There are five common stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. After a miscarriage in 2019, I hit those stages hard and fast. So fast in fact I think I skipped right through denial and delved head-long into anger stirred in with an unforeseen amount of depression.
I was angry at the entire universe. I was so small and insignificant in the vastness and busyness of the galaxies that it angered me. No one seemed to slow down enough to sit with me in my grief as much as I wanted them to. I WAS HURTING and everyone else around me needed to acknowledge that.
If they didn’t acknowledge my grief and hang on long enough with me, I was angry.
If they said the wrong thing, I was angry.
If they didn’t say anything, I was angry.
I eventually gave that angry piece of my grief journey to God after a lot of prayer and several apologies, but I still found myself spiraling into a deeper and scarier depression. Each month would pass, and I would imagine where I’d be in my pregnancy. The due date came and went. Then the first would-be birthday. Then another. With each milestone I’d find myself dreading for weeks, sometimes months, the coming day where I’d be reminded of what I was missing.
With every instance, I’d find myself agonizing over how I would pass the day. Should I get a new piece of jewelry? Should I release some butterflies? Should we send off some floating lanterns? I’d worry that nothing would be good enough to remember the child we had lost. How would I include the kids? What if no one else cares like I do? WHY DOES NO ONE ELSE CARE?
Three years of this cycle continued. Regular mental breakdowns rolled in as I tried to figure out just how to memorialize the child we had lost. My husband came in this last time and found me with tears streaming down my face…again…as I went on telling him how anxious I was at the next would-be birthday coming up and not knowing what to do. It was then he really saw to my heart. He said so tenderly, “There is no guilt in being able to just live with our loss. You can actually move on with living and still keep their memory with you.”
Woah, what? Guilt?
I was carrying this extremely heavy guilt that no one had ever placed on me. It wasn’t meant for me to carry. This guilt I carried was placed there with the idea that maybe if I didn’t properly memorialize the baby we’d lost that maybe one of those “would have been” days would pass me by and I would have FORGOTTEN! The honest truth is that I will never forget that we lost a child. No memorial, tree planted, or piece of jewelry could ever change that. I will never need a reminder that my child is gone.
I let God have the anger. I let God have the depression. I let God have my child! But I was so petrified of giving Him each and every day, each and every moment. I was afraid to let myself just be okay. In my head that meant I was telling the world that the loss no longer affected me. But I held tightly to it. It had become an idol.
It was my husband’s gentle words that finally hit my heart. The reason why the burden was so heavy was because I never gave that piece of my grief to the One who was strong enough to carry it.
My loss belonged to me and no one was allowed to touch it, question it, or change it. I finally recognized that the last piece of my broken heart was still firmly clutched in my own hands instead of the hands of my Almighty God. I opened them and surrendered it all to Heaven. That is when I comprehended what it actually means to “let go.”
Letting go doesn’t have to mean forgetting, ignoring, or replacing; it could simply mean taking what has held you back from fully trusting God and placing it at His feet instead of at an altar built for grief, anger, or any other pain you don’t want to release. I had to understand that my burden could only become light if I placed it in the strong hands of my Savior. When my grief became an idol, I needed to learn a lesson of surrender. It took this painful process to bring me to a closer, more intimate understanding of the heart of God. For that, I will forever be grateful.
Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.
[1Peter 5:7]
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