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.

Gratitude

It took me a while to hit upon this major key to happiness and peace.  For such a long time, I felt the gaping hole the loss of my little girl left in my life.  I still do.  But before, I felt that gaping hole as the definition of who I was.  Now, it's an important part but not the defining part.  I felt the pain of what I didn't have: a rainbow baby to somehow make my loss somehow feel less final.  Now, I know the rainbow baby will ever remain just that, the illusion of a baby I will not be holding, a mirage I've been chasing for years without success.  I still feel that pain.

But I have come to understand that there is power in focusing not on what I don't have--on the angels I can't hold for now--but on what I do have.  I do have two children around whom I can wrap my arms.  I have a supportive husband who will hold me when I fall apart with pain.  I have faith that the Lord is there, and that my angels are mine forever.  That they're watching over me now.  I believe in forever families.  I have heard of some people so enmeshed in grief that they've totally lost touch with reality.  They try so hard to regain what they've lost through irrational means.  I gain peace from the knowledge I don't need to be so desperate to hold the shreds of the past because I have a glorious future to anticipate.  I know I will hold them again, all of my angels.  They are lost, but only for now.  There is much to be grateful for in this knowledge.

 I know my angels watch out for me.  I know the Lord will send his Spirit when I am hurting.  For all of this, I can be eternally grateful.  Acts 27:23 states, "For there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve."  The scripture refers to being in the service of God, not in service of the angel. I, too, can have my angels stand beside me as I serve God.  "And thanks be to God for [this] unspeakable gift"(2 Cor 9:15).  Gratitude brings me much joy, and I know it can do the same for you.

Faith and Healing

Morning is Unique

Mourning is an individual experience.  For each person, grief takes different forms.  A lot of people tout the virtues of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief.  When my baby smothered herself in a pillow six years ago, the support groups I joined each handed me a copy of the five stages as if it were a guide book to the experience of mourning.  Yet my experience and those of others around me seem to defy one single process, one single experience.  The five stages did not help me in my personal search for healing.  They did nothing for me except set me up for a confusing and incomplete definition of healing. 

False Expectations:

            Before my baby passed away, I lived in the illusion of safety, that just because no great tragedy had happened to me, it couldn’t.  It felt like a kind of protection that shielded me from the worst the world had to offer.  Then when my baby died, I was unprepared.  I had taken a class on trauma writing.  I had also written my master’s thesis on how reading fictional accounts of trauma and healing can provide a safer, somewhat removed space in which to deal with tragedy.  But none of this prepared me for the actual experience of loss. 

            I had heard time heals all wounds and was set up by that “guide book” I was handed for an expectation that all I had to do was let time pass, and Kubler-Ross’s five stages would happen to me.  As soon as they were done, I’d be healed.  I’d go back to how I was before my tragedy had punched a big bloody hole in my heart.  I wanted something to make it better because it hurt so much. 

The Reality

I knew, based on my experiences with child development classes, that stages meant states of being that would happen on their own in a normalized sort of order.  But in reality, I found myself going through a crazy mix of emotions, only a few of which matched up with Kubler-Ross’s stages of shock and denial, anger, depression and detachment, dialogue and bargaining, and acceptance, all of which were supposed to lead to a return to a meaningful life.  I didn’t see a lot of anger or detachment.  I couldn’t really deny anything.  And there were so many more emotions that weren’t on the list that I faced.  I discovered I could go through all of these emotions and more in a month, a week, or even an hour.  I’d skip from shock to acceptance and back to depression or hysteria then eagerness to share my story and back to depression again.  There was nothing stage-like in any of it. Even on days of acceptance, and even after returning to a meaningful life, it still hurt.  My heart still felt like it had a bloody, nasty, painful hole in it that wouldn’t go away. 

As time passed, I found ways to not think, to keep busy, to look at anything but my baby’s pictures or other triggers that sent me into fits of hysteria.  Basically, time allowed me to grow scabs over the big, bloody, painful hole, so I wouldn’t have to feel it.  But a scab is not nearly as comfortable or sensitive a tissue as regular flesh.  All it took was a nudge or poke at the edges of the scab, and I was in pain again.  

Research

So I started to look elsewhere for guidance in the healing process.  I picked up Robert Neimeyer’s book, Meaning Reconstruction and the Exerience of Loss, that debunked Kubler-Ross’s stages as unscientific.  He pointed out that Kubler-Ross’s original theory was based on the experience of dying, not on grief at all.  And he also pointed out that her theory had no scientific foundation or basis in fact, that the “stages” she defined were not stages at all.  I merely learned what I already knew, that grief involves “highly individual processes.”  What I didn’t find in either text was a useful idea of what healing would feel like for me, what it even meant.  Both texts defined healing as, basically, a return to normalcy.  I had returned to some kind of functionality, which meant by either definition, I was healed.  But I certainly didn’t feel healed.  Memories of my loss still hurt acutely even years later. 

 I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, so another kind of guide I was given and studied was a variety of books by other LDS people about their experience of loss and healing.  Almost across the board, they set up a model of prayer, reading scriptures, and above all, having another baby, a rainbow baby to fill the arms even if he or she couldn’t replace the baby lost.  So we tried.  We spent years trying, only to have a total of 15 losses in a row before we walked away from trying, one baby death and 14 first term miscarriages.  All the testing brought us no answer as to the source of our problem and no rainbow baby.  We’ve recently come to terms with the idea that my body just will not carry babies to term anymore for whatever reason. 

Turning to the Source

So instead, I have turned to God for answers, and I have come to a greater understanding of the healing process than I ever did through science or pseudoscience.   Just after my baby died, I turned intensely to faith.  I prayed harder, studied scriptures more closely and with the guide of the Spirit, more than I ever have in my life.  I felt the best, the most at peace, when I sensed other people’s prayers and when I was full of the influence of the Comforter, also called the Holy Ghost.  God doesn’t want us to suffer.  If we turn to Him, he will bring us comfort.  I felt the best when I felt wrapped in His arms. 

Being healed for me is not just about being functional.  Someone could be dying inside but still live what looks like a normal life from the outside.  The best definition I have heard is that a person who is healed is able to look at a picture or other reminder of the loved one and smile over the memories and blessings more than ache over the loss.  Six years after my loss, I am not there yet, but I’d like to be.  I have moments of peace like that, but they don’t last.  However, this portrait of a healed heart gives me a goal to work toward above and beyond just the goal of functionality.  I met someone recently who has bouts of depression but otherwise, arrived at the emotional state I’m still striving for within hours of delivery of a stillbirth.  The Lord sent her spiritual experiences that immediately brought the peace and joy that have been hard-fought for me.  Everyone is different, so everyone’s experience is different.  True healing is a gift the Lord can give in His time and in His way if we earnestly seek it and pray for it.  

The key is applying the Lord’s atonement.  When Jesus suffered and died for us, he didn’t just suffer for our sins.  He also suffered our pains.  He understands what we suffer.  He understands loss, sadness, and pain.  We need to reach out to him.  We need to seek His peace through obedience, through scripture study, and through bringing the Spirit into our lives so strongly that there is no more space for pain.  He will buffer us from agony.  He will bring us joy and peace.  

One of the general authorities of the LDS church, Elder Shayne Bowen, told the story of how his toddler choked on chalk and died.  Elder Bowen went through pain, anger, frustration, and guilt.  He rejected the comforting words of those who tried to reach out to him.  But as he focused more on gratitude for what he had rather than on his pain and loss, he began to find peace and joy.  The Lord “gave him a new heart," a heart full of light rather than “darkness and despair.”  He did warn that “you will never completely get over [grief] until you are once again with your departed loved ones […or] have a fullness of joy until [you] are reunited in the morning of the First Resurrection.”  But we can still have joy, love, and peace.  We can, as he says, “continue with good cheer.”  The Lord can heal our hearts when we seek Him in sincere prayer, service of our fellow man, obedience, love, and gratitude. 

We will never be the same person we were before.  But we also don’t have to suffer for the rest of our lives, either.  Each person has a different journey, but we don’t have to make this journey alone.  We have our fellow travelers here, but most of all, we have the Lord who loves us with all his heart and wants us to find peace and joy.  

I Believe Gratitude is the Key to Happiness

After Alamanda died, I longed for another baby to fill my arms.  It made sense that if sadness came from empty arms and the absence of baby warmth, cooing, and the smell of fresh baby breath and even the sour smell of tiny baby diapers, all it would take to make me happy was another baby.  I knew another baby could never replace Alamanda, but he or she could fill the empty spaces and relieve the pain.  But instead, I had to learn the hard way that the key to happiness is not from getting what I want but from gratitude for what I have been given. 

When my baby died, the loss left a massive, bloody hole in my heart and my life.  I wanted to get my smile back, but in a world plunged into darkness, my smile was hard to find in a way that wasn’t fake.  Looking at babies, pregnant women, and ultrasounds caused nothing but agony, and in Utah, they’re everywhere.  I kept reading LDS books on healing that showed all you had to do to find healing from the pain worse than any I thought possible was to study scriptures and pray.  Both of these brought peace, as did prayers of friends and family.  But above all, the formula in these books demanded I have another baby for my healing and happiness to be complete.  However, as much as I studied scriptures and prayed earnestly, my rainbow baby never came.  Pregnancy after pregnancy for 13 in a row, I met with more heartache, sometimes a quiet ultrasound with no heartbeat, a hospital visit or other medical intervention, but no baby.  Each time, we bought another porcelain angel for my kids to name, so we could put him or her on the shelf to help them feel the connection and to help them understand the reality of their siblings.  But despite testing and medication from the doctor to prevent another loss, there it came.  I started buying porcelain angels in advance because I figured chances were I would need them.  Every time I prayed about whether to keep trying, I felt like it was not yet time to quit. I have come to believe the reason I was guided this way was because I needed that time to hope in order to heal.  I emotionally needed that crutch, so the Lord let me have it. 

Eventually, I started noticing a pattern in the scriptures and in spiritual thoughts, LDS General Conference Talks, and other places.  Again and again, I heard that joy came not in the getting such as getting a baby but in the gratitude for that which I’d already been richly blessed.  I did not need a baby to complete me.  The Lord would heal me and make me whole, or as whole as I will be until I hold my angels again.  Elder Bowen’s talk from the October 2012 General Conference Really struck me.  He told the story of his journey of healing after his baby died.  He talked of the joy I can have even in spite of the pain, the healing that comes when I realize “How grateful I am to my Father in Heaven that He allows us to love deeply and love eternally. How grateful I am for eternal families. How grateful I am that He has revealed once again through His living prophets the glorious plan of redemption.”  I realized healing is a gift from the Lord, and it comes, in part, through gratitude. 

The Lord has given me so much.  I was blessed with four blissful, though sometimes challenging, months with my angel baby, Alamanda.  She was a truly special spirit who will be mine forever because of Heavenly Father’s plan for families.  I have also been blessed with an army of guardian angels who will watch over me until they can come again and fill my arms.  I have been blessed with a loving husband and two wonderful, warm, vibrant children I can hold and love.  We have been blessed with several pets to fill my days when the kids are in school, including a cat sent specifically to be a hug from Alamanda to my little girl, who still misses her sister.  I have been blessed with talents and opportunities to bless other lives through them. 

I will likely never hold another baby of mine until the Lord comes again.  But I can still find joy and happiness because of gratitude for my blessings and the knowledge that the separation isn’t forever, just for now. 

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.  

A song for the season

I have heard of at least three local stories of women losing their babies in the last 24 hours.  Their Christmas season will ever more be colored by trauma and loss. One would like to think of this as a season of joy, love and laughter, but there are so many ghosts of Christmas past haunting many of us that it's sometimes hard to feel the joy or want to laugh.  Sometimes, it's even hard to care.  My husband's mother was the spirit of Christmas for him, yet she died a week before the holiday.  Every Christmas since has been dimmed by this loss, and that was 20 years ago or more.  And the loss doesn't have to occur during the season to cast a shadow on every holiday for years to come.  I mentioned this holiday issue in my last blog.

For the first four years after Allie's loss, I felt a compulsion to reach out to people, to find as many people as possible I could serve and for whom I could buy Christmas gifts.  I wanted to help people have a better holiday, but almost more, I wanted to survive the holiday season without my baby, with a silence where there should be laughter of my third child.  And it helped.  It carried me through to New Years.  And for Christmas every year for the rest of my life, I will fill a jar for my angels as their gift from me, a jar with all the service we as a family have done throughout the holidays and the year.  We read each slip on Christmas in place of a little five-year-old and her younger siblings opening dolls or bears  It makes for a meaningful climax after the present unwrapping is done.

I still reach out and help, but it's more for others now.  I no longer cry as much when I hear songs about angels and babies, though occasionally, tears still come.  I still identify most with Christmas songs about the experience of motherhood, like "Mary Did You Know," Amy Grant's "Breath of Heaven," and "What Child Is This?"  I also like "Christmas Shoes" because it starts to reach the sadness and joy of the season.  Even though I've heard them multiple times, I often cry mourning or healing tears on hearing them.

I found a fairly new song yesterday that makes me cry just to think about it.  I can't mention its name without crying, but it's a good kind of tears, healing tears.  The song moved me in a way most Christmas songs don't.  And I don't even generally listen to country.  It's called "Broken Hearts like Mine" by Cherie Call.  It hits on the pain of the season for those in mourning, but also on the healing nature of the reason for the season.  I thought I'd share it with those out there who may experience the holiday through a similar lens of mourning.  The song is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pGNFXCq2pY  I know we all can find healing through Him.  That was part of the purpose for his atonement and resurrection, was to understand our pain and help us heal.  We just need to reach out, and he will be there for all of us.  I wish everyone, in spite of the pain, a joyous or at least peaceful season.