died." It described the experience of losing a child more eloquently than I can.

"The death of a child is viewed as the greatest of all tragedies. When we lose a child, it is as if a part of us dies, too. We feel our children's every hurt, we instinctively know what they need, and we live to protect them. When they die, the loss of this connection can bring on the most terrible kind of grief. There are ways of managing the pain and grief, however, so that it doesn't overwhelm your life and does allow you to move on."

The Free Dictionary online says that to survive is to remain alive or in existence, to carry on despite hardships or trauma. Surviving is hard work. It takes an effort to make a choice to go on living. There have been many days over the past year where it has taken an act of my will to get out of bed in the morning. It has been a battle to make simple choices to eat nutritious food, to get myself out of the house into the fresh air, to exercise and do simple things to take care of myself. All of these things are part of surviving.

It is hard sometimes not to feel guilty for enjoying life when she is gone and can no longer experience it with us. Over time, the intensity of this feeling does lessen, but her absence still remains.

A working mother in a novel I read described the experience of being separated from her infant son while she was at work. As she left him with his nanny and began her journey to work, it felt like a spool of thread inside of her was unwinding, with the other end being attached to her son. All day long, the further she got away from him in time and space, the more that spool unwound until at the end of the day, she felt as if she would fall apart. She would race to get back to him as quickly as possible so that spool of thread would wind up tightly again, bringing them back together at the moment he came into her arms.

I felt this way each evening that we left Liza at the hospital so we could go home for some nourishment and sleep. Each morning, I felt almost panicky until I got back to the hospital. My spool of thread was unwound, and it wouldn't be right again until I was back with her.

Now that she is gone, though, I can't get that spool of thread back together. She is out there, somewhere, dangling at the end of it, and I am unwound inside, missing her, longing for her. This feeling is more intense some days than others.

And yet, life goes on. The sun continues to rise and set. We have to go on getting up in the morning and participating in life. Sometimes it is tempting to try to make something happen so that spool can be tightly wound again - I won't lie. But it is my choice to honor my daughter's memory by living... not only that, but living as well as I can, and with as much love for those around me as possible. I'm learning to survive.