Trust in God?

I'm writing this post in the hopes that others who are struggling with something similar will take comfort in knowing they are not alone. I don't like being this vulnerable because I'm afraid of what people will think. I am afraid of being judged.

The only way I know to break through this barrier of fear, though, is to begin.

It's very hard to return to an image of a good, caring, loving God after seeing him allow something terrible to happen to someone you love.

My daughter was the sweetest, most precious little baby girl I have ever laid eyes on. Even though she is now gone, I still love her as fiercely as any mother ever loved her child. And I wish with all my heart that she were here, that I was dealing with diapers and midnight feedings and fatigue and all the things parents complain about.

The strength of my love, from the time of my pregnancy onward, made it even harder to see all she had to go through in her tiny six pound body. She had two surgeries, the first on her abdomen resulting in a colostomy bag, the second with her returning from the ER with her chest still open and a small cloth tent sewn over the hole. We could see her fragile heart beating beneath the fabric patch. It was left open in case emergency intervention was needed. It was traumatic to see my babe of under two months old lying there open, bruised from having her sternum broken and her ribs pulled apart. It was traumatic each time her heart failed, we almost lost her, and they brought her back, each time putting her on more machines to try to keep her alive.

How do people who have been through terrible tragedies return to any trust in God? I think of the victims of genocide, war, rape, torture... For many, relief from the pain and answers on this earth never come. And for me, as for many, the pain of what she had to go through continues to grind away in the core of my being, at times with a literal, physical impact.

I know the pat answers Christians provide to these questions. That God didn't cause the event; a sinful, fallen world caused the event. But I struggle with how a loving God could even so much as allow these terrible, painful things - especially to one so innocent, so small, so vulnerable.

And it makes it very difficult to trust in God, for anything at all, great or small, ever again.

Nothing in my life experience prepared me for this. And it seems like a harsh way to learn.

Less Alone

I spent the last week in training for work. During the group introductions on Day 1, I realized that there is an often silent minority of individuals in our society who may wish to have biological children, but do not.

As we went around the room and gave introductions, those who had children shared about them as a central part of their lives, as they should be. I was sitting there thinking and wondering if I was the only one in the room who wished they could say the same, but could not.

Our baby girl gave us her first and only hint of a smile on the way to her heart catheter procedure, which would be the first in a domino series of events that would ultimately end her life.

Whether due to infertility, miscarriages, a child being stillborn, losing a child later in life, or simply not finding the right partner, I am realizing there are more of us out there than meets the eye. This is because we often don't talk about the loss, the missing piece, the disappointment. Even Facebook is a microcosm of this issue: many people seem to post about the highlights in life and bury the low points.

As I walked back to our training room from lunch one day, I heard one classmate talking to another about their plans for the holiday week. The first woman said to the other that her 14-year-old son had been adopted via an open adoption process, so he was visiting with his birth family for a few days. Looking at this woman, I never would have guessed that for whatever reason, she ended up adopting her son. Admittedly, I am making a giant assumption that this woman chose adoption because biological conception was not an option -- but given the cost of adoption, allow me this luxury for the sake of argument.

I think it is easy to assume we are the only ones who have struggled with some loss. It helps, though, to know that we are not alone. There are often others who are walking similar roads, and they are closer than we may think.

When we have enough courage to open up about our challenges, the results may surprise us. For me, at least, it has resulted in feeling less alone on the path of life. And feeling less alone is worth the risk.

Uncooked

It is difficult to know how to grieve in Western society. I've been encouraged to share my feelings with others more, to talk about what I'm going through, because it aids the healing process. In our world, though, there are not a lot of good outlets for this.

One family I've observed who recently lost a precious 5-year-old daughter seems to be facing the same problem. They have posted about their anguish on their daughter's Facebook page, and I'm happy to report, many people either "like" those comments or reply with encouraging words.

Maybe the internet is the new way that we share our grief. There certainly are not a whole lot of other socially acceptable ways to express grief.

I've quoted Joan Didion's book before on this blog. It's so insightful that I just can't help it. Here's what she found about grief in our society.

"Philip Aries, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. 'Death,' he wrote, 'so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.'"

- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking



Try to stay with me... I know this is a bit academic-sounding, but in my experience it is pretty true to life.

"The English social anthropologist Geoffry Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new 'ethical duty to enjoy oneself,' a novel 'imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.' In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was 'to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.'"

- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking



Now, any therapist worth their salt will tell you that mourning is not self-indulgent. It is an absolutely critical process that a person has to walk through, often for years, in order to heal emotionally. And yet, our society doesn't seem to be comfortable with letting people do just that.

Maybe for we Americans, it is our independent streak that gets the better of us. Our culture prizes the attitude of pulling ourselves up by our boot straps and moving on. Often I've heard the quote "when the going gets tough, the tough get going." This isn't always the healthy thing to do though. The many emotions of grief, if not given air, will fester below the surface and eventually come to the forefront again.

This is an excerpt from the memoir Angelica Huston has been writing since her husband of 16 years, the artist Robert Graham, died in 2008.

"I like to be associated with strength rather than weakness and misery. But we're made up of all of these components. There's always a moment where you are deeply alone in your own skin, and it's hard to come to terms with it. There's a period after something like the death of a spouse where you can totally understand why widows wore veils.

"Because no one should really look upon you for a couple of years, and you really shouldn't look upon anyone else. You're very tender; you feel like something uncooked. And people can be very unpleasant when you're in a state of grief."

- Excerpt from Angelica Huston's memoir, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal online

I love the way she uses the word "uncooked" here. I've often felt tender, vulnerable, like I was going out in public with a big bulls eye on my torso. To me, it seems like people should have a special designation when they are going through grief. Like a "fragile, handle with care" sticker that lets others know this individual is going through a difficult time, so please show some mercy.

It doesn't work that way, though. I've come to grips with the fact that in most social settings, I will have to be the one to bring up my daughter in conversation. Most people will not ask how I'm doing or extend their sympathies at this point. They look embarassed, averting their eyes and mumbling condolensces, if I relate a lesson that she taught me, or a story from her life.

And I cannot blame them: they have no pattern for doing this; they haven't observed anyone else around them responding to grief in an open way. Maybe they don't realize that it takes a long, long time for these wounds to heal, and that I will never forget my daughter, she will always be a part of me, always on my mind. If that means I have to walk through life a little bit uncooked, then it is worth it... she was, and is, worth it.