A Light From The Shadows Shall Spring

A Light From The Shadows Shall Spring

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost,
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring,
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
-by J.R.R. Tolkien

I believe there is more to this world than mere flesh and bone, and that our miscarried child—since conception—became an eternal being with a spirit of his own. That spirit just left its temporal shell the night he slipped from my body. My own spirit believes that I will see him again; I will hold him again, in whatever form that may take.

However, I do not get to hold him now. I do not get to watch my womb expand as his flesh and bone expands. This is what makes my spirit weak, as it longs to eternally commune with his.

Is it truly better, then, to have so fiercely loved and lost when I will never get to look into my child’s eyes that were forming right up until the day, the second, the exhalation of my breath during which God knew this unborn child would never take a breath of his own?

Did my own heart skip, as it searched to find the matching beat of his? Did I let the plate float down into the iridescent water and look out at the bruised fall sky, sensing a tectonic shift in the plates of my world?

I don’t know the day, the second, the exhalation of my breath that my baby died, and there is grace in the fact that I do not know. That for a few days—possibly a week—I blissfully toted my toddler on my hip, marveling at the fact that my small body could carry two offspring at once.

But grief demands to be felt.

My spirit yearned to communicate with my body the great loss of such a small being. And so, those plates shifted. Carrying a twenty-seven pound box of books, wiping up milk spots on the kitchen floor, pushing the stroller down our graveled lane – something happened at some point in my earth’s rotation and that separation between mother and child—my son’s body and his spirit—began.

Despite it all, I have felt strong, even supernaturally graced. I have again carried books, wiped milk spots, pushed the stroller down the graveled lane beside which our miscarried child’s body rests. I have even sat at my best friend’s kitchen table as music played and light slanted through her farmhouse windows and said, “I am okay.”

But again, today, the plates shifted and the grief demanded to be felt.

Five weeks after the loss of our child, I began to feel the phantom cramping as my womb once again started the physiological process that filled my heart with such terror the night my miscarriage began.

Today, I went into the bathroom—where I had held our tiny son—and saw, in the mirror, grief personified. A mother of one daughter but two souls looking back.

That daughter was right then in her crib, asleep. I stumbled over to my closet, knelt until my forehead touched the floor in supplication, and blindly pulled one of the shirts from the laundry basket beside me. Covering my face with my husband’s scent, I travailed so hard it seemed my body and spirit were replicating my son’s birth that will never happen.

“God, I want my baby! I want my baby, God!” I screamed this over and over and over. Even in such ardent pain, I was sure to stifle my cries so as not to awaken my daughter.

Grief demands to be felt.

My spirit heard this, and my mind conjured forth images of women all over the world travailing as I was right then—not giving birth but mourning the life that will never happen, the eyes that will never open, the lungs that will never inflate with breath.

I could picture us kneeling in closets or on cold bathroom floors or lying paralyzed in doctors’ offices as the ultrasound screens above us remained dark.

I could see us, not bound together by sadness, but by our mutual loss and love and by the fierce hope that there is more to this world than mere flesh and bone. And that someday our spirits with be able to eternally commune with the spirits of the children who we will not get to hold on this temporal earth.

And in that celestial place, there will be no more travailing, only rejoicing in the life we had thought we had lost.