Am I though? And if I am, what kind of rhythm does it have? I’m about to give birth to our fifth child, yet I have lost 3 babies and a beloved 6yo son along the way. It’s a mystery as to how one should hold these juxtaposing feelings in tension…

Has my body moulded itself around the holes of grief? Or is it still in pieces? Has my brokenness yet started repairing into a Kintsugi-like artwork? Or do people see me as the moth-eaten shadow of the happier person I used to be, tainted with loss? Can they see the weariness borne of dreadfully missing one child in every moment, whilst concurrently trying to love and serve my three, soon to be four, children here on earth? I’ve been told I don’t understand grace, and I’m ‘too negative’; yet, in a culture so unfamiliar and awkward about sitting in uncertainty and discomfort, I feel like there should be no one template of how to do something so unnatural as to grieve a child before their time.

‘Mourning’ is defined as “the outward signs and rituals associated with sorrow for a person’s death; usually limited in time by social conventions or community expectations”. Whereas ‘grief’ is “the deep and poignant distress caused by bereavement and profound loss”. Unlike a funeral, the Ned-shaped chasm in our lives will not come to an end until we are reunited with him in Heaven.

This is a bittersweet time for us, awaiting the arrival of another much-anticipated family member – who won’t ever know Ned here on earth. Memories of my last pregnancy at this same gestation cloud my mind – trying to navigate Ned’s intense pre-transplant treatment, Eleanor’s pre-transplant donor work-up, figuring out logistics of who would be with Ned in hospital while I was in labour, all in a different state from our home… This time, to my detriment perhaps, I’ve spent more time working and studying to keep my brain busy and distracted. Though our family has already endured such sorrow and suffered a tragedy, it doesn’t render us immune to further heartbreak and loss - and this weighs heavily on my mind.

So in my incapacity to better articulate where I’m at, I reflect only on these beautiful words below, written by writer, minister and artist, Jan Richardson:

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

‘There is no remedy for love but to love more’ — Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree for now
that we will not say the breaking
makes us stronger

or that it is better to have this pain
than to have done without this love.

Let us promise we will not
tell ourselves time will heal
the wound, when every day
our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough
to simply marvel at the mystery
of how a heart so broken can go on beating,
as if it were made for precisely this — as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it,

as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still,

as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom
but will save us nonetheless.

~~~~~~

I’m sad more often than not, but I’m not scared. Psalm 23:4 says “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” We have not yet made it through that valley. In fact, we are far from it. But as I remind my eldest (and myself) every night, just as God promised the Israelites back in the Old Testament as they fled through desert for 40 years, likely full of uncertainty and fear, though we know not what tomorrow holds – joy or sorrow, contentment or despair – God has assured us that He will be walking beside us. To this I have held, and I continue to cling.

“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 staff, they comfort me.” Psalm 23:4

Edward Isham