Being sad

In a past post, I referred to going through a difficult time in my family. This difficulty was dealing with the emotions and physical recovery of a miscarriage.

Grief. Whether it be losing a loved one too soon, losing an opportunity, losing the idea of something we’ve always hoped for. Whatever it is…it’s not fair. I’ve always tried to make people feel better about their personal sadness or try to rationalize why they may be going through it. Until it happened to me.

My parents lost a child before having me and my twin sister. With the sadness experienced by going through something like that, my mom asked me how I was doing after our miscarriage. Although some time had passed, the wound was still sore. I answered by talking about losing a baby and then quickly realized that my parents actually lost a baby, a fully formed, breathing and beautiful little two day old boy. They had his nursery ready, little onesies washed and ready to fit his perfect little body, a bed fitted with new and clean smelling sheets. And they didn’t get to bring him home. When I realized what I was saying, that I was grieving over the idea of having a baby, I felt guilty. I started to say things like, “I know it’s nothing like losing a baby, like you did with Michael…” My mom quickly stopped me and said “No, it’s the same. You lost the dream of having a baby. You thought about bringing your baby home and thought about what your family would be like”. It was then that I realized that grief is grief. Sadness is sadness. Whatever level of sadness we attach to someone’s pain is completely and utterly unfair. It was within my right to feel sad, without feeling any guilt that someone else’s pain is more painful than my own.

What I’ve learned through this is, I’m not going to rationalize why we were not given the opportunity to have that baby. I’m not going to say that we now have a beautiful baby boy, Emery Michael, and because we lost our first, we now have Emery. I’m not going to do that. I know that we live in a world that is fallen. Things happen that should never happen. And because of this, it is okay to be sad. That’s it. Sad. With no rationalization.

This is part of an email that I wrote to my dad several months after our miscarriage:

I think I experienced my first opportunity of healing the other day. I haven't been angry or as sad, like I was in the beginning, but it felt like some real healing. Let me preface this with saying that after experiencing this, I now would never say to anyone in their time of hurting, that maybe God will use this as an opportunity to help someone else in their time of need, but that is what happened. Because no matter what you believe, it never truly feels like God's good when you are in a hurtful situation that you don't understand. Despite that, a friend of mine has been trying to get pregnant for a long time and is feeling very discouraged and deeply sad about the situation; having a hard time rejoicing in any of God's goodness because this is clouding her mind. I felt that way for a while after we had our miscarriage. I didn't really know I was feeling that way while going through it, but I distinctly remember feeling feelings of happiness again, talking to people because I wanted to and not because I had to, praying again. I remember coming out of this "cloud". All this to say, being able to know just a glimpse of the pain that my friend was going through and express some of that to her, was, I think helpful for her and a little healing for me. It was nice to have some healing.

Grieve, and someday move into awesome periods of joy, but always be sad that something completely unfair and less than perfect happened.

My awesome period of joy...