Molly Piper

Every year around major holidays, there’s a particular sting for a mom missing her only daughter. It comes when I set out to find a decent-looking set of clothes for my sons to wear.

Here’s the criteria I’m usually looking for:

• Nothing with cartoon characters on them (or skulls & crossbones, thank you very much).
• Something affordable (I don’t want to spend more than $20-25 per kid), but still made nicely.
• Something handsome, usually with a tie and collared dress shirt (Orison loves a good clip-on).

You’d be surprised how difficult this quest can be. I try department stores, and then the lesser-expensive department stores (Target, Kohl’s), and then move onto stores like Marshall’s.

What I hoped would be a fun way to buy some cute clothes for my kids usually turns into frustration and anger, though. I spend five minutes just trying to find the boys’ dress clothes amidst the sea of girl dress clothes. Eventually I might find a rack or two, and I’ll think from looking at the front, “Oh, this one looks nice…” and then I turn it over and there’s a HUGE applique on the back that says something like “Little Devil” with a demon face on it. What?!?! Do people buy this stuff???

I’m sure the equivalent for little girls would say something like “Perfect Angel” or something sweet like that. Because we all know that girls are just so sweet and perfect, and boys so…not???

I’m sorry, I know it probably sounds like I’m bitter. I’ll admit it, I get angry. It really sucks to go in the kids’ clothes section at all sometimes. And then to be so poignantly reminded that I have no business shopping on 90% of the racks hurts even more. It’s like there’s a big sign slapped on all those racks:

“You Don’t Belong Here.”

I know there are other women like me, living without their only daughter. There’s a particular hole for a mom, a woman, who loses her chance to raise her little girl. So many hopes and dreams die with that little girl.

One thing I’ve learned on my journey is that if I take the time to listen to what’s going on in my heart, all this anger and frustration, and let God pull me deeper, past the self-protectiveness of the anger, I get down to the pain of it. If I will get honest with God there in my anger, he always shows me just how much I’m hurting. Somehow the wall of anger crumbles and I’m left in the rubble, weeping.

Because underneath the anger is always the pain. I can stay there in the anger and grow bitter and hard (trust me, the temptation is there), but God has helped me see that it’s always better to let myself feel all of the emotions (first the anger) and then search for what’s really going on in my heart. Pretty much 100% of the time, under the anger is pain. More pain to feel, more tears to cry, more aspects of the loss that I need to grieve.

Sometimes I don’t want to go there. Sometimes I just want to rant and rail against my situation. Sometimes I just want to buy clothes for my sons. It’s hard and frustrating. Sometimes it feels like there’s nowhere to go from the pain–it can rise up anytime or anywhere. Grief is not just for grieving places, like the cemetery. It happens in other stranger places–you know, places like Kohl’s.

I suppose the other option would be to pretend like I don’t feel the anger. “No, no, no…it’s bad to be angry. God took Felicity away and I have to be happy and content with that.” If I decide on this option, I also miss the chance to grieve, just like I would have if I would’ve stayed hard and angry and bitter.

But Jesus doesn’t turn away the grievers. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” I am called blessed. And I’m promised His comfort.

This is blessed assurance. It’s like a great big sign at the foot of the Cross that say:

“You Belong Here.”

Last week I wrote about the fear that kept me from blogging about being pregnant. This is another post written during my post-Felicity pregnancy, the one that brought the blessed arrival of Morrow. Morrow is now 17-months-old. So this post is old.

The first reason was fear; the second reason I didn’t post about my pregancy was time.

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Aside from the fear of telling people about our upcoming arrival, I also had a deep longing during this unique season to focus on my daughter.

From the time this pregnancy started, I’ve felt this desire to protect her place in my life and heart, not ever wanting to feel like I was trying to replace her.

I’ve also known that these months where I could focus my energies more on her and her memory were limited. Especially as we got closer to having our second son, I kind of wished that I could be pregnant longer, just so I could keep focusing on Felicity.

I knew that the instant he arrived, my affections and heart would be different, because I would have so much love for him. But what would happen to the feelings I still want to have for Felicity? Will there be room enough for all of them? I almost felt like her territory was being encroached upon. Not that this would be the fault of our next child AT ALL; I just felt like her little spot in my life would get even smaller. And as her mother, I dreaded that.

I never, ever want to leave her behind. And in some ways, I know I won’t. But in other ways it’s inevitable that our life will move on. And I’ve wanted to hope so badly that it will be good when it did.

I just finished an excellent book by Jerry Sittser called A Grace Disguised. A dear sister gave it to me. Her full-term daughter Addie died due to complications during birth just over a year ago. Anyway, if you have ever experienced any kind of loss, this is an excellent book. One of the closing statements really shed light on what I just described.

The accident remains now, as it always has been, a horrible experience that did great damage to us and to so many others. It was and will remain a very bad chapter. But the whole of my life is becoming what appears to be a very good book.

Since I’m writing this before the arrival of this child, I don’t know how all that is going to shake out. I suppose you’ll hear more about it in the coming months. I’m thankful for the book that God is writing. I never thought it would include a chapter like Felicity’s, but it has. By no means is the chapter finished, but now there is another chapter called “Morrow.”

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Reading this post again after so much time has passed is very interesting. I thought that having another child would be so healing for me. And ultimately, it was. But I was expecting it to be healing in the short run, too, and it wasn’t. In reality, having another child sent me into a new wave of grief after his birth.

It was after his birth that I finally came to terms with my depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It was after his birth that I got the most counseling (professional and non-professional). His birth didn’t remove me from the pain of losing Felicity, it blew the lid off of it.

I thought I was focusing on Felicity in the year after her death when I was pregnant with Morrow. Looking back on it, what I can remember at least, I was still in shock. I was pregnant (And happy to be!) 3 months after her death, but it caused me to focus on the pregnancy and what was ahead more than focusing on healing from the wounds of the past. So much so that when we got through the pregnancy with the hoped-for result (a living baby), all the pain of the pregnancy with the unhoped-for result forced its way to the top.

And that had to happen. I had to come to terms with the deep pain and loss. And I did that with a new baby at my breast.

In some ways, he saved my life. He ushered me into the darkest, most painful places I’ve ever been, where I wrestled and struggled and thought for sure I would die. He was my constant companion through those dark, dark days—grunting, smiling, filling his diaper. It was like his presence and the regularity of his need for me kept me alive, kept me waking up every morning, forced me to go to my counseling appointments (since I only had a small window until he’d need me again), and gave me a reason to want to get to the other side.

He was God’s little catalyst for my healing, ultimately.

So there I was, my whole pregnancy with Morrow, worrying about having enough time to grieve. Turns out, God had hardly begun the mega-process I was in. He gave me just the right time, with just the right people, and one very special baby who remained a mystery to all of you while God knit him together.

This post was written right after the birth of our third child, Morrow. Today he turns 17 months old. So this post is about that old.

I never published it—not sure why.

For those of you newer to our story, our third child was born 8.22.08, 11 months after the stillbirth of his sister, Felicity. But… I kept my pregnancy a secret from my blogging audience until the day I was going in to deliver.

Here’s the original post, written sometime in late 2008.

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Many of you were probably a little bit surprised by the news of our third child’s arrival. I am too.

There are a few reasons I haven’t blogged about it.

1. Fear.

Women who have experienced the death of a child often deal with irrational thoughts. I’ve dealt with so many since Felicity’s death. Many of them have been those “if only” thoughts:

If only I had gone into the hospital the night I was having some painful contractions, maybe they just would have let me stay and I’d have her right now.

Others have been more like:

My baby died inside of me. My womb is a place of death.

So much of me has struggled to believe that the birth of a healthy, living child could ever happen for us again.

Maybe God will never do this for me. I’m going to live with the agony of another stillbirth so that he can keep making an example out of me and my suffering.

I don’t want to be an example. I want to be the mother of more than one living child.

So, though I don’t believe in jinxes, I shied away from announcing my pregnancy for a long time, mostly because I was afraid to actually say the words and then have God snuff it out because I was presumptuous and he was going to teach me a lesson about that.

I know these thoughts don’t reflect a belief in a loving God. And I’ve wept even thinking the thoughts. But they’ve been there.

I didn’t even tell my parents for almost five months that we were expecting. It was as though my mouth went dumb every time I tried to bring it up in a phone conversation with them 900 miles away. It was just easier to talk about weather or Orison or what I was making for dinner.

The fears I dealt with throughout this pregnancy were ones that I wanted to deal with personally, first between me and God, then between me and Abraham, then between me and my family and close friends. These concentric circles of trust and support have been what I needed for the duration of my pregnancy.

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It’s been about 17 months since I wrote those words. And since then I’ve given birth to a healthy, full-term, living baby. That should prove to me that it’s possible, right? That should take care of my fears, right?

God has indeed proven his faithfulness in many ways in my life since September 2007. But… fears remain. This Christmas I was struck over and over and over with how each person responded to the announcement of Christ’s coming. What was the first thing the angel told each of them (Mary, Joseph, the shepherds)?

“Fear not…”

It’s like the angel knew what a human’s knee-jerk reaction would be—fear.

We’re so stinkin’ fearful, every last one of us. But one thing I’ve been clinging to recently is something my mentor told me when I was dealing with something very fearful for me.

“Hell dances when God’s people are afraid.”

So I can either add to their revery and stew in my fears down here, or I can bring them to the Cross, where God is not spurning them, but hearing them and calming them. If the angels know that we will react fearfully, then surely God knows our inclinations. He’s not surprised by my fears. So I can run to him, and he will embrace me.

I just keep telling myself: He is a loving Father, and not my adversary.

A fellow grieving mother sent me this poem the other day. Her son is buried very near to my Felicity. I visit him each time I go.

I know I haven’t written much about how I’m doing, grief-wise, in awhile. But it’s there, always, and some of it too deep, too painful to share here. Maybe I’ll get there someday.

In the meantime, you can read something that just recently made me cry tears of longing and joy and pain, all at the same time.

Resignation
from The Seaside and the Fireside

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807-1882)

Our Christmas tree decorating process has morphed and evolved over the years. Now it includes shedding tears for our family member who’s not with us, prancing around the Christmas tree and getting into trouble.

Our daughter has been with Jesus for three Christmases now.

Most people who’ve ever lost someone they love will tell you that the holidays are particularly hard. So, for people to have the foresight to give these ornaments to us back in 2007… let’s just say, I’m deeply thankful.

We’ve done it differently every year, but this year, the Felicity ornaments were the last to go on the tree. And since there were three, Abraham, Orison, and I all chose the one we’d like to hang.

I don’t want to make our tree a Felicity tree, I just want her there. These three little ornaments are very special to us.

If you’ve ever wondered what to get for someone who has lost a child, I would highly recommend an ornament. That way, it’s not another item they have to find a place for year-round, but when Christmas comes, there’s a ready-made place for remembering.

Our tree isn’t fancy. It’s not pristine. But it’s ours. It’s our family tree.

Most of you have already put up your Christmas trees. You’ve strung the lights and hung the ornaments. You might even be sitting and enjoying it right now.

There’s nothing like a Christmas tree at Christmas to make it feel like home. Like family.

We chose, for a number of reasons, to put up a very small tree this year. But in actuality, it’s the third year in a row we’ve used this little thing as our family Christmas tree.

You see, I bought it in the Fall of 2007, just after we lost Felicity and I was going through a major money-spending binge (shock does insane things to you). And then when Christmas came, I was too tired to think about putting up a real tree. Plus, we decided to go on an extensive 4-week road trip at Christmas. (Again, shock does crazy things to you.) We spent Christmas #1 without Felicity in Pennsylvania (in our stupor of shock) among our family and friends there.

Then for Christmas 2008, we had just moved into our current house a couple weeks before and the only thing I had time for (and room for among the boxes) was this little tree. Combine that with having a 4-month old baby, and it wasn’t exactly the right time for me to move forward with any elaborate Christmas decorating.

Now it’s Christmas 2009. Christmas #3. (For those of you living without loved ones, help me out here: do you mark your holidays like this? I don’t feel like I have the same inclination to mark other holidays like Thanksgiving or Easter this way. But at Christmas I miss her a lot, and I feel the passage of time more poignantly.)

Anyway… Christmas #3. Another Pennsylvania Christmas. So I figured, “Why go to the trouble of doing a tree when we’re not even going to be here?”

But Orison had other plans.

In his Christmas excitement, one night after dinner, he’d had enough of this waiting around thing (I’m pretty sure it was December 1) and decided to light a fire under Abraham and I. He came into the kitchen and announced that we were all going to the basement right now and, “Dad, you’ll carry the Christmas tree. Mommy, you’ll carry the Advent calendar. And I’ll carry the boxes.”

“Ready… set… go!” And all of a sudden we were putting up a tree after all.

(And no, we didn’t make him carry the boxes.)

I’m planning a couple more posts about what makes our tree, our family tree, special for me. What makes your Christmas tree special for your family?

On September 22, we marked Felicity’s second birthday. We don’t do anything extravagant, just things that recognize the significance of the day in our hearts.

At the cemetery Abraham and I try to give each other a few minutes of peace and reflection while we alternate caring for the other kids.

Morrow was alert and aware of his surroundings this year, as opposed to last year when he was one month old. At thirteen months he’s a busy one! He enjoyed the birthday balloon the best, more specifically bopping his brother.

And he enjoyed crawling all over the cemetery (note the filthy knees). He eventually found some goose poop on a veteran’s grave and decided to give it a taste. Abraham used most of a bottle of water trying to flush his mouth, hence the soaked shirt.

My girlfriends had already brought some of these flowers. It was like a welcome banner for us. And it meant a lot to know that they’d been there.

Orison really likes to take pictures, so here’s one he snapped of the rest of us:

Orison kept himself very busy while we were there. He often brings his bike to the cemetery, but this time he had no training wheels! He hadn’t exactly gotten the hang of it until this day, so bad mommy didn’t even bring his helmet (I totally wasn’t expecting him to get it!)

It truly was a special gift from the Lord to have something to celebrate through our tears. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience or something while I watched him—how did I get here? how did he get to be so old? how is it that he’s taking this huge step of independence right before my eyes?

It felt like a launching forward.

Happy birthday, Felicity Margaret. We miss you.

I have people contact me pretty regularly who are intersecting with stillbirth and child loss for the first time. Some are experiencing it themselves, but more often than not, they’re friends with someone who’s just lost a child.

Most of them have no idea what to do. They’re at a loss, completely unprepared to comfort in something so mind-numbingly awful.

It took me at least six months to want to read a book about loss, grief, or death. It took me a couple months to even read anything. It felt so trite and small to read something that wasn’t about death, but then it felt like too much of a bad thing to read about grief and loss when I was just trying to make it through a day with death all around me.

Lots of people want to give a book to the grieving person. It’s not a bad gift, especially if it’s a good book about grief and loss.

But I want to challenge you one further—read the book first.

I want to tell you a story about what that meant for me. A few months ago, I was given a present from one of our dear friends—an unmarried, male friend. It was wrapped in the way you might expect an unmarried male to wrap a gift, in a brown paper bag with my name scrawled on top in permanent marker.

I waited to open it until later in the night, after he’d left. I unwrapped the package and found a book, a book about stillbirth. I opened the cover to find this inscription:

This is a book I recently stumbled across by a woman whose first child was stillborn. It moved me very powerfully, and I wanted to give it to you… “We read to know we’re not alone,” say the characters in Shadowlands. I hope this book makes you feel less alone.”

I could hardly read his words through the thick tears in my eyes. All I could say over and over, through my sobbing was, “He read the book. He read the book!”

What was a single guy with no children doing reading a book about stillbirth? I’ll tell you what he was doing. He was loving me in one of the most profound ways I’ve experienced from a friend since Felicity died.

This was no quick-fix, at-arms-length gift from someone who didn’t know how to handle someone like me. He had decided very consciously to enter into our pain, into our hell, even just for 184 pages. But that decision meant more to me than almost anything. It was a decision to love.

Too often we panic when we don’t understand how to interact with someone who’s going through tremendous pain. I think one motivation for simply buying a book and giving it is to say, “Wow, I don’t know what all this is about, but this person [who wrote the book] must know something. I mean, they have a book about it.”

Another thing it can communicate is a desire to keep things neat and tidy. If we’re really honest with ourselves we might find something a few layers deeper that’s saying, “I don’t understand this. I’m not very good at all this stuff. So here, here’s a book! That’ll help them, right?”

And neither of those is wrong, necessarily. Buying a book for a hurting person is not unkind; I don’t mean to imply that at all.

But what if we said, “Wow, I have no idea what they’re going through. Here’s a book about it. That’ll help me understand them better, hopefully.” You can equip yourselves to love hurting people! This will give you mileage in communicating and relating with the brokenhearted if you can join them in their brokenheartedness. It’ll help you cry a few more tears for the one who hasn’t stopped crying.

I don’t know if any of you will take this advice. Maybe a few of you will. If you do, I want to thank you in advance on behalf of grieving people everywhere. It will be a transforming step of blessing for them… and you.

Last night we lit candles. On the eve of our daughter Felicity’s 2-year homegoing anniversary, our dear friend Barbie read us a beautiful piece she had written. She adapted it from something written for her on the 2-year anniversary of her son’s death back in August.

We lit candles for love, joy, memories, tears, hope, peace, and strength.

I wasn’t expecting this at all, but the stanza about joy was the one that touched me the deepest. I don’t feel like I connect with the word joy very much in my grief. So I was surprised by joy, even as the tears ran down my face.

Here’s what she wrote:

We light a candle for JOY:

For the joy of a wedding;
For the joy of Orison’s birth;
For the joy of Morrow’s sweet life;
For the joy of Felicity’s name;
For the joy in hearts that waited for her;
For her joy in the presence of our God;
For the joy, for the Felicity of our risen Lord.

Happy birthday, Felicity Margaret.

In early September 2007, Abraham and I traveled to Wheaton, IL for “one last hurrah” before our second child would be born.

We left our 2-year-old with my mother-in-law and hit the road in a sporty-looking rental—a highly impractical red Pontiac. I remember we stopped for a leisurely lunch on our way there, and I kept my feet up on the dash for a good portion of the six hour trip to prevent swelling.

While in Wheaton, we distributed books to the college students, compliments of Desiring God (the company my husband works for). We also went out to eat, talked with students, visited with Abraham’s brother and his family and other good friends. We were footloose and fancy-free.

And I was 36 weeks pregnant.

We took this picture of us to email to Orison so that he’d know we were thinking about him and missing him.

What strikes me most about this picture is how happy we look.

One of the things I’ve been grieving this last year is simply that I used to be a happy person. It used to be that my days were primarily happy, with the occasional interruption of melancholy or difficulty. For the last 22 months, the opposite has been mainly true.

One of my good friends uses the phrase “secondary losses.” I think that’s what this year has been—a whole bunch of secondary losses. The loss of innocence. The loss of happiness. The loss of youth.The loss of simplicity. And when you experience those secondary losses, you grieve.

I look at those two people and truly wonder if that is the same person I see in the mirror each day. I feel like I’ve aged something like 10 years since then.

Today, memories like this one make me cry—hard. We had no idea that we were a few weeks away from one of the worst tragedies we’ll ever face.

So if you’re a mom like me, living without one (or more) of your children, take heart that this is indeed one of the hardest things you will ever live through. But that also means that you lived.

The lines around your eyes will deepen. But that also means you’ve seen. You’ve seen the chaos of pain. Your eyes have and will shed tears for people in their pain that you could’ve never understood before. This is a blessed gift.

Hold on with me. We’re gonna make it. We might not be the happy-go-lucky gals we used to be, but our lives here will tell stories of indescribable loss and the love of a God who made us to be exactly who we are—every line, every gray hair. None of it is wasted.