Simon Sparrow

Four years later, Elena still remembers the funny things Simon did and talks about him almost every day. When she and her mom pass a child on the street with curly hair, she’ll say, “I think Simon would have looked like him.”

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep on the Today Show

This is a clip from NBC’s Today Show, March 5, 2008.

For those who give birth to a stillborn baby, or those who learn their baby is terminal during the pregnancy, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep offers a wonderful service–memorial photographs, free of charge in many cities and countries around the world. The book Naming the Child features an interview with Cheryl Haggard, co-founder of this organization, and mother of Maddex Achilles Haggard.

Samuel Provenzano

“About holding Sam, I’m thankful that i wasn’t deprived of those moments. His sweet baby body, it makes his life more real to me. Loving touch confirms the sacredness of life, but it was painful and hard to hold him, waiting for life to end. Hearing the labor of his breathing, knowing it could – and would – stop at any moment. i could see why you would want to protect someone from that–it was hard to hold him. It was nothing like the pure bliss of holding Natalia. Nothing like to look on the suffering of your sweet innocent baby… to know that he was hurting, to know he could barely take the next breath. Who wants to see that? And yet to miss that would have been to deprive myself, not of some great memory, but of the ability to do the one small thing I could do for my son in this life.”

-Tawnya Provenzano, mother of Samuel

Maddux Achilles Haggard

Maddux Achilles Haggard
February 4th-10th 2005

That next day, we sat with you, held you, sang to you and rocked you. I was even able to change your diapers. You still didn’t move. You couldn’t grip our fingers, and you never opened your eyes. But that was ok. Even though you couldn’t hold onto us, we were holding onto you. Mommy and Daddy told you over and over how much we loved you. We stroked your head, kissed your tiny fingers and toes. We whispered in your ears. We cried. We prayed. You are just beautiful.

–From a letter Cheryl wrote to Maddux

Philip Bibas

Stephanos and his son Harry visit Philip’s grave.

The Empty Place

Since you’ve been gone
there is a place
inside of us
that is shaped like you
so empty now
that place which is filled
with so much love
for you.

––Juliana Bibas

Trisomy

This video was shown at the 2008 SOFT Conference and is dedicated to all of the parents and families of babies born with Trisomy 13 and Trisomy 18.

To learn more about Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, please visit our website at: http://www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org and our support forum at: http://www.nowisleep.com.

To learn more about Trisomy, visit: http://www.trisomy.org

Zoe

Peter Jon Gillquist recorded this song shortly after his baby, Zoe, was miscarried.

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From Despair to Dawn

“The anguish completely paralyzed me,” wrote Henri Nouwen in The Inner Voice of Love. “I could no longer sleep. I cried uncontrollably for hours. I could not be reached by consoling words or arguments … All had become darkness. Within me there was one long scream coming from a place I didn’t know existed, a place full of demons.”

Anyone who has fallen through Nouwen’s “house without floors” can relate, at least in part, to this description. Despair can be triggered by a specific event — like the death of a loved one, a failed relationship, a traumatic move.

Sometimes despair has no apparent cause, and descends without warning. Life feels suddenly meaningless and exhausting. The smallest tasks, like licking a stamp and attaching it to an envelope, require Herculean effort. No amount of coffee cuts the gloom.

Some people find that they suddenly cannot pray. It’s like those dreams when you’re trying to escape a stalker, but your legs refuse to move and you struggle to scream but no sound comes out. A priest friend of mine recommended that the best thing to say to a person in this situation is, “Don’t worry about praying for now. You concentrate on surviving, and I’ll pray for both of us.”

During a recent mini-bout with despair, I developed a bonus aliment — a flu complete with fever and the shakes. I crawled into bed and called my friend Amber, hoping to get a sympathetic chuckle out of her. “I’m on my deathbed,” I said. “I think it may be a step in the right direction.”

Two Kinds of Despair
Despair is the death of hope. Judas experienced this after he betrayed Jesus. In one of the Gospel’s most poignant scenes, he suddenly realizes what he’s set into motion. He bolts to the temple leaders, begging them to take the money back and release Jesus.

They don’t want his blood money, however, nor do they intend to let Jesus go. Judas throws the coins at their feet and flees. When he realizes that there is no going back he hangs himself.

Jesus, also, struggled with something like despair when he was languishing on the cross, as he cried out to his Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus felt abandoned. Some of his best friends, with their freshly-washed feet, the taste of bread and wine still on their lips, pretended like they never knew him while he was being led away. Even God seemed to withdraw — offering no solace or comfort as he hung on the cross, just a shattering, expansive silence.

Jesus’ anguished question echoes through our own moments of despair, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”

Biological Despair
Anyone who has given birth without the help of anesthetics may have some idea of what Jesus was getting at. There is a common phenomenon — a moment of despair — that strikes women during natural childbirth. The pain has become excruciating, her body limp with exhaustion, and her potential best ally during labor — her mind — shamelessly betrays her.

She may begin believe that the labor will never end, that her ultrasounds were some kind of cruel trick to dupe her into thinking that she was actually going to have a baby, when she was actually suffering from an extreme case of appendicitis all along.

This may seem like an exaggeration, but despair (in and out of labor) can be out of touch with reality — even delusional. The most unusual thing about the moment of despair in labor is that it strikes different women at exactly the same phase — just before transition when the pushing is about to begin. The despair is actually a hopeful sign—the baby is breathlessly close.

Nature is like that as well — bleak moments lead to new life. In Chicago the winters are so wretched, that by mid-February, I start envisioning an Apocalyptic Return of the Ice Ages. Usually, a few days later, the Great Thaw begins. It is no accident that our journey through lent into Easter parallels to the reawakening of the natural world.

The Way Through
Even if we know that spring is coming, winter still seems endless. When C.S. Lewis was grieving the death of his wife, he described the vicious cycle of sorrow: not only did he have to suffer, but he had to continually think about the fact that he was suffering.

Lewis’ journal, A Grief Observed, offers a window into his heart after Joy died, as he cycled through grief, rage, despair, confusion and hope. Lewis invites us, by example, to be honest about our own pain.

Several years ago, I met an Episcopal priest who had survived the death of two wives, the first by cancer, the second in a hit-and-run accident. He told me that after his second wife died he went into a chapel and he started yelling and sobbing. He cried and raged, and then cried and raged some more. And then, he told me, a silence unlike any he had ever experienced descended on him.

“Let God have it,” this priest told me. “He can take it.”

The silence he experienced might have been similar to what Lewis describes near the end of A Grief Observed. “When I lay these questions before God I get no answer, but a rather special sort of ‘no answer,’ he wrote. “It is not a locked door, but a gaze, certainly not uncompassionate, not in refusal, but waving the question, saying, ‘Peace child, you do not understand.’”

Hold My Hand
For all those times when we simply cannot understand, when we lay questions before God and get no answer, or when we don’t even have the strength to ask, people can help carry us through.

“Find the places in your life where you sense the hand of God, and grab on with all your might,” said one of my seminary mentors. For me, one of the key places is relationships. When I’m tempted by despair, I call a few friends and tell them my woeful, meandering tales. Even when they don’t have answers, it helps to know that they are on the other end of the line, holding me in prayer.

It also helps to remember that despair sometimes gives way to dawn. The Eastern Orthodox word for Easter is Pascha, and can be translated as “the dawn.” I love the way this world captures nature’s answer to night and God’s answer to death.

Years ago, when my husband and I lived next to our church, we used to walk home from the Pascha service at four in the morning, after a long night of singing and feasting. We’d make our way through a slip of dark woods, over a trickle of brook. We’d crawl into our bed, the twilight blue of the almost day framed by our window. And then, just as we were drifting off to sleep, the birds would begin to sing.

It was still dark, but they sang anyway, sensing that the twilight would break open to reveal the dawn.

Copyright (c) 2005 Jenny Schroedel. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. This article was published on Boundless.org on May 26, 2005.

Solace from Silence: Comforting the Bereaved

One night when I was in high school, my mom came into my room to tell me that my friend Sara’s father had died. I didn’t know what to do, so I called another friend who had recently lost her father. She said, “Get in your car and go over there.”

So that’s what I did, along with a few of Sara’s closest friends. In the car nobody spoke. None of us had firsthand experience with death and were wary about entering a home where death had passed through and taken somebody we knew.

When we arrived Sara was in her snowy front yard with her beagle, Macintosh. As we approached she opened her arms as if she had been expecting us.

Just Be There

Sara led us to her room, lit candles and asked us to pray with her. I’m struck now by how odd this was, considering that we were uptight college-prep school kids who rarely spoke about spirituality. But we followed Sara’s lead, held hands in a circle and let her initiate prayers.

Years later, I got another phone call. This time, a friend’s newborn baby had died from a genetic abnormality. My friend and her husband were living in Canada and had no family nearby. I remembered the advice given to me years before and asked my friend if she wanted me to come. She said, “Oh yes, please.”

I felt a little awkward in their home, sleeping on a sofa a few feet from the room where their baby had died. I was afraid I’d invaded their privacy, but the baby’s father, a Moroccan Muslim, put me at ease when he told me that my presence reminded him of his childhood. In his community, when a person died, everyone went to the home. They would stay up all night sharing food, memories and grief.

In America, friends and family offer their support by attending the funeral, writing notes and baking casseroles. But afterward, we’re often left to grieve alone. Mother Theresa said that Americans suffer from the worst form of poverty — loneliness. This is felt acutely after a death.

Listen Empathically

There is a reason that many of us pull back: death makes us tongue-tied. C.S. Lewis described his friends’ awkwardness about his wife’s death in A Grief Observed.

“An odd byproduct of my loss is that I am aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet,” wrote Lewis. “At work, at the club, in the street, I see people as they approach me trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ’say something about it’ or not.”

There isn’t that much to say. We can gently open the door to conversation with, “I’m sorry about your loss.” But after we open that door, even a crack, we need to be open to the possibility of an authentic response.

At seminary, I learned about empathic listening in a counseling class. Empathic listening is a form of active engagement where you silence your own ideas and try to paraphrase back what’s been said to you.

When we role-played in the classroom, one student would be the talker and the other the listener. These early conversations felt awkward, but they demonstrated what empathic listening is supposed to look like. They went something like this:

Jane: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me — I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I barely have the energy to brush my teeth.”

Joe: “You feel listless.”

We thought that if we tried our new “technique” on friends they’d laugh. But the exact opposite occurred — people would open up, as if they’d just been waiting for a chance to speak and be heard.

Empathic listening is difficult. For most of us, the temptation to insert our own ideas and stories into the conversation is fierce. We have to silence our egos repeatedly. A neighbor whose father recently died asked me why people always rush to say something when she mentions her dad. “Why can’t they just be silent for a moment and leave it at that?” she said.

Don’t Rush It

Like Job, who not only suffered massive hardship but also suffered the ongoing commentary of his peers, my neighbor has experienced some strange reactions. When she mentioned that her dad’s funeral was this past weekend, one friend said, “Wow, it sure took a long time for you to get him buried.” My neighbor was taken aback. “That response made me feel like I was grieving my dad too long. Sort of a ‘Haven’t you moved on, yet?’”

We tend to be uneasy with long processes and overt displays of grief. Ancient religions, however, create space for emotions woven through many seasons. Within Observant Judaism the entire first year after a death is devoted to several phases of mourning. During the first seven days those closest to the deceased don’t work, bathe, have their hair cut, read the Torah or have sex. It intrigues me that Judaism sanctions a break from those things that a grieving person might naturally be inclined to skip.

Within the Eastern Orthodox Church, funerals are followed by 40 days of remembrance and prayer. Similarly, after an Orthodox woman gives birth, she’s not expected to attend church or do much else for 40 days while she bonds with her newborn. I like the idea of a 40-day pause after something as significant as a death or a birth because it takes time to make sense of our rearranged lives.

A Grief Observed chronicles this journey toward understanding. Lewis experiences a cycle of restlessness, rage, grasping, surrender and serenity, followed by fresh tears and disbelief. Over the course of the book, Lewis comes to understand that he will never really “get over” Joy’s death.

Lewis compares being a widower to being an amputee. “He will probably have recurrent pains in that stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones, and he will always be a one-legged-man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed.”

Speak No Platitudes

“The worst thing is not the sorrow or loss or the heartbreak,” writes Richard John Neuhaus. “Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter.” Death changes us in hundreds of subtle and pronounced ways. It is difficult to speak to the significance of this encounter, and most bereavement cards fall woefully short.

It’s better to say nothing than to say something that minimizes the pain as so many of these cards do. Memories aren’t much of a comfort when you’ve lost a 2-day-old baby and time doesn’t seem to heal wounds as much as it slowly numbs us to them.

After a death occurs, there are no perfect words. Perhaps the most loving response is a willingness to linger with our bereaved friend beside their loss. “There is a time simply to be present to death — whether one’s own or that of others — without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it,” wrote Neuhaus.

Be still, writes the Psalmist, and know that I am God. It is in stillness that we know, in stillness that we hear, and in stillness that we love.

Copyright © 2005 Jenny Schroedel. All rights reserved. Published on Boundless.org on October 13, 2005.

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