8 Years Later (and It Still Hurts)

I might have had an eight-year-old son today. His name was Theodore and I delivered his stillborn body the morning of August 24th, 2017.

It has been eight years and sometimes it still hurts like hell. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect to be crying so much this week. I didn’t expect my body to feel absolutely exhausted, like it’s carrying the weight of my grief as much as my heart is.

In the last year, our family has talked a lot about Theodore and Oliver, too (our ectopic pregnancy from October 2016). I don’t know how it first came up, but my kids now both know that two babies came before them and neither lived to come home. How do you talk to a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old about loss? My son in particular has been fascinated by the fact he has brothers. My daughter has wondered why she’s the only girl (who knows whether she is; I only had maternal intuition that Oliver was a boy). How do I answer all their questions? How do I keep them from telling strangers at a park about their dead brothers; yes, this actually happened and we had a long discussion about welcome and unwelcome topics of conversation, safe people, and appropriate venues. But I don’t want them to shy away from facing the hard parts of life. I don’t want to shut their emotions down or shut their questions up.

So how do we talk about it? We just do, if ever imperfectly. If my kids bring up their brothers or their grandmothers, instead of letting the sting make me quiet, instead of changing the subject, we do our best to remember, to explain, and to listen as best we can.

I’ve recently been reminded that listening, really listening, to music is something that fills my cup. These days it’s usually background noise, but I spent so many hours of my youth with lyric books in hand listening to every chord change, every instrument’s entrance, every turn of phrase. This week, I put an album on the record player and sat down to sip my coffee and listen to a song that seemed to be calling to me. It drew me because I remembered a line about “planting sequoias” and that concept has fascinated me since—planting something with absolute certainty I will never see its full maturation. But other lyrics were the ones to hit home:

“Come down from your mountain
Your high-rise apartment
And tell me of the God you know who bleeds
And what to tell my daughter
When she asks so many questions
And I fail to fill her heaviness with peace

When I've got no answers
For hurt knees or cancers
But a Savior who suffers them with me
Singing goodbye, Olympus
The heart of my Maker
Is spread out on the road, the rocks, and the weeds.”

—John Mark McMillan, “The Road, the Rocks, and the Weeds”

I’m fresh out of answers, except for a God who suffers with me, who has never left me alone. I’m reminded of an explanation of grief I saw a few years ago. Often we think grief shrinks over time, but what actually happens is our lives are built around it (visual below).

Some days the life I’ve built around missing Theodore is big and bright and beautiful. Sometimes, like this week, I zoom into the grief, and get tunnel vision. All week I’ve felt like a pot of water sitting on the stove, filled a tad too high, boiling over inevitable.

Oh God, when I’ve reached my boiling point and tears overflow, may they be sown like sequoias, growing into something majestic, something I’ll never see the end of. Thank you for drawing near today and for your presence being the answer in my many questions and sorrows.

“Those who sow with tears
    will reap with songs of joy.”

—Psalm 126:5, New International Version