Exactly one year ago, I began my grief
journey.
1 year – 12 months – 52 weeks – 364 days
– 525,600 minutes.
And I have felt the weight of every single minute. It is strange how something which happened so
long ago can be so strongly engrained in a person’s memory. It still hits me like a freight train
sometimes, like getting the wind knocked out of me. No one expects to walk in for their 14 week prenatal
appointment and hear the words “no heartbeat.”
When you lose a child, you miss out on so much: the milestones, the
“firsts,” the birthdays, the hugs and kisses.
My grief was wrapped up in not only the loss of a child but the loss of
life experiences with that child. It is not about forgetting but about remembering. Yet my
grief more often than not ended up in a mangled, twisted ball of confusion. In fact, it felt like I had fallen down a
rabbit hole.
Since I was a little girl, I have always been captivated
by the story of Alice In Wonderland. Published in 1865 by English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
under the pen name of Lewis Carroll, it received great success and is known still
today as a classic children’s book.
There are many movies, plays, musicals, etc. that depict varied
off-shoots of the original, and trust me, I fell in love with them all. But as I began my grief journey, I started to
realize the unintentional connection I felt to Alice. Like Alice, I had tumbled down a rabbit hole
into a strange new and confusing world where everyone was “mad” or sometimes thought
of me as the “mad” one.
After
entering this world, Alice experienced changing shape from normal size to small,
then to large, and then back to small again.
I remember when I first heard the shocking news in the ultrasound room,
the whole space expanded. The walls got
farther and farther away and the ceiling lifted higher and higher. I felt as if the world around me was growing
bigger and swallowing me up in it. In
Chapter Two, Alice swims in the pool of her own tears. Need I say more on this subject! Then there is the Mad Tea Party where the
characters rotate seats and perform mundane tasks for no reason at all. When grief is involved, the daily act of life
is much more monotonous, and life keeps moving even when you don’t want to move.
Not to
mention the Cheshire Cat…who sometimes helps guide Alice and sometimes confuses
her more. At the beginning of my grief, I
felt like that was God, dragging me around a chess board, deciding where I
should go like a pawn about to be sacrificed in order to strategize for the
team. Disappearing and reappearing at
random, smirking at me with his curled-up smile. But now I realize that is absolutely
false. That is what I thought at the
time, based on my feelings, and we were never meant to govern our life by our
emotions. Now that I look back, I
realize how God was comforting me, encouraging me, making me part of His plan
all along the way. Joni Eareckson Tada,
in her introduction for the book “Scars That Have Shaped Me” by Vaneetha Rendall
Risner (which I highly recommend by the way), explains that we do not always see God’s hand in the midst of difficult
times until we peer over our shoulder and look back at our life. It is only then that we see how God carried
us with His amazing grace. He allowed me
to hurt so deeply that only He could be the one to help. It may have been confusing at the time, but
God sees it all as crystal clear, unmuddied by the world’s demands and criticisms. No, God is not the Cheshire Cat to me anymore;
He has walked with me in the darkest valleys.
The Bible verse that has consistently come to my mind is Psalm 23:4: “Even though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are
with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
When I was
a child, the character I was most terrified of was the Jabberwock from Through
the Looking Glass. A make-believe creature which is dragon-like with “claws that
catch” and “jaws that bite,” it originated from Lewis Carroll’s poem titled
“The Jabberwocky.” Honestly, I was
pretty much terrified of mostly everything as a child, but that is an entirely
different blog post. In my grief, I felt
like I was stuck on the side of the mirror with the Jabberwock tormenting me
and keeping me fearful of the future, my children on earth, what would happen
in my life. I remember a desperate scene
in a movie reconstruction of Through the Looking Glass in which Alice can see
her mother and her real life on the other side of the mirror. She hits and bangs on the mirror, all while
shouting and crying for her mother to see her, but she is separated from
her. I felt that way with my grief…as if
I could see my old life in my past, and all I wanted was to get back there, to
walk through the mirror to the other side and be with my child. Yet nothing in my power could achieve that.
Much like Alice's world, the world
in which we live is inverted.
God never planned it to be this way.
Things are very different now than on Day One of the world. However, human beings chose to leave God
behind and take their own path which lead to death and destruction. The only way this inverted world will ever
become right side up again is in Heaven through the work of Jesus Christ on the
cross. And so I wait (somedays more
patiently than others) for that day, when I will see my baby again in Heaven. Just a year ago, my baby was inside me, and
now, he or she is waiting for me in Paradise.
One year may feel like a long time...but not in comparison to eternity.
