I’ve had two miscarriages in the last 14 months. My fingers stumble on the keyboard, hovering, trying to find just the right words. Miscarriage is too sterile and I hate it sitting up there. Pregnancy loss is too minimizing—I lost more than a pregnancy. Infant loss isn’t right either. Does my grief get to share the same words with a woman who’s lost a full-term baby? But maybe words just fail in this sacred space. Nothing sounds right because nothing is right.
Two lives. Two souls. Two beloveds. Both were greeted with ecstatic, delirious joy. I’ve born four babies and adopted another and the wonder of life has always captivated me. The quiet stillness of creation unfolding inside my body, cell after cell knitting together all while I do laundry and cook dinner and drive my car. To carry around with me the sweet secret of creation, to participate with the God of all in the making of new life is a most precious gift. It’s an intimacy with the miraculous.
Both times, things progressed slowly and cautiously and then, eventually, stopped progressing altogether. I learned the language of beta counts and HCG doubling and crown to rump lengths. I googled myself into madness looking for hope. I begged God for miracles right up until the end at eight weeks and ten weeks. I’d loved carrying life inside me and now I had to learn how to carry death.
The first was ripped from my body and whisked away in the cold four walls of a hospital room while I lay on sterile paper desperately clutching my husband’s hand—a merciless echo of the other times we’ve been in those same positions. With loss and hope intertwined, we set about trying again.
The second slipped quietly from me as I stood in Michael’s arms at home. I thought of Job at that moment as the magnitude of loss washed over me standing there, and I can’t say my soul fared as well as his did. Curses burned my throat with bile and clung to my tongue. Blasphemy ran hot and wet down my legs into a pool at my feet. My soul rend in two from top to bottom as I found the courage to look down at my too-small one. Standing cold and numb inside myself, I watched as Michael gathered it up with an awkward tenderness that was achingly familiar.
Next came what to do? It felt like an ancient question with the simplest answer, one that I know in my bones couples have asked for millenia. I wish I’d never had to face the question or know the answer. We planned where to bury it outside and thought about what to speak over it. My numb mind faltered but it didn’t take long for the words I needed to come right up to meet me.
I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
The last line of the Nicene Creed. We come from a liturgical background where the Creed, a declaration of the Christian faith written in the year 325, was recited every single Sunday. I hadn’t thought of it for years, but suddenly, it felt like my life’s blood. What was the beginning again?
I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth . . .
We walked outside in the dark of night, and I sat on the ground as he dug the grave. The cold and wet of a New England fall seeped into my pants and matched my soul. I watched him carefully place it in the ground and shovel the dirt on top. I wept my eyes raw as he read those words.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God . . .
I’m not sure how long I would have sat there after he finished, my mind and body grappling hard with the valley of the shadow of death. After a while, I looked to see him standing above me, hand outstretched in a silent, gentle command. Stand up. I didn’t want to, but my hand reached up to meet his, and I let him pull me up. Slowly, we walked back to the house, and I felt my body break at the unnatural, relentless, ever-widening distance between my baby and me.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life . . .
The yawning ache of an empty womb and empty arms is impossible to express with words. If you know it, I am sorry for it, and if you don’t, I’m glad. It is the most unnatural thing I’ve ever felt. It’s raw and ugly and physical, and I hate it with everything I have in me. My body has railed against it, wept over it, and steeled itself when a mother walks by with a baby in her arms, all while trying to regulate and recuperate. I understand Jeremiah 31:15 (CSB) now:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
A lament with bitter weeping—
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted
It is a terrible verse and a terrible truth. My soul will not be comforted, and I’m not sure I want it to be. Grief is a barren place, stark and cold and lonely, but it’s the purest evidence of love. Grief breeds anger, though, and I went about my days doing laundry, cooking dinner, and driving my car mute with bewildered rage. The questions came hard and fast like punches to my gut. Why didn’t He answer my prayers? How can a good God let babies die? Is He even real?
My faith took a body blow, and I clung to it like a burr even as I sat in the blood-soaked ground of my own unbelief. For months, my only weapon was that Creed, and I raged at Him while gripping the hem of His garment. Sitting in a wasteland, my mind recited: I believe in one God the Father Almighty . . . over and over again. I spoke it, I wrote it out, I read it and slowly, those ancient words from 17 centuries ago gave my broken heart a rhythm to beat to. It became first a soothing mantra, then a choice, and then the dearest truth. It bled into me and wrote itself over my loss like Easter morning follows the darkness of Saturday night.
I don’t know the answers to those first two questions, and I don’t think I ever will. Maybe the answers would only upset and confuse me. But I do know some things: Faith isn’t flimsy—it will hold.
There is a God, and He is close to the brokenhearted. I know because I’ve seen Him in the kindness of friends. and I’ve felt Him in the cradle of my husband’s arms. His nearness settled on me like a cloak, and while it didn’t ease the pain, His presence reminded me that hope is holy. He loves mothers and babies—He is a parent too, after all. And He knows what it’s like to lose a child.
Believing is breathing, in and out over and over again, declarative sentence after declarative sentence. I’ve felt the harrowing of hell and slowly, my soul stood up and reached for His outstretched hand. Limping on shaky legs, I awkwardly learned how to stand in the midst of death and let my faith in the God-who-sometimes-says-no hold me up.
I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Christos Anesti.
Christ is Risen.
by Dawn Byington 
