Trying to Smile

I remembered Jenna yesterday, but it's no different than today. Today when my heart has been pulled out of my chest and stomped on.

You ask, what happened?

Nothing new. Just life and the reality of babies dying.

It never gets old and it always hurts. I won't ever view pregnancy the same or newborns or the maternity ward or hospitals for that matter. They are building a fancy new hospital seven minutes from where we live right now and the first thought that popped in my head after she died was, I wonder how many babies will die there...

Who have I become???

If you think me cruel or heartless, you caught me on the wrong day. I hope I don't come off that way. But I just need to get this out. This grief is not just tears and cherished memories. For me there is a new way of thinking. And this new way of thinking is usually triggered by raw, agonizing emotions. It's sad. My heart is longing to hold her again. My mind cannot fathom what good could possibly justify her suffering and death. My soul is broken. And what is most alarming is that this is not going to change... this is who I'll forever be.

Permanent scars. Permanent reasons to cry my eyeballs out. Permanent loss. Permanent. I hate that word right now.

One day I want to wake up in a better place and be able to look up into the sky, wonder about her new home and not feel like fate is mocking me. I get to wondering about Heaven and feeling desperate at how little I know about it. I know that if God were to pull back the screen of Heaven and give me a glance that I'd never want to bring her back into this world, and it would calm my restless heart that misses her beyond words. I would see how happy she is. I would understand with my eyes how perfect everything is up there. But since it is faith that has to silence all these emotions, it is an ongoing battle.

This is me and my finite mind at work.

While I miss her terribly, I have to remind myself how much I did enjoy her while she was with us. She fought for her life for 13 days and I got to be by her side. Those 13 days were filled with the most nauseating roller coaster of ups and downs fueled by the ever-changing doctor reports, unstable saturation levels, and pleading for a miracle from Heaven. But they were also filled with a beautiful love that I'd never experienced before. She brought so many people so much closer together. Her life. Her short little life. It never ceases to amaze me how much changed through her life and death. I look back now and remember that I never let myself think she might not make it. I had to believe in her life for her sake. I don't remember being sad over her condition then. I remember being overjoyed at being a mother. Her mother.

This is my attempt to remember my daughter's life. I am trying to smile, on the inside. My joy has been left behind. I think I actually left it in the NICU when she died. I am trying to get it back.

And I get so wrapped up in my loss that I forget what I gained. I gained motherhood. I gained a beautiful baby girl that knows me, even now, as her mother. I gained a broken heart that will forever break for every mother who has ever faced the tragedy of saying goodbye to her child. I gained a firsthand look at what God sacrificed for me when He watched His Son die for me on the cross. I have gained... because of Jenna.

I can name all the whimsical, charming things that I would have rather gained in the little girl she could have been. But I have to stop and realize I have gained, in spite of her death, I have still gained so much.

A Secret

I don't know about you...

but I struggle with the thought that God has a plan. I struggle with telling myself that God knows best. I struggle with the fact that God could have saved Jenna and He didn't. My faith has been dismantled, torn apart, scrupulously analyzed, turned upside down, chiseled, wounded, interrogated, and left desolate to tell whether or not it would survive the past five months.

My faith has changed. 

My faith in the God who could have saved her has come to find out something about Him I never knew. It's one of those secrets of God that can only be manifested in the deepest, darkest pits of absolute pain. To be honest, it's one of those secrets I wish I knew nothing about. But since grief has redefined my life, it is a secret I have come to cherish.

I have heard all my life that Jesus Christ died for my sins and how He bore my sins on the cross so that I could have a way to go to Heaven when I died. One day, I accepted Him as my Savior, believing that He did indeed die and carried my sins to that cross and paid the debt I could never pay.

What I didn't know was that on that cross, he also bore my griefs. The Bible says He is "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief". Acquainted with grief? I have read those words before, but this time those words just flew off the page because that's me! I know grief more than I ever wanted to know it or be acquainted with it. It is deeper and far more hopeless than I ever could have imagined. Grieving a child is what we often say to be the harshest form of grief. I would have to agree. I didn't just bury my baby; I buried a toddler who would never take her first bite, lose a tooth, need a Barbie band-aid or take her first steps. I buried a girl who would never paint her fingernails or wear her Sunday best on Easter to church, I buried a young lady who would never go off to college or fall in love and get married. I buried a woman who would never have children or grandchildren. I buried everything she could have been. I buried my heart and love in the purest form. 

But Christ... He bore my griefs. It comforts me to read that He didn't just heal the sick and raise the dead. He knows my griefs. He knows. He is not just about the happy endings, He is familiar with the sad ones too. He acquainted Himself with this grief so that He could comfort my broken heart one day.

In that same verse, the Bible says that He also "carried our sorrows". The sorrow of those last moments of her life flashing through my head. The sorrow of knowing I will never get to use her beautiful name. The sorrow of knowing that life itself fled my baby girl's body. The sorrow of knowing the doctors did all they could to save her life. The sorrow of knowing that she is gone. The sorrow of the loss that empty arms can never satisfy. The sorrow of the memory of the pain her tiny body went through. The sorrow of the reality of her death at the grave. He carried all these sorrows with Him. 

A lot of people IRL will tell me they are sorry for what happened, and that is really all they can say. Let me just say that I am grateful for their sincere sympathy and understand their loss of words. But Christ actually carried my sorrow. He didn't just tell me He was sorry it happened, He carried this pain and sorrow because He knew one day I would need someone who feels the exact pain that I feel. So when I take my broken heart to Him, He knows all about it. 

And what's even more baffling to me is that He bore all my griefs and carried my sorrows way before they even happened. To think that He carried mine plus the entire world's grief and sorrow just helps me.

When someone shared these verses with me, it was like a light bulb turned on. These are familiar verses but they bring new light in this dark place of grief. 

"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted."

Isaiah 53:3, 4

You Kept All My Tears

The day Jenna died and I walked away from the hospital with empty arms

I cried so many tears my face hurt and my soul felt dead

Life was changed

Death was real

And I wondered if

anybody knew about my tears.

The day of the funeral came

And I wondered why I had to go through all this,

I cried on the way there and all through the service

I cried and we couldn't even drive ourselves to the gravesite

I began convincing myself

that nobody knew about my tears.

Slowly the world began to shift and my ground became unstable

Unable to keep pace with the rest of the world

I fell behind

And I was convinced

that nobody knows about my tears.

I hide behind closed doors and rush out of crowds

Tears build up

Behind sore eyes and a shattered spirit

Forced into this secret society of broken hearts

And I am convinced

that nobody knows about my tears.

I grieve my loss of motherhood

The need to hold her makes me sore

The feeling that I have been robbed

Every time a mother holds her living baby closely

I am convinced

that nobody knows about my tears.

Driving home my mind starts to wander

What she would have been like?

How she should be in the backseat

Snuggled safely in that 4-door sedan I picked over a year ago because we wanted her...

I am convinced

that nobody knows about my tears.

The scar that my body wears replays that night she was born

How it happened, and why

The scar that means she happened

Too quickly...

I am convinced

that nobody knows about my tears.

I sit alone most days

Avoiding the inevitable and meaningless conversations

That I just cannot care about

I feel I am losing myself in this grief

I am convinced

that nobody knows about my tears.

But someday when I die, Lord,

You tell me that you knew

You didn't let my tears dry up on the ground,

You kept them close to you.

In that bottle where our tears our stored

To show us just how much you cared

You saw me cry every time I convinced myself

that nobody knew...

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?  

Psalms 56:8

Picking up the Pieces and Healing Tears

I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but last night I felt so much better after I just let it all out. I waited until after I thought my husband was sleeping and I cried and cried and cried. I had a mountain of grief sitting on my chest and a million different emotions that can hardly be handled that were desperate for some relief. So I cried and it HELPED.

Nothing got solved, just released. Maybe that's what it was.

Aside from the million emotions, I didn't get a chance to blog away my heart. This added to the reality of facing my grief, which at times, is unbearable.

On a different note, I find it difficult to talk with people. Just simple conversation makes my brain crazy. It's not that I don't want to (or maybe I don't?) but it is so hard to FOCUS. I have never been more scatter-brained and that makes me crazier. I also find myself avoiding certain people because I don't want to talk about the frivolous things in life and they don't want to talk about my baby who died too soon. So I become a hermit who crawls out when I MUST be ok or when I finally reach a "safety zone".

On top of that, I haven't been able to go see her. Her marker is so pretty but its ugly too. It just urks me that she is in the ground. My brain knows she is in Heaven, but my heart can't get past her body being buried - the very one I felt kicking and moving inside, is buried. I can't write in words what that does to me. I hate it. I used to love going to see her and I wish I could see past the marker that so delicately marks her putrid grave. Why did I spend so much time trying to make it look so pretty??!! It is not going to matter! I thought it was the last thing I could do for her. Now it just keeps me away. I feel guilty, angry and disgusted that I can't make it better. It hurts so much to see her like that. I mean to go this Friday. She will have been gone four months. I want to go Friday, but it's going to be hard.

I thought about it like this.

In this house there is this beautiful, fragile yet perfect glass vase. And it sits in a place where it can display its beauty to everyone in the house, at all times. But one day it gets knocked over and it doesn't just break - it shatters throughout the entire house, in every corner and under every stool, table and furnishing. No matter where you walk in this house there are sharp remnants of this once-beautifully adorned glass vase. But the beauty is gone and all that's left is a mess and pain with every step you take. As I think about the glass pieces everywhere I go, I can't help but think I am just leaving the glass pieces on the ground to continue to wound my already wounded heart. How do you pick up the pieces? How do you tell yourself it's time to find a way to heal? When does the pain stop tearing you apart everywhere you go? When do the little things in life that bring you back to the darkest hour stop bringing you to tears? How does life return to a sense of normalcy after your innocence is gone? How do you pick that first piece off the ground and not feel guilty?

I don't know. But I do know that it has got to start soon. Some sort of stepping forward. Not "moving on" or "getting over it" as people say without the slightest idea of how those careless words rend your heart, but a true finding of what it means to live with this grief and without the guilt of leaving her behind.

It won't happen overnight and I know these next few months and even years will try my relationships. I hope that my friends and family can be patient. I pray that I can have grace. I know that I serve a good God. There are few things that I know for certain anymore but one is that He is right there, ready to help me pick up that first piece. And the second and the third.

...forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark...

Philippians 3:13,14

Hope???

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three..." I Corinthians 13:13

Yes. In the midst of my broken, oh-so broken heart it is possible. Not because of anything I have done or even asked God for. My reason of the hope that I have is all because of my truest friend, Jesus Christ.

Everyday is a horrible reminder of the life that could have been. Having been almost four months into this nightmare of the life almost lived, it has exhausted my entire being. My will to fight and live and breath. But out of nowhere here it is.

Hope. Abiding Hope.

He pours it into my soul in buckets of sweet rain. I don't look for hope as I feel like hope is a way of leaving her behind. But when He just gives it to me, I can't resist. It feels so nice to have a glimpse of the life that survives this aftermath. He gives me hope when I least expect it, when I don't deserve it after all my questioning and anger and when I least understand it. He lifts me up just like He said He would. I don't know what my hope will bring, but I know that it is something that can be waited for.

When everything inside of me has failed, I have an abiding hope. One of my favorite definitions of the word abide is found in webster's dictionary.

abide: \ə-ˈbīd\ 1 to endure without yielding
 
Without Yielding! We have a blessed hope. We really really do. We can bring our shattered hearts and all the parts of our lives that don't make any sense to Him. When everyone around us seems to be forgetting our precious angels or when people shrivel up in conversation when you tell them yes, you had a child but they died, He has not forgotten or left any pieces of our lives behind. He is ok talking with us about our angels.

Tonight, even if it lasts for only a moment, I am going to dare to hope. I will not pretend I am ok. I will have a broken heart the rest of my life. I will always wonder why. But since Jesus made a way for me to hope, tonight I will. For as long as I can. There is no harm in hoping.
 
Lately I have had a bunch of rough days which has probably been reflected in my posts. Since I have shared my rough days I wanted to share my hope. Abiding Hope.
 
Hope for a healed heart.
Hope to go Home one day.
Hope to have a healthy baby one day.
Hope to see our last enemy conquered, death.
Hope to see my Jenna again.

"But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings..." Malachi 4:2