When Fears Aren't Unfounded
I found out I’d lost my first baby at what should have been 11 weeks. My husband and I went to my first ultrasound hoping to hear a heartbeat, and instead we were told our baby had been dead so long that they’d disintegrated in my womb. For weeks I’d held my stomach, picturing the life growing in there, loving it so intensely already, not knowing the life inside me had already ended. I was my first baby’s first tomb. I had heard about missed miscarriages; I was terrified of that happening to me, and it did. I was devastated.
When a little over a year later we found out I was pregnant again, we were thrilled. The whole day, I felt like I was floating. I spent the afternoon working in my garden in the end-of-summer sun, singing to my poppyseed-sized baby. A few days later, fear set in when I took another pregnancy test hoping the test line would be darker, and it wasn’t. I began worrying that my pregnancy was ectopic, which is where the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, usually in the fallopian tubes. It is life threatening for the mother, and ectopic pregnancies are always nonviable. Low and slow rising hormone levels are a potential sign of an ectopic pregnancy, but they can also mean nothing. I knew worrying did no good, so I told myself the likelihood of having an ectopic pregnancy was so low, and it was, only 1-2%. I had a month of mostly very sweet and happy days before my first appointment. The fear crept back in when I had some sharp pain in my left side, another potential sign of an ectopic pregnancy, but I dismissed it. I told myself my pain would be unbearable if it were truly symptomatic of an ectopic.
In the days leading up to my ultrasound at nearly 9 weeks, I had a sense of dread. I told myself that it made sense that I felt that way because of my loss, but I reminded myself that chances were that everything was fine this time and we’d hear a strong, healthy heartbeat. The day came, and as we walked down a hall with the ultrasound tech, I told her I was nervous because I’d had a previous loss. As I lay down on the table next to the machine, I remember saying “My worst fear is that this is ectopic.” It was.
“I knew it. I knew it.” I sobbed bitterly into my sweet husband’s chest. “You didn’t” he whispered gently as he held me, and he was right. I hadn’t known it; I had been afraid of it, and being afraid of something is not the same as knowing something. It can’t be. That’s no way to live. I had many other fears with both my pregnancies that didn’t turn out to be what went wrong. I was afraid of ectopic in my first pregnancy and of another missed miscarriage in my second. Yes, I know my body and have intuition about it, but there is a difference between intuition and fear.
I’ve really struggled to figure out how to process this second loss spiritually. For the first few weeks, I just felt numb and angry. This past weekend while away on a retreat, I snuck out to the porch alone with a mug of hot coffee in the cool morning air. I looked out at the fall foliage and the mountains and silently prayed messy prayers as I let myself begin to feel what was beneath my anger. The grief felt bottomless and terrifying. A sense of emptiness set in and brought doubts about my faith with it. I looked up into the cloudy sky and thought: “There’s not even anyone there is there?” Then my eyes looked back down and focused on the vibrant colors of the dying leaves on the trees and the various shades of rust on the distant mountains. I looked back behind me through the large glass windows into the room where my friends were animatedly talking with each other, and I took deep breaths. “There You are, God, all around me.”
It’s hard to reconcile the comfort I find in God with the thought that He could have prevented my losses. I keep thinking about the story of Lazarus and about his sister Mary and how she didn’t go out to see Jesus when He arrived after her brother’s death until He asked after her. When she did see Him, she just collapsed at His feet and wept and said: “Lord, if you would have been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” Christ’s response was to weep with her and ask Mary and the others that had come with her to take Him to Lazarus’ grave. I love this moment, the image of them leading Jesus to the source of their grief.
I’ve been reading this story a lot recently as I try to process my own lack of desire to seek out Jesus after my loss, my own preference to sit at home in my grief, my own inclination to throw myself on the ground and pin my pain on God’s inaction. In my reading, I noticed a footnote I hadn’t read before, a comment on the whole account of the raising of Lazarus. It said that Christ raising Lazarus from the dead was the final act that led to the authorities’ decision to put Jesus to death. I honestly hadn’t thought much before of the story of Lazarus in the context of Christ’s own life and death and Resurrection, but it’s clear the Church has. It had never actually clicked with me before that the reason for all the Palm Sunday fanfare was the spreading of the news of Christ raising Lazarus. Christ raised Lazarus mere days before His own gruesome death. In raising his friend and giving Mary and Martha back their brother for a time, Christ was sealing his own death sentence. This has changed that story so much for me the last few weeks.
Another thing I love about the story of Lazarus is how gritty it is. It doesn’t shy away from the indignity of death. As unpoetic as it is: Lazarus stank. Many of the icons of Lazarus being raised depict the people around him covering their noses. That is so strangely comforting to me right now. It’s so real. Last year after my first loss, the hospital sent us home (at our request) with what was left of our baby wrapped carefully in gauze and stiff blue cloth inside an opaque plastic container. We made a tiny wooden coffin and buried the remains. The blood soaked cloth they had been wrapped in was resealed in the plastic container and forgotten in the garage in late summer. A few weeks later when cleaning, I stumbled upon the container and decided I should wash and recycle it, so I opened the box. The stench that suddenly overwhelmed me was revolting. I doubled over, simultaneously gagging and sobbing. Something about that moment of grief was so cathartic though. It reminded my empty arms how real and tangible my baby had actually been.
Life isn't tidy. Sometimes our worst fears do happen. Grief is messy and winding. Death literally stinks. Life never goes on in the same way after loss; we are reshaped by it. There are rarely clear answers for why things happen the way they do. One thing I know more deeply than ever though is that there are whole universes of pain that I know nothing about. I never could have imagined the depth of the pain of my losses before experiencing it. I want that to both strengthen and soften me and make me more tender and generous towards others and more willing to enter into their universes of pain with them when needed.
I was talking with a friend a few days ago about our moments of doubt. We both automatically began to tell each other about the people in our lives who help root us in our faith when our own faith feels shaky. I think it’s right and beautiful that our doubts make us think of the people we share our lives with who struggle alongside us. It’s like how Moses’ friends held his arms up for him in battle when he was too weak to continue holding out his own arms. The Orthodox faith is not one that ignores the material world and looks for some other plane of unseen existence for our faith to focus on. We can see God every moment of every day if we have eyes that have learned how to recognize Him. Grief can be blinding, but when our worst fears aren’t unfounded, Christ wants to go with us to the places we hurt the most. He isn’t put off by our raw grief or even our anger at Him. He weeps with us, and He’s given us the gift of each other, His Body, the Church, to make that burden-sharing love visible when we need to be reminded how real He actually is. We get to make God tangible to each other.
