Our Traditions

Christmas season, as I've said, is hard.  But we've found ways to make it just a little bit easier with traditions and sparks of joy.  

When I unpacked our Christmas decorations, I pulled out a little tree made of gold tinsel. I wouldn't think much of it, except that we bought it on clearance the year my baby died.  That year, everything was painful.  Breathing was painful.  Existing was painful.  It's hard to describe just how much agony comes upon a family that has just lost a child when the holiday season comes.  Everything from a baby's first Christmas ornament to images of babies to paintings of angels to songs about mothers giving birth brought new pangs of loss.  With that tinsel tree, my kids played an improv game named Props in which they brainstormed what that little tinsel tree could be from a mermaid fin to a cat's tail to a dunce cap to a nose.  That little tinsel tree brought a rare smile to my face.  It brought something so rare during such a painful season: laughter.  

This one little item makes me reflect over the last seven Christmases since our angel came and left.  I remember buying little angel ornaments with anticipation to add to our journal tree.  Every year, we select and date an ornament to represent our year.  We have a 2004 angel that represents our boy before he was born and a toddler ornament that represents him after his birth.  We have similar ornaments to represent our next child.  We bought both a solitary angel for Alli and an angel dancing with a little girl to represent both of our girls.  Then, we bought a frame with wings in which to place our baby's photo after she passed.  But most years, we buy one ornament to represent our vacations or the purchase of a house or a pet.  Those ornaments, like our children's scrap books, remind us of the major events in our lives.  We also have an ornament to represent our miscarried angels.  We all sit together to put those special journal ornaments on our tree and reflect on our lives together.  We smile together remember the fun moments as well as our losses. The tree represents all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  

Then, there's our angels' gift.  Every year, it's the last present we open because it's the most important.  Over the course of the holiday season for the last seven years, we've recorded every service we've done for our fellow man, even each other.  We write them on slips and put them under the tree.  We've made a point to add to it every chance we got.  For the first few years, I needed something to think about other than the holiday season, itself.  I have a friend who struggles financially, especially around the holidays.  So every year for the first few years, I had my kids and me find presents for this family to make their Christmas a little bit brighter.  Now, I don't need that emotional escape, but I still want to help.  I still want to add to that service jar, the gift for my angels.  So I give her a little money.  I want her to have the joy of doing the Christmas shopping for her kids.  This year, especially, we're looking for ways to bring a little bit of joy to others.  That's what this season is all about: remembering the giver of all good things.  

Due to these acts of healing and others as well as the healing power of the Lord, Christmas is no longer as painful as it once was.  That doesn't mean it's free of tears and pain.  But it is better.  We don't have to let the holidays stay painful.  We can find traditions, find ways to bring joy in spite of our pain.  I hope you can do the same.  Because the message of Christmas isn't one of pain but of joy, light, and love.  When we share all of that with others, it comes more fully into our lives.  

The Tunnel of Mourning

I recently read a FaceBook meme debunking the fiction we're told that all we have to do is slog through an emotionally dark tunnel after loss, and we'll come out the other end all healed and feeling great.  It's so true that there really is no end to the tunnel.  Life changes.  We can either stare back the way we came, fighting for the dream of what we lost, or we can accept that life will never be the same.  All we can work toward is what experts like to call "the new normal."

After my baby died, I spent a long time looking behind me, longing for a way to get back into the life I left behind.  I kept feeling like somehow, I could think myself back through time and make the accident that took my baby never happen.  I could will my earlier self to do all the right things at the right times to make loss be a nightmare that passed instead of my new hellish reality.

I've since learned that I have little choice but to accept the tunnel in which I live.  The sooner I accept, the sooner I can move on.  There is no use looking back toward the sunlight, toward the imaginary protection offered by the world above, the world in which "it can't happen to me."  The tunnel is my life, my existence.  That won't change.

What can change is whether or not I let the light in, even here in the tunnel.  At first, letting the light in and feeling joy felt disloyal.  I've heard the same from friends who have lost, especially who have had a recent loss.  It feels like if you smile, you're betraying the person you've lost.  The truth is our angels want us to have joy.  We are here to learn to smile and be happy, even in the darkest night and to help others find the same light.  Even here in the tunnel, there is fellowship.  We can reach out in empathy to others who have lost.  There is healing.  The Lord can touch our hearts and lift our burdens no matter how deeply we feel we've sunk.  If we seek Him and help others lift their burdens, He will make our anguish seem less painful.

This doesn't mean all will be sunshine and perfection.  It just means we can seek and receive help to make it through those dark days.  We can know we're not alone.  I still have days when it feels like my heart is so broken and bloodied, my pit so deep, I'll never find joy again.  But as time goes on, and I seek healing, those days seem fewer and further between.  Time doesn't heal all wounds.  The Lord does.  That's why He suffered your pain and mine: so He would understand it and us.  He loves us all and wants us to feel joy.  We don't need to cling to the fiction that life is supposed to be painless for us to find joy.  The dark helps us understand and appreciate the light.  He is the light.  Let Him in.

Emotional Scabs

They say time heals all wounds, but I would beg to differ.  This doesn’t always work.  I’d say time allows scabbing to form.  Time allows the heart to hurt less because it forms a natural bandage, a protective mechanism.  But the scabby heart, in my experience, isn’t as resilient or healed as one would like.  Scabbing helps with the immediate pain.  It means the mourner has come up with ways of not looking at, feeling, pondering the cause of the pain.  Scabbing means there’s a bridge to emotionally walk over the wound but scabbing is not healing.  There’s still a painful hole, a raw wound under that scar.  All it takes is a nudge, a bump, a thought, or a trigger, and the scab comes off.  The pain is still there, just as raw as ever.  I met up with friends recently, fellow mourners with fresh wounds of their own.  One had lost her husband and one her father, all in much more recent history.  Every time I spoke, the tears came.  The pain seemed to be there and real and visceral, just beneath that scabby surface, for all of us to one degree or another. 

For me, a healed heart is one that can look at pictures of the one that was lost and cherish the memories rather than continue to hurt.  Some people come to this state quickly and without a lot of fanfare.  They have the faith to know their loved one is happier, healthier, better off somehow than they were here.  The people with this kind of faith can immediately point to the belief that they will be with their loved one again.  These people can smile in peace and can continue to feel joy even just after loss.  I would find a short-lived peace, the buffer from the worst of the pain that came with feeling the Holy Ghost and people’s prayers.  But the pain was still very real and very present just beneath the surface. 

Granted, what seems to be perfect and instant healing may be an illusion, what we as outsiders see.  It may be for a while, they, too, had the raw then scabbed hearts that mourn behind closed doors.  Or it may also be they truly experienced such instantaneous healing, with the power of the atonement, the power of the Lord who overcame pain, sin, and death to heal all wounds and to buffer our pains and our hurts.   

As an outsider, it’s hard to say what’s really going on under the surface with other people.  The LDS father of a little girl who died in the Sandy Hook shooting immediately extended his forgiveness and displayed what appeared to be a healed, joyous heart.  I don’t think I could do that.  Six years after my baby died, I’m still feeling only partially healed under the scabs.  Maybe to an outsider, I look like I’m healed and happy.  I have my moments when I feel healed.  I feel happy.  I am able to function and sometimes even look at the pictures and cherish the moments.  But so many times, just thinking about her or hearing about her or seeing my picture brings tears to my eyes.  I know we will be together again.  I know my angel is here with me as often as she can be.  I know these things to be true.  And maybe I’ll just have to cherish that I no longer [very often] become so incapacitated with hysterical sobbing that I can’t function, can’t think, only feel a gushing hole where my heart used to be.  I can enjoy those days when I don’t ponder [very deeply] the pain of miscarriage after miscarriage with no rainbow baby in sight.  I can feel [at least for the moment] healed and whole. 

But I also know I’ll never be the same person I was before.  That’s not how healing works.  It is not a reset button to days of innocence before the emotional firestorm came.  It’s a new, older, empathetic self that forms in the place of the innocent.  It’s someone who understands these things CAN happen to me, but that I can survive it.  It’s a stronger heart that forms under the scabs.  The moments of intense and searing pain still happen, but I don’t have to be consumed by them.  I can cherish those times of peace and joy and enjoy the moments with the children I can still hold.  I have been healed to some extent.  But that doesn’t mean I got over it.  One never gets over it.  One just gets through it the best one can and prays for healing that can even---eventually with faith and the power of God--come.