Jessica BriggsJessica originally shared these words at a Wave of Light Service on October 15th to honor Pregnancy and Infant Loss.
Only one who has lost a child knows the journey. The beginning of the path is full of thrill as you announce ‘we’re pregnant.’ As you walked ahead from that joyous discovery, you began to birth dreams and hopes for your baby, well before their due date draws near. And one day, you lose a grip on hope, and … well, now the road has left us carrying around a great emptiness.
Empty arms.
Empty dreams.
Empty milestones.
Empty hopes.
Empty nurseries.
Empty wombs.
Losing a baby is an emptiness that is all-encompassing; yet in our world, we are often told to fill our emptiness. We walk around like empty suggestion boxes, and people fill our ears and hurt our hearts by saying things like: “At least you can try again”… “at least you know you can get pregnant”…“there’s always adoption”.. “Be grateful for the children you do have.”
As if your gratefulness will help this emptiness.
As if another life, or another baby, or another child will somehow make you forget THIS child.
As if reminding us that our now-empty wombs once held life is some type of comfort.
I am not here tonight to tell you how to fill the emptiness. In my own experience with loss, I know that’s not possible. It’s been 13 years since my miscarriage, and the emptiness is still there. Because this emptiness has a name- grief. And grief never goes away; it simply becomes a new room in our hearts, a place we forever hold special memories, a place where our dreams go that we never could see come true; grief is the place our wonderings of what would’ve or could’ve been live. It’s in this emptiness, this house of grief, where the memory of our baby’s life lives on. I’ve learned to embrace and welcome this emptiness instead of wishing it away, being numb to it, ignoring it or covering it up.
The emptiness has become a companion. I have heard it said that grief is all the love we hold in our heart that now has nowhere to go. I think the very best way we honor our children who were gone too soon is by holding onto that love. We embrace our emptiness, knowing that special place in our hearts belongs to our baby.
I want to encourage you tonight to welcome your emptiness but to also not allow the emptiness to become a place of loneliness. Isolation is the most dangerous side effect of loss and we know miscarriage, stillbirth, infertility and infant death is complicated grief that often leaves people unable to comfort us. There’s a plethora of education and information to help with the grief process, but somehow those resources don’t seem to help us feel included, seen, or surrounded. We might know how to cope with the waves of grief but we don’t know how to cope with the feeling of being alone.
You do not have to grieve alone.
You do not have to remember alone.
I believe grief has the power to push us into community and belonging instead of isolation. In this room, we share commonality tonight because of the emptiness we each have known. We all walk the dark path of grief. We all know the heartache of not celebrating our baby’s first steps, first birthday, or first time saying “mama” or “dada.” These thoughts can be painful. We might avoid them altogether. We might think them in our heads but be afraid to say them out loud, for fear of seeming silly or overly emotional. Yet simultaneously, we are afraid to forget our baby, sometimes even in the midst of our fear of remembering.
There is a section of scripture I’d like to share with you from my faith tradition. It’s found in Psalm 139 and it says:
“Where shall I go to escape your spirit? Where shall I flee from your presence? If I scale the heavens you are there, if I lie flat in Sheol, there you are. If I speed away on the wings of the dawn, if I dwell beyond the ocean, even there your hand will be guiding me, your right hand holding me fast. I will say, ‘Let the darkness cover me, and the night wrap itself around me,’ even darkness to you is not dark, and night is as clear as the day. You created my inmost self, knit me together in my mother’s womb. For so many marvels I thank you; a wonder am I, and all your works are wonders. You knew me through and through, my being held no secrets from you, when I was being formed in secret, textured in the depths of the earth. Your eyes could see my embryo. In your book all my days were inscribed, every one that was fixed is there’.”
We are all here because we know what it’s like to let the darkness cover us and feel enclosed by the night. Losing a baby feels very much like a covering of darkness- a place to just crawl into and hide. We feel alone and angry, maybe even embarrassed to have hoped and shared that our little one was coming. While there is a time for mourning, the hope within our grief is that we are not alone- whether you are in the heights of heaven, the depths of hell, or in the testy waters of fresh loss, we stand together tonight with you. Every day and moment of your baby’s life mattered, whether baby was a 5 week embryo or a fully birthed child.
The light bursting into the darkness of our grief says that our experience, though painful and personal, is also collective. At one time or another, each human being experiences the emptiness of loss and learns to make a home for grief within their hearts. Tonight, in this place, we gather as a community to share our love and light, our pain and sorrow, our hearts and our heaviness together. We will say your baby’s name. We shared sacred stories of loss. And We will create a wave of light that helps us know and see in a tangible way that the light always overcomes darkness.
And the mystery that I’ve learned is that emptiness is also the home of empathy. As we each push into our grief, share our pain and our stories, we create a crack in the darkness that allows the light to come in for others who have built a room in their heart for grief.
I want to affirm that you are allowed to share your thoughts when you miss your baby. In a world that tell us to be quiet when we are suffering, I want you to know that it’s okay to feel. It’s okay not to be okay- and you can talk about that, too. You don’t owe anyone an apology for bringing up your baby’s memory. You are allowed to remember and honor the special dates- when they were due, when they slipped away, and the day when you had to lay them in a coffin too small to understand. This is how we keep the light with us, finding that we are not alone as we reach out and remember. Often, and statistically speaking 1 in 4 times, you will be greeted by a fellow- sojourner who says “me too.” And you never know- sometimes when we share our darkest moments, it seems as light to someone else.
