“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Embodied

In a true display of privilege, I didn’t need to think of my body until I became pregnant. I had never been hospitalized, never broken a bone, never encountered any limits on the capacity my body had to bring me to and fro, to breathe in and out without assistance; my body was a convenient vessel for the rest of my life.

That is until the beige, sticky pall of nausea began somewhere around 8 weeks.

And then the hemorrhoids that plagued my sedentary life.

The electric round ligament pain as my belly grew.

Pregnancy forced me to face my bodily existence every day. It forced me to confront my limitations, which is really my humanity.

Lent does the same.

It’s a six week stretch, beginning with Ash Wednesday that sets the tone of the ultimate humility: we are not God. We will die. We are dying. We choose death (that religious word sin). We are so deeply dependent and it kills us. The rest of the year we might entertain the illusions of our control and self-sufficiency, but Lent is one giant social experience in radical honesty.

“I am not okay.”

“I chose that vice again, and I am sick to my stomach.”

“I need help.”

We always carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.
2 Corinthians 4:10

I know that Paul was speaking in metaphor. But I’ve always sensed that women can put flesh on those words better than anyone.

There are leaders among us every day, women who have carried death in their bodies.

Those who have miscarried, birthed deceased babies, lost their children within those fragile first weeks.

They are the ones who live with no illusions of control. They have tasted the bitter cup first hand that life is and then isn’t. That’s the truth of being human.

Just this week Vanessa Bryant eulogized her thirteen year old baby girl and her lover, Kobe.

They were and then they weren’t.

Fragile

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”
+ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

So fragile a thing.

I think for some of us, the boundary lines have fallen in such pleasant places that we truly forget that life is neither guaranteed nor owed. It is truly a gift.

The numbers do not deceive us:

1 in 3 women will have at least one miscarriage in her lifetime.

1 in 36 women will experience 2-3 miscarriages.

At age 20, 20% of pregnancies will end in death.

By age 40, 40% will.

We don’t have consistent parameters for early loss, those pregnancies that end before life could be detected with a Doppler. Estimates are between 50-70% of positive pregnancy tests end in death.

There is no standard of care for how to talk about loss.

Some providers refer to a fetus, a missed pregnancy or the dreaded clinical term, “spontaneous abortion.”

Every year in the US, 26,000 babies are stillborn, dying post 20 weeks gestation.

That’s 1 in every 160 deliveries.

71 families will be told today that their baby has died, and the stillborn rate is more than premature infant death and SIDS combined.

We don’t talk about it. Therefore, we don’t expect it. Therefore, when it happens to us the weight of silence is unbearable.

Pain Demands to Be Felt

There’s a line from John Green’s young adult novel The Fault in our Stars:

That’s the things about Pain, it demands to be felt.

Do we believe that? Do we live that?

As I am more and more exposed to a woman’s body in birth, I find this physiological truth fascinating:

If a woman fights the sensation of pain that comes with contractions, she will experience the process as unbearably painful and even traumatic.

If she has tools, support, and presence to surrender to the pain, she will progress.

Pain demands to be felt.

And that’s where Ash Wednesday enters. A day of communal permission to feel the pain: the pain of our suffering, the pain of our sin, the pain of our mortality.

Please, instead of shrouding the mothers in our midst who have experienced loss with that deafening silence, can we approach them this time? Can we ask them about their story? Say their baby’s name?

We might find that they are our leaders into lament, into feeling the pain that demands to be felt, into remembering our true humanity. And, as Audrey Assad sings,

See what you've lived through
So you can grieve it
And draw it towards you
Catch and release it

The following is a letter my dear friend Beth wrote to her stillborn daughter, whom she and her husband Brandon lost at 19 weeks. Her name is Annie Hesed (which means “an enduring love”), and Beth and Brandon have developed the most beautiful rituals to integrate the suffering of Annie’s death into their family life. Follow her @bethbgoad to read more about Annie’s death and how Beth is living with this grief.

Dear Annie,
A year has passed since the first and last time I held you in my arms. I remember so much of the day we met you face to face and feel robbed of a lifetime of memories. Your delicate body, fearfully and wonderfully made, was so strong. I measured your foot against my thumbnail so I’d always remember how small it was.
This year was not what I had imagined. There were no matching dresses with Maggie. I slept through many nights and woke up feeling disappointed I wasn’t a sleep deprived mother of an infant.
It is a privilege to be your mama, Annie, even though I have so many unanswered questions. When I am sad about your absence in our family, I try to remember all the pain you get to avoid on earth. I remember you’re with my own mama and smile thinking about you helping her with her heavenly garden.
You are loved, sweet girl, by so many, and perfectly, by our Heavenly Father.
Love,
Mom

*In remembrance of Annie Hesed Goad, born May 22, 2018 at 10:54PM, 66g and 5.5 inches*

Resources

Adriel Booker’s Grace Like Scarlett

here’s an excerpt:

Grief expands the soul and exposes our need, but it also expands our heart to receive love and be changed by it. This becoming can make us more whole if we are open to receive (and be changed by) God’s astonishing love. “Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus said, “for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). We are not blessed because we are mourning what we lost; we are blessed because we’ve experienced his comfort in the midst of it — that’s the blessing. Suddenly the brokenness has been transformed into the blessing. He doesn’t simply want to rescue us; he want to remake us. How stunning!

Podcast “Still A Part of Us” featuring the stories of parents of stillborn babies

Audrey Assad’s song on grief Shiloh