Beth’s poignant letter to her son, My Son Who is in Heaven, demonstrate how a caring heart can continue even after being shattered by tragedy. If you have had similar experiences and need someone to talk to confidentially, please contact us to talk today.

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How Can I Have Faith After Losing My Son? I was angry at God

After losing our twins girls at 20 weeks gestation, my world completely fell apart. As I gingerly attempted to reintegrate my new, raw reality with the life I used to know, I often found it jarring.  Relationships that used to just work felt awkward.  Sometimes words that meant to comfort felt like sandpaper to my soul, and surprisingly, people I barely used to know became life-long friends.

My loss had made me an outsider to many.  While friends and family wanted to support us, they didn’t know how.  How do you help someone whose world has fallen apart?  What do you say when your friend has just said goodbye to her first two babies?  How do you come alongside someone as they try to make their way back?

I knows it’s awkward being around someone who’s grieving.  It was awkward for me too.  This is what I wish I could have told my friends when the pain was raw and new.  The pain is familiar now, which makes it easier to breathe.  I wish that no one else would ever know what pain like that feels like, but sadly I know that someone somewhere is probably feeling it right now.  If you know someone who is grieving, I hope this can help you as you try to help them.

Please don’t say that…

My heart has been shattered, my world forever changed.  The me you knew is gone, and I am still discovering the new and very different me.  I know I am not easy to be around right now, and I find it hard to express what I need and how I feel.

• Please don’t tell me how “So-and-so” coped with grief.
• Don’t tell me you understand, or suggest how my grief journey should be.  My pain is unique, and my journey will be also.  It may not look anything like what yours would look like.
• Please do not judge.
• Don’t compare my loss to the loss of your grandmother, your pet dog, or even your favourite teacher.  It is different … each loss is.  Comparing only makes me feel alienated from you.

Do not tell me “All things work for the good …” or “Everything has a purpose …” or “God let this happen for a reason…” Although all these things may be true, I am not in a place where hearing them is helpful right now.  When life falls apart, well-intentioned people use these words to try to right the world again.  My world is completely upside-down.  Words cannot put it back the way it used to be.  I have not turned my back on God; church just is a tough place to be right now. When sitting at church I feel very alone with my pain.

Please don’t try to make me feel better by “looking on the bright side”. I would give anything to be exhausted from sleepless night or chasing after a screaming toddler. Having no responsibilities and a “pre-baby” body are not all they are cracked up to be.

These things help

Talking about my lost children is always a good thing.  Don’t feel that you are “reminding me of pain” – I never forget.  Talking about them validates their existence; it brings back all the positive memories.  When you talk about them, it gives me the freedom to talk back and I need that.

I need to laugh – sometimes at the same time as needing to cry. Please let me do both.

I am excited for you when you are happy. Even when that might involve an aspect that is sensitive to me – like a new pregnancy.  There are days when I won’t be able to articulate this well, but it is always true.  I will always be excited for you, although sometimes my excitement might be overshadowed by my pain.  Please don’t hold back your excitement because of me; it doesn’t make me feel better.

I need you right now. I don’t always say it, and find it tough to reach out, but more than ever I need to know I am loved and prayed for. Please don’t stop calling me, even when I don’t call you back.  Sometimes dialling the numbers is just too much for me, but I always appreciate the thought.  Do tangible things for me  … do not just offer to help.  Normally an offer would be enough, but right now getting up in the morning, taking care of basic tasks, and somehow making it through each day take every bit of energy that I have.  Even if I desperately need help, asking might be more than I can bear.

My grief will not disappear, I will not “get better”. It will change, it will morph, but it will not go away. Sometimes the grief is a raging monster, obvious to all, making it difficult to do even the simplest things like breathe. At other times grief silently sits in the corner, biding his time. Others can’t see him, but I still know he is there – leaving a quiet dull ache in my soul. As time goes on, there are more quiet days than not, but grief is always there, even when you can’t see it.

I have been forever changed by grief. The “me” that used to exist is now changed.  There are a few more rough edges; I am not as tidy as a package.  But I am still me … and I need you to accept this new version.  I did not choose this path that I am on; I would not have ever chosen it.  The only choice I have left is what to do with it – and I am in the process of figuring that out.  I am on a journey and need you to support me on my path.

If you are experience grief and need to talk to someone we can help. We offer  free and confidential mentoring. Just let us know by filling out this form.

Dear Jacob,

Three years have come and gone since we met and said goodbye to you.  How time has alternated between dragging and flying by.  I can hardly believe that it has been three years.  It seems odd, that whole time oxymoron.  It either flies by or drags.  When I am besought with pain it drags and seems to go on forever, the pain seems endless.  Yet when I look at other little boys your age it seems to have flown by.  I still think of you as a baby, but you would not be a baby anymore.

This week I allowed thoughts of you to creep into my imagination. (I don’t permit myself to do that very often, it hurts too much).   This week I allowed it and wondered what color your hair would be.  By now you would have a full head of hair.  What about your eyes and your features?  I assume that you would look like Sam, he looks exactly like Daddy.  But how would you differ?  What would your personality be like?  I imagine that you would be easy going.  Fourth children must be, after all.  Probably quite busy, as boys are, especially my boys.  Who are you Jacob?

You are a myth.  You can be whoever I want you to be.  I can invent your looks and personality anyway I choose, I can imagine you however my mind will go.  Yet I arrive again at the painful realization that whoever I make you to be I will never know the answer to my questions. The pain, having receded with my imaginings, forces its way back into my heart with a creeping, seeping knowledge that I will never know!

Some kids have imaginary friends, yet mothers who have lost babies have imaginary children.  They are based in reality, for I have seen you with my own eyes, I have heard your heart beat, I have felt you move.  Only once did I have these opportunities with you my son.  I saw you only once, heard your heart beat just once, I felt you move only once, but you lived with me for 19 weeks.  For 19 weeks, just shy of 5 months, I dreamed of my baby, and a bond grew between us that will last a lifetime. Although your personality and looks are left to my imagination, you my son are real!  My love for you is real and I cling to the hope of Heaven and our reunion.

This year for your birthday I bought another Willow Tree figurine.  This one is a little boy with his hands in the air lifting a balloon high for all to see.  His face is tilted up, his arms lifted high.  The balloon says HOPE in it.  I bought it because it could be a 2 1/2 year old boy, which is what you would be today if you were here in my arms.  I choose to cling to the hope we have of Heaven. So this little boy will remind me of my son in Heaven and that there is hope for our future both yours and mine even though we cannot be together; for now.

Hope means so much Jacob, because I have hope that someday we will meet in heaven.  I am assuming that I will recognize you.  How could a mother not know her child?! (It grieves my heart to have to wonder.) Yet I don’t know what you look like or your mannerisms.  But here comes hope once again to encompass my heart and say of course I will recognize you, I am sure that God will grant a mother’s heart this gift.

Even as I write, my eyes swim with unshed tears.  There are tears for the pain I suffer at not watching you grow up with our friends, and tears that I must sit here and wonder who you are and what you are like instead of chasing you and telling you to “get down or stop that”.  I cry because you are in some ways my imaginary child.  I have sad tears for my loss and the hole you left in my heart and life; glad tears for hope and our future knowing that one day we will meet.

So Jacob, these are the musings of a mother’s heart three years after your loss.  Looking back I remember wondering, a couple of weeks after you were born, “When will I get over this?  How long will it hurt like this?” I guess it’s a good thing no one told me “forever”.  The pain has changed, one cannot live with pain that large and throbbing forever, yet it will never go away.

I will never get over the pain and sorrow of losing my son. Yet oddly Jacob, there are many who wouldn’t consider you a person or me your mother because you never took a breath on your own or came to life outside of my womb.  How little those people know about the truth, Jacob.  Perhaps you and I can share a message someday about life before birth and the bond created between mother and child no matter how big the child.

It is time to close for now.

Love, Mom

If you know what it is to lose a child, I am so sorry for your loss.  If you would like to talk to someone you can use this form to request a mentor.

“What?” my mind screamed. “What are you saying?”  But really I didn’t want to know.  I stared at the screen willing the baby to live.  A month before, we had seen the baby move and blood flowing to its heart. But now, there was nothing.

“Please,” my heart cried, “Please find it.” I couldn’t look at my husband’s face.  The world had seemed to stop suddenly and everything in my heart waited to hear what she had to say next. But there was nothing more to see.

Finally, I remembered my husband and that he needed me too.  He, too, was suffering.  I glanced at him in shock and then looked back at the screen, wishing the outcome to be different.

But it was not.  Just a few minutes ago, we had been talking about morning sickness, hormones, weight loss and suddenly I was talking about miscarriage and next steps.  I began to cry.  The technician was still probing inside and took a ton of pictures and I just wanted her to be done.  I didn’t want to see anymore.

So many questions

My eyes were rather red as my husband lovingly held me as we walked down the hall to the doctor’s room again.  There we talked about surgery and medicine and natural miscarriage.  We decided to wait and make a decision later that day.  The doctor was great.  She hugged us as we left.

We walked out, only to see a little girl.  I began crying again.  My husband took me to the car and we cried and hugged each other.  It hurt so badly that I didn’t know what to do.

We had told everyone we knew that we were expecting.  They all knew days after the baby had already died in my womb.  I felt so silly.  What a mess to undo.  My head was in shock and I didn’t know where to go.

But I asked God, “Why?  Why didn’t we know sooner? Why did it happen? Was it our fault?  Did we do it?  Were we ever going to have kids?  Could we go back to the office and have a second look?  What if they were wrong? Why didn’t you let the baby live?  Why did you take him?” These questions kept running through my head over and over and over again.

We thought the baby was a boy.  We had names picked out and everything.  We were planning and saving, hoping and dreaming.  What kind of God would do that?  “Who are You, God,” my heart cried.

Working through my grief

A year and a half later, it still hurts.  It’s still a painful memory, although time has softened the blow.  But I feel like I’m betraying the lives of my children to even say that.  It hurts a great deal. I’m still angry at times.  It has been a long process to even get this far – a long and intense process.

I’ve heard the sympathy and lack of sympathy from many.  I’ve been part of an incredible friendship that has encouraged, uplifted and challenged me as we walked the road of losing a child together.  But mostly, I’ve cried out to God.

I’ve yelled at God, telling Him everything that He has done stinks. I’ve hated Him.  I didn’t even want to speak to Him ever again, but after realizing that it was impossible to do that I repented and turned from that sin.

I remember not wanting to ever see people again, at the same time I wanted them to surround me.  I never wanted to attend church again, so that I wouldn’t have to answer any questions. But I did and I’m glad I did because I’ve had the arms of many believers around me.

But the internal struggles continued. It wasn’t supposed to happen to me, to us.  We were solid, growing, maturing believers.  We loved God enough to give our lives to whatever ministry He wanted us to be in. We did what was right.

Moving forward

As the due date approached for our little one, I struggled even harder.  Up until that point, I was so busy with everything that I didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time working on the grief process.  The hardest point for me when the baby would have been born was that I was without a job, something I would not have needed had the baby lived. I was going to be a mom and my status in life would have been secure in that.  Instead, here I was, a jobless woman.  So I mourned that loss.

I remember feeling so helpless and uncertain of why I even existed.  God seemed so unfair and so far away, so uncaring in my mind.  Everything seemed so pointless.  And as I mourned, crying out to God with my pain, He comforted me with Himself.

He showed me that it was okay to cry, to tell Him of all that hurt, and then He comforted me. He showed me through His word, through His Spirit, through the love of my husband, and the love of His people that He loved me. He didn’t do this to punish me.  My sins were canceled at the cross of Christ. Instead of having a child on September 28, the due date, I was hired for a job that I had been training for since the month after the miscarriage.  He loved me, a fact that I understand a great deal more now because of this pain.

Back to the beginning

Life progressed and God brought a new challenge into our lives in the form of foster parenting and possibly adoption. We started two and a half months of classes in February of that next year, only to find out a month later that we were pregnant again.

Oh, the joy that I experienced.  I was elated!  “God doesn’t hate me,” I thought. I am blessed! We kept it quiet for about a week as the hormone levels were confirmed to be rising and then told our families, and then gradually, our friends.  I felt complete.  I had given my in-laws and my mom a grandchild.  I wasn’t a failure in life any longer.  I had a purpose and it was to be a mom.

That was March.  In April, I experienced a loss in hormones and had a funny feeling that it was happening again.  Suddenly, my world spun.  I became cold to all of it, especially God. I was shocked that He would allow it to happen again.  For three weeks, we went to a weekly ultrasound as we watched and waited.

The night before our seventh week ultrasound, I had realized that I hadn’t prayed for this little one.  I knew why. I knew that God was in control and if He was going to allow this baby to live, then He would. And if not, then He wouldn’t.  My prayers wouldn’t change His will.  But I also knew that He wanted me to tell Him what was on my heart, so I decided to pray and tell God that I wanted this one to live.  I wanted to hold this baby in my arms and be their mom.

I wish there was another way

But the next day, we saw nothing on the ultrasound machine, having seen the heartbeat only the week before.  I cried, but at the same time, something in me had died.  I was angry at God, in a way that I couldn’t even explain.

We didn’t schedule a surgery that week, as the doctor wanted to give the baby another week to prove without a doubt that he or she hadn’t just turned out of view.  So we told our families, crying with them and waited, hoping.  But the baby was gone.  We had an amazingly clear picture of her or his development, but no heart was beating.

I miss this child too.  I hate that it’s a past tense.  I wish there was another way.  I don’t know if it will ever really go away although there are days that it’s not as intense as others.  Maybe it will continue to lessen if God ever will give us a child.  Maybe not. Maybe I will one day hold those kids in heaven.

He has the words of life

I know God is sovereign and good and just and merciful and full of compassion, because He said so.  He told me that in His Word. If it isn’t true here and now, in this crisis, then what use is my faith?

I’m reminded of the question Christ asked His disciples when many decided to forsake Him because of the pressures of the religious leaders of His day.  “Do you wish to leave me also?” He asked. And their response? “To whom shall we go?  You have the words of life.”

There is no other rock nor hiding Place. He alone is God. Therefore, if He cannot comfort me, then there is none who can help.  So I wait for the God of all comfort and in the meantime, I cry to Him of my pain.

Read a story of miscarriage, hope, and God’s provision in a woman’s personal story in “An Unreasonable Joy“.

A Mother’s Day Even a Mom Could Love
Now that Mother’s Day has passed for another year, I have to be honest: Until I became a mom seven years ago, I had no idea how stressful and even (let’s face it) awful it can be. I knew, of course, it was rough on the women who desperately wanted to be moms and on mothers who had lost children. I even got that it was hard for moms who spent the day far away from their children. So how can we help moms have a Mother’s Day they’ll actually love? Read more

Take action: Having trouble feeling content being a mom? A dad? Single? Explore being content in our Struggling With Contentment online interactive life lesson.

You said it: This week, bangkok malco commented on Swine Flu Fear, saying “With the UK confirming two cases of swine flu and the World Health Organization raising its alert level from three to four, the threat does sound quite serious.” Agree? Disagree? Have your say on this post!

Blog: The Road to Adoption
The word “adoption” stirs up strong emotions. For some the word represents the fulfillment of a life long dream. For others, it speaks of one of the hardest choices of all. Read more

Article: An Unreasonable Joy
When my first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at thirteen weeks I was heartbroken. Read more

Coming up next week: One of the topics of our upcoming online chats is “Mothers and Daughters” Join us in the chat room May 13^th 2009 @ 12:15pm EST for this chat or see also our full chat calendar for other upcoming topics.

I am a mother,  but I don’t have a child to hug. I can’t brag about my baby’s first steps, the first day of school or graduation.  I have no photographs.  But I am a mother.  My children are in heaven.

After only two months of “trying” my husband and I were thrilled when our first pregnancy test came up positive.  We couldn’t believe our good fortune.  Although I was terribly sick throughout the first trimester, our enthusiasm for this new journey never wavered.

Life and death

After experiencing extreme stomach growth in my second trimester, we were relieved – although slightly overwhelmed – to discover at 18 weeks that we had not one, but two little ones growing in my womb.  We embraced the news with enthusiasm, albeit slightly tempered by the knowledge of the road ahead.   Things were definitely about to change.  Fortunately, we didn’t really know what the road ahead held.

Just prior to 20 weeks – after only 2 weeks of getting to know our twins — our world was shattered when my water broke, and I went into pre-term labour.  To this day the words I heard that night echo in my head.

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do.”

That night I held my sweet baby girls for the first and last time.

Everything stripped away

After losing our girls – Avery and Sophie – my life consisted of doing what I needed to in order to survive.  I wandered around with empty arms and an empty heart.  My saggy stomach and full, aching breasts were just some of the reminders of the dreams that had been lost so quickly.

Although I was functioning in the most basic sense of the word, in the months that followed I felt like  I was drowning.  Nothing could pull me out.  I was angry, confused and struggling to deal with my grief.  I felt very alone.

Everything I used to identify myself my was stripped away. My job, which I had found so fulfilling only days before, felt empty.  Instead of being something I eagerly talked about and engaged in, it was a chore.  I had to go, but found no joy in it.

I was still a wife, but even that couldn’t take the smallest edge off the pain.  My husband had an unbreakable commitment that sent him across the country for six months.   Although still part of a couple, I was completely on my own.   And he was alone too, working through his grief in hectic and unfamiliar surroundings.

What I knew about God

In this very dark place I found myself questioning God for the first time in my life.  I am a logical person, and have lived my life that way.  To me, if God says it, it is true.  Therefore, there is no room to question. But in the months following the loss of our daughters, I fought to reconcile what I knew about God with what I felt about Him.

I knew that He loved me and had a plan for my life (Jeremiah 29:11).  I knew that He had promised to never leave me or forsake me (Joshua 1:5).  But I no longer felt either to be true. I felt that by questioning Him, He would certainly walk away from me – if He had not already done so.

I realized that some of these promises I knew about God had a big “if” attached to them in my mind. In my thinking, however unintentionally, the promises were conditional.  God would never leave me or forsake me if I never got angry with Him.  He would never turn his back on me as long as I never shouted questions at Him.

In a time where all I could find was anger and questions when I spoke to God, I was sure that He had turned his back on me.  In my mind He had every right to do so.  My journal was filled with anguish, raw emotions, and fury.

God’s promises do not change

As time went on, God clearly showed me that He had never left.  Instead, He waited until I was ready for Him.  He showed me how He had walked the journey with me.  Only then did I realize the full extent of what He meant with His promises.

Not only did He refuse to leave – He was an active participant in my life.  He cried as I shouted in pain, He sheltered me when I could take no more.  He whispered encouragement when I lay alone in the dark at night.  It was only as I stepped away that I felt the separation.  I created the distance between us,  He never did.

God’s promises are not conditional. The strength of His promise lies in what He can do, not what I do.  I can choose to distance myself from God. I can have unconfessed sin in my life that takes away the closeness of our relationship, but I cannot alter the truth of His promises.   My questions cannot lessen who He is.  My times of doubt do not diminish His strength.

I know now that when my heart cries out in unendurable pain, the sound of it does not drive Him away.  He pulls in close and whispers the promises I have read so many times but am only beginning to truly understand.  He loves me in ways I haven’t even dream of yet and He will never leave me.

As my husband an I walk our journey of grief a year and a half after the loss of our girls, I continue to see that God is walking every step along with us.  He walked through the shock and raw pain of our initial loss.  He was there as the ache of another pregnancy loss shook us to the core.  He is still journeying with us as we deal with all the emotions that a third pregnancy has brought along.  And I know, regardless of the outcome, that he will continue to walk this journey with us.  God is bigger than my questions.  His promises do not change. As I place my life in His hands, I will not be disappointed.

More Personal Stories
Unreasonable joy: Heather’s mom walked her own journey
Unthinkable loss: Miscarriage and stillbirth