In Every Season

In Every Season

On midnight, October 7th, as my husband and I knelt on the cold slate floor of our bathroom and stared down at our son cupped in my palm, I found that the most tragic event of my adulthood was also one of the most beautiful.

I was only ten weeks along, but in the weeks since we’d learned of our baby’s existence, we had picked out a name and my husband had commemorated the occasion by adding an opening verse to our nineteen-month-old daughter’s “theme song”:

“Mommy loves you; Daddy loves you; Baby loves you too!”

The week before, I had taken an IntelliGender test on a whim, which boasts of 90% accuracy.

It said that our baby was a boy.

We joked that he would look like me, since our daughter looks just like my husband. I read books to our daughter — Guess How Much I Love You, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, On The Night You Were Born, The Dreamer –- and imagined that he was tucked away inside me, listening too. I pictured the three of us nestled together on that glider in the spring.

So, though the clear, amniotic sack containing him was only the size of a grape and he was far smaller than that, he was still our son. Our child. Through the tears coursing down my face, and the sobs that wracked my body, I could see the miniscule ridge of his spine and marveled at the miracle of life, even as I mourned his death.

Time passed and the amniotic sack darkened, a window into another world now closed.

My husband put on his boots and said he would like to bury him that night. I dried my cheeks on the sleeve of my robe and nodded. We wrapped our child and gently laid him in a small Tupperware container gathered from the drawer in the kitchen where our daughter loves to play.

Outside, it was drizzling and black. Mist clung to the edges of our lane as my husband and I walked side by side over the gravel that crunched beneath my galoshes. The weather was almost too textbook for such a somber event, as if we were just actors in a play dealt by a larger hand.

But, as I stood next to the cedar-rail fence and my husband began digging the tiny grave, I did not feel angry at God, the greatest playwright of all time. If anything, I felt closer to Him. I suddenly saw that death and life move together as seamless as a stream. And yet, in our fallibility, we believe we hold the power to contain its ebb and flow when He is the one who controls everything.

My husband leaned on the shovel and wiped the moisture from his face. I did not know if it was from tears or rain.

“It reminds me of burying Grandpa Elam,” he said. “We men took turns with the shovel until the hole was filled.” He glanced down at the earth. “We each return here—dust to dust–just some return here sooner than others.”

After the grave was finished, we held the container between our bodies and said a prayer. We laid our son to rest, covered him, and then walked back toward our home, hand-in-hand and weeping. Inside those walls my husband had built, we knew our daughter lay sleeping in her mint and cream nursery. She was, and will forever remain, our Balm of Gilead.

The day after was hard. A kind text, a song, holding my daughter’s hand while scattering petals from the rose bush across our son’s grave . . . that fierce current of grief pulled me under time and time again.

In the afternoon, I drove over to my sister-in-law’s and saturated in her and my mother-in-law’s compassion and love and the laughter of my daughter playing with her cousins.

I didn’t cry when they prayed for me and thought that I must not have any tears left. But driving down the covered road toward our home, I listened to “Desert Song” by Hillsong and the mourning resumed.

All of my life
In every season
You are still God
I have a reason to sing
I have a reason to worship.

The velocity of my car tumbled yellow leaves across the pot-holed asphalt. Late afternoon sun slanted through the trees that the loggers hadn’t stripped, and I could see that, from the ashes of death, new life would rise again.

And soon, my song would rise with it.

I didn’t know until a friend shared with me, but “Desert Song,” which has become my mantra this week, has a testimony of its own. One of the lead worship leaders for Hillsong lost her son when she was six months pregnant. The album was going to be made a few days later, and she knew that she had to sing . . . regardless of her grief.

Her story challenged me, and though we had only told our family and close friends about our pregnancy, I knew that I needed to share about our loss through my writing, in case it could bring hope to someone who has walked through this pain.

If you have ever suffered from a miscarriage, please know that you are not alone. If you would like to share about your journey, you can email me through my contact page. One of the most blessed things about a tragedy such as this is how it expands our capacity to grieve with others.

Much love,