Tribute to a Lost Child

This week marks five years since I lost a child. I was about four months pregnant when an ultrasound revealed his little heart has stopped. My first and only pregnancy is a story I have buried deep inside of me, but every September, I crumble just a bit and my eyes fill with tears when I see a child about the age mine would be. Miscarriage, perhaps for many reasons, is rarely acknowledged in our society and there is no appropriate place for the grief of a child never carried to term, a child who never saw the world.

It is a peculiar grief, a grief that has no face, no memories of cuddling, no dreams of soft skin touching yours. It is a grief of lost hopes and lost dreams. For me, it is the grief of knowing that is biologically difficult for me to carry a child and the awareness that I will likely never conceive again. But it is also more. It is the grief of knowing that your womb, the giver and nourisher of life, became a tomb. What was meant, what was expected to give life carried death. The sensation of new life growing within my body, the awareness of another life sharing mine, was severed. The labor that normally accompanies new life was only the harbinger of death.

As a pastor, I wonder why we do not acknowledge miscarriage more, why we don’t commemorate children lost before their life begins and mothers who carry their memories in silence. Perhaps it is because we are uncomfortable with loss and even less comfortable with ambiguity. In our society, we do not have the words to speak of a miscarriage as a death. No ritual, no funeral, no memorial marks the end of a tiny life. When people ask me if I have children, the appropriate answer is no, even though I want so desperately to say yes. Yes, I am a mother, though I was only a mother for four short months.

 A woman who miscarries is often told to move on, to forget. I remember a male pastor telling me to stop grieving because it made the other women in the church uncomfortable (though I would guess he was only expressing his own discomfort).

We need a pastoral theology around miscarriage. We need a way to speak of expected life turning to death, we need a way to honor a life much shorter than expected and the woman who carried it.

I never buried my baby. “Fetal tissue” was sent to the lab for testing to determine why it was so difficult for me to get pregnant and even more difficult for me to maintain pregnancy. Last night, in my dreams, I enacted a funeral. I prepared a tiny shroud and, in my mind’s eye, I found a spot I loved among the trees on the land I love, and I dug a tiny hole. I imagined my baby dancing in the wildflowers and sunshine, watching me, its tiny spirit secure and loved by a God who gathers little children in his arms.