http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/fashion/21love.html?pagewanted=1&em
but it's really good. maybe not quite appropriate for the next week
in my life, but...it is a little applicable. but it's really sad. if
you are pregnant, you might want to skip it.
if you do read it, i think it raises some interesting questions. it
does seem like our culture (big culture and subculture) doesn't really
have a good way to deal with unborn loss. Please don't turn this into
something about abortion--i realize it's related, but that's not what
i'm interested in.
this is a quote from the man after he sent out an email to his
college, telling about his still-born son:
"AND then came the outpouring: for weeks after, people I barely knew
would come into my office, gently shut the door and burst into tears.
I heard stories of single and serial miscarriages, pregnancies carried
nearly to full term, stillbirths — all the lost, lost children. Grief
hauled about, and nowhere to put it down. Some said they had never
told anyone; who would understand?"
When we lost our baby (our first baby, even if I don't take the time
to explain why I want to say "no" when people ask if Iris is our first
baby..I just say yes and move on), people kept telling us all their
sad stories, like our grief gave them permission to sort of re-grieve
and be sad again, even though some of them were very matter-of-fact,
and almost even jolly about their losses. At the time, i really wanted
to bitterly resent their sadness, that I was having to carry their
burden as well as the heavy weight of my own. I'm still not sure that
I would tell someone I knew had recently miscarried about mine. Nobody
else lost OUR baby, the pieces of DNA that could only come from me and
Roy and that merged together in a unique (and probably fatal) way and
lived in my belly for a little while.
And we are delighted to have Iris but she isn't the baby we lost.
this post maybe continued...but i really have to stop now. but anyway.
our culture sucks at baby grief. how can it get better?
5 comments:
The church hasn't helped. It has been a little inconsistent. When your mother and I lost our first via miscarriage, there was no action from the church indicating that a real baby had died. When Granville and Judith lost one by stillbirth, we had a funeral where they distributed the poem I had written when we learned of the tragedy when we went to rejoice with them in the hospital. Tan and I may have lost two, but it is hard to tell. What is an empty sac, anyway? Everything was there except an embryo. Was there ever one there to grieve the loss of? We grieved, anyway.
amen.
even though you warned me, i read it anyway.
horribly, horribly sad.
I think sometimes what is true sounds trite. It's hard to hold onto the truth when the pain is so strong. "All the lost, lost children" are in God's hands - the best place they can be - which our culture would accept minus the gospel, without which it is trite.
Hey, look! I finally posted it:
Your dad's comment (at least the first part) made me think, too. We don't have any of the normal death and grieving processes for lost babies. I never really thought about it before, but when someone's friend or parent or sibling dies, you don't "comfort" them by going up and telling them about all the people close to you that have died. Why do we do that with babies? When someone gets
sick with cancer or whatnot, sharing stories is often comforting or encouraging, but really only from people who have experienced the same thing. And the loss of life is not the same thing as being sick. Sick people are still in the journey. Dead babies and adults have already reached the end of their journey. Those left behind have a different struggle.
Anyway, I still think about your and Roy's first baby, and I look forward to meeting that little one in heaven.
And another question or so I thought of since I wrote that: why don't we have funerals for "miscarriages"? I think as anti-abortion as our church is (and should be), it's rather inconsistent not to treat the death of an undeveloped baby with the same regard as that of a fully developed person. And why do we expect the presence of a term pregnancy to relieve the grief of a lost child? Gaining a friend after losing one is wonderful, but it doesn't change the fact that you lost a friend. You're right, Em. Our culture is really bad at this. I think we're bad at grief in general, too.
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