She Brings Joy

{Disclaimer— what I am writing comes after a lot of soul-searching and going through the worst part of the bereavement process.

It's been five years since my daughter died. I have not always felt this way, and in the early stages of my bereavement I was very antagonistic to information like this. Please note that I am not attempting to guilt or push anyone into a premature reconciliation with God when they don’t feel open to this yet. See HERE and HERE for some early (poorly written) posts regarding the anger and mistrust I felt in my initial grieving period. Do not read this if you aren't ready for a conversation about deep theology. Don't read this if you are in a sensitive stage where every comment stings. You may not want to read if you're having a bad day, depending on where you are in your grief and how you practice your faith -- some may find this initially harsh but ultimately very comforting. Some may not.

This is a brutal honesty post. Last warning. }

I've been trying to work out some thoughts about the nature of death for the believer. This is what I've come to understand in the five years since my Beatrix left.

There is a big difference between Christians and others when it comes to the disposition of a soul after death.

While there are different Christian teachings regarding some of what happens immediately after someone dies (purgatory, resting state, etc.), we all believe that our faithful dead eventually end up in Heaven.

Because of this, finding comfort in some of the common themes shared by baby loss writers and artists can be difficult for devout loss moms. Our belief system doesn’t allow us to imagine our child as a butterfly landing on our shoulder, a feather on our doorstep, or a favorite song played at the moment we needed it most. Some Christian faith practices allow for a concept commonly referred to as “God-winks”, the claim being that God is sending these small messages to you. However, that concept is suspect and debatable – and even if your faith practice accepts this concept, the claim is still that God is sending the messages, not our babies.

We also can’t imagine stars opening holes in the heavens so our loved ones shine down on us, we have no belief that our babies become angels (this is actually a belief unheard of by virtually every world religion – angels are separate beings from human in almost all faith practices, Christian and non-Christian alike), and babies aren’t coming back in future pregnancies.

Once our babies are gone they are gone.

So what does Christianity have to offer the grieving mom?

In the immediacy of our initial grief it seems as if we would be left bereft of comfort. Christianity and God seem like heartless realities to those who don't understand them. Often, we are so blinded by our emotions that even welose sight of the big picture – the picture which gives us a {perfect} antidote to our sadness.

Sometimes we forget that true comfort only comes at the foot of the cross.

The cross promises us tomorrow – eternity – unlike the here and now centered beliefs elucidated above.

The cross promises:

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." {Rev. 21:4}






I read a quote long ago by Pope John Paul II which even non-Catholics could identify with:

"Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.”

Would we give up the forever of Easter, for temporal comfort here?

This is a harsh truth, and it doesn't promise to get any easier over our time on this earth. We may rationalize this love of Christ, but the human part of us just wants our babies.

I know I want my baby back.

But I want her back. I want her back forever. I want her back the way I was promised her -- perfect and alive.

"For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself." {Phillipians 3:20}


"So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." {1 Corinthians 42-44}

While no one must believe this {truth} who chooses not to, for those who do believe it holds more promise for the one thing which every single one of us loss moms want -- time.

While I could believe my daughter to be reincarnated in another pregnancy, doing so binds her in a finite life-cycle. It means she will die again, and this could be during the course of my lifespan, because we aren't promised a limit on suffering.

Reincarnation {her being born in a subsequent pregnancy} means I could lose her all over again.

In this dynamic we could both also be reincarnated into other families, or as a fox, or a fish, or a supernatural spirit, never to see one another again.

It also means I am not promised eternity with God, and in turn, with her.

If she becomes part of the natural world -- a butterfly or a symbol we see in rocks and trees -- she can be destroyed by wind and rains. Something as simple as a bird landing could disrupt whatever form she was in. If she were a star she would eventually burn out; her light would be permanently extinguished, and eventually her absence would be detectable to this world.

Being born into Heaven, even though I must wait to see her, holds the most promise. The promise of Heaven only seems cruel because we must wait to reap the rewards for our faithfulness. We want immediate gratification, but the promise offers eternal gratification.
In 2 Samuel 12: 23, after King David’s son died he stopped his weeping saying, “I will go to him, but he will not return to me”. This is a rough story, but it brings to point the reality of what our God promises. He promises those who have faith in Him an eternity in Heaven. Long after the world stops turning we will be with Him. I do not want my daughter to come to me in this world, because that means the promise is a lie. My daughter in this world means eternity does not exist. It means the Bible promises, the love of Christ, is just another fairy tale.

Because we can’t have it both ways.

God promises us heaven after death, not an amorphous existence hanging around the earth. If this promise is a lie, so is everything else He says.

Our loved ones will not return to us in this world. We will go to them…. and more importantly, to Him. That promise is better than anything this temporal world could ever offer me.




In my next post I will be talking about “Psychics and signs in baby loss”. I hope you join me in that discussion too!

It's difficult to separate her from the nip in the evening air. 

Waiting for winter was so easy before she came, but

As always when writing on a religious subject which may hurt some baby loss mom's feelings, I am disclaiming this post -- it may not appeal to everyone. It is only going to appeal to Christian moms. Please remember, we are all just sojourners here and the individual experience of one of us may be vastly different than another's. This is part of my journey, a story of me as a Christian being inadvertently shut out from the huge baby loss support system, and it is something which I believe I may not be alone in struggling with.

During my pregnancy with Beatrix there were very few online resources for the loss mom, presented in an organized fashion. The Facebook group explosion, which happened shortly after her birth, helped to connect parents in a new way.

In the four years since I lost my Beatrix I have seen a remarkable shift in the baby loss community.

We have become a force to be reckoned with. Women are using the powers of this collective to change the conversation about baby loss. We are connecting over this shared experience. Legislation is being created based on our experience, as is a shift in best-practices for caring for the post loss mother, particularly the mother whose loss occurs in her first few days post-partum.

We are seeing a movement towards acknowledgement of the pain of child loss in even its earliest stages. As a pro-life advocate I find this especially gratifying. Life at all stages should be honored and babies lost at any gestation and for whatever reason, are worth grieving over.

Very early on in the movement there were a number of brave mothers who put their hearts on the line, creating safe places for mothers to remember their babies. They carved out beautiful, comforting spaces for us to mourn together. They set the gold standard for how to interact with one another. They pushed other moms into activism. They helped me immensely with my growth into this terrible reality.

But --


Tonight I read a query from a mom in one of the loss groups that I belong to. She asked if anyone "felt" their baby near. She expressed distress due to the fact that she had not, since she understood so many other moms do sense their baby's presence.

She was saddened by the distance she felt between her and her sweet son.

I wanted to respond because I too had wondered about that in the beginning. My husband once had a dream of my sweet Bea. It was very upsetting to me because of how casually he mentioned it. I hungered so deeply to just be in the space where my daughter was. It seemed unfair -- he was given the gift I'd prayed for since she had died.

I heard loss friends talk about how their children sent them messages from heaven. I hadn't received messages. I wanted to. I willed myself into believing that it could/would eventually happen.

I looked for signs in the clouds.
They never came.

Eventually I began to grow into this skin. The shock of loss began to wear off. I began to meditate deeply on the nature of death, the nature of my daughter's death and the inevitable fact that death always separates us from those we love, no matter how much we love them.

As I ruminated upon these things I came to the realization that just like our society in general, there is a pervasive mysticism in the baby loss community. This is partly because some of the most vocal moms, those who helped to create the parameters of this community,  themselves seem to have enthusiastically embraced mysticism.

For anyone who's a mystic -- that's great.

But for those of us, including the mom who wondered why she wasn't feeling her baby, who are Christian -- mysticism just isn't part of the story. We don't feel our babies nearby because they aren't here. We don't see signs and psychic messages from beyond the grave.

This narrative can inadvertently cause some moms pain. Moms who wonder why they don't get these signs and wonders. Moms who have a visceral knowledge that their babies are gone but who are having a difficult time working that knowledge into the fabric of their faith.  It can rob them of peace

King David said, "I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.” (2 Samuel 12:23)

To the newly bereaved mother this is such a heart breaking and terribly inadequate response to her suffering. We will go to them, but they will not come to us.

The God who chose to gift her with this cross also chooses to hold her baby beyond her reach. On those days that she has exhausted herself with need to touch that skin again, that God isn't the one she wants to hear about. She wants to hear about the God of miracles, who can surely turn back time and fix her baby. She wants to hear about Lazarus rising from the dead.

She wants to believe that God would not be so cruel as to deny her those small communications. But any belief that the dead reach beyond the grave is based on nothing more than feeling.

It's a harsh reality.

Our babies don't feel close to us because they are not here.

They will not come to us.

We will, however, go to them.

It's a long walk though. And the temptation of trying to shorten that walk is sometimes too overwhelming to resist.

I read a quote recently. It summarizes this concept succinctly.

"The longest walk home that a parent will ever take home is the one after their child has run ahead of them."

We have a difficult time with conceptualizing the span between now and then. We are a "now" people. We are able to have overnight packages shipped from halfway around the world. Family members who live across the country are available 24/7 via our computer screens. Most of us can drive ten miles from our home, in any direction, and find a hot meal ready to eat within minutes of ordering it.

We are addicted to immediate gratification. We want things done yesterday.

I want my daughter now.

But Death doesn't do demands. It doesn't answer to our "I just want" statements. It is permanent and unforgiving.... In the context of a life without God.

We have a difficult time with that knowledge, with the waiting. So we try to grab a little bit of eternity occasionally.

Unfortunately even when we grasp as tightly as we can, eternity isn't really what we are holding onto.

(Even more unfortunately, there are people who will take advantage of that. They tell you that they can connect you with the people you love. They can't. They just know that there is nothing more desperate than a grieving mom. They know that if they can pull you in, you'll be hooked on that feeling of togetherness. In one sense, mysticism will always end up becoming an addiction. You will always be left wanting more because it can't deliver on the promise it makes. Permanent connection with the one you love. )

In my own grieving process I very quickly came to understand that the lack communication from my Beatrix, who is living her supernatural afterlife, is not about me.

It is about the Easter promise- "It is finished". It is about the promise that when our physical bodies fail, we will leave this world. It's about reality versus a feeling that we may have.

I cannot feel my daughter because God's truth is a real thing.

She didn't fade away into an amorphous cloud of energy.  

She is in paradise.

She is waiting for the resurrection.

She is singing with all of the saints who went before her, about the glory of a God who redeemed all of us. The broken, weak, and wanting.

And I am glad for that. My feelings are fickle things. An eternal outlook based on my feelings would be a terrible thing -- I am not nearly as trustworthy as God is.

Do I want her here? Of course. Is that desire normal? Of course. Does it make me less faithful? No.

But the reality of the situation is that I would not trade the knowledge of her security, and the fulfillment of that promise for even the smallest cosmic communication from her. Because I can't have it both ways. I can't claim to believe in the resurrection of the life to come and then make attempts to pull her out of a spiritual energy cloud. It doesn't work that way.

The promise of our reunion is enough to keep me satisfied that the silence from my daughter is part of the plan. (Most of the time...)

It's enough for me to accept that the plan is something bigger than me and my grief.

I hope that more Christian loss moms will come forward to share their stories of healing without utilizing mysticism so that no mom ever feels that something has gone wrong, because she cannot feel her baby close. We have enough room in this community to say, "I don't agree with you but I validate your grief and I will support your grief process, as long as you support mine."

I hope that if you are reading this, you are moved to understand that your baby is in a place where there is no more pain, sorrow, or suffering. That you will see her or him again, and when the time comes you will understand and be so grateful for the truth of the Gospel and the reality of what the resurrection means.

If you are a Christian baby loss blogger and you have written about grief, mysticism, and/or Christianity, I would love to hear from you. I am interested in creating a collective of supportive women who can help navigate this post-loss terrain for the Christian mom, by basing that support on consistent, orthodox, Christian teachings.

Please contact me at:

Sarah@shebringsjoy.com

My "before" photo is me during my last successful pregnancy, before losing my Bea.

This is me before:

Before I knew that women who did everything right could still have a baby with birth defects.

Before I knew that women in developed America had babies with birth defects. 

Before I knew that birth defects didn't always mean a future of surgeries and hospital stays. 

Before I knew that you don't have to be a drug addict or an alcoholic to have a baby with birth defects. 

Before I knew that there was such an horrific thing as perinatal hospice. 

Before I knew that one in four pregnancies will end in loss. 

Before I knew that sometimes euthanasia can be practiced passively.

Before I knew that sometimes parents leave the hospital with empty arms.

Before I knew how to retain a calm exterior when I am quaking inside. 

Before I knew that the people most interested in your sad stories are usually the ones who you should stay away from.

Before I lost my very, very best friend (32 years, down the drain). 

Before I had ever seen a person die. 

Before I understood genetics and the probabilities involved in having good genes, and the miraculous thing that is life- so much could go wrong. Each one if us is a miracle.

Before I was who I am now. 

My hair will be white and my skin will fall loosely from my face.

I will have yellow fingernails and false teeth.

I will be old.

You will never be old. Your hair will stay it's red, dark and wispy. Your eyes will remain clear and your fingernails will keep their tiny pale moons.

You would have been three years old on Friday. Your hair would have fit into ponytails. You would have been big enough to sit at the table. You would have been able to help make your own cake.

But you will never be older. You will never age- you will remain elusive and you will remain the same. Always the same.

He said that my daughter was defective.




















This is just a short list of my imperfections. The most glaring of my physical shortcomings.