I wish that I had something more profound to say. Time marches on, and so life continues to happen, and we continue to put one foot in front of the other.
It has been just over two months now since we lost our baby girl. I suppose that time has been a healing force, and it has also carried me forward to a more distant vantage point. I can look back over the past several months and take in more of the landscape at once. At first, things were very compartmentalized. I think that's how it has to be... you have to deal with one hurt at a time, one task at a time. The view from here is different, though. I can see it all, from start to finish.
I can see that I was right about one thing for sure - that initially finding out about Gracie's condition was far worse than dealing with the physical loss, when it happened. By the time she was born, we'd had time to grieve over all that we were losing. We weren't finished, by any means, but so much of the emotion had already been processed. Much of the shock and devastation had been worn away. We had already said goodbye to the life we had imagined for her and for our family. We knew what was to come, and had made arrangements to make the very most of every moment we would have with her. Being able to leave the cemetery with no regrets made our healing process that much simpler, or at least less complex.
When Gracie was born, she was already gone. The little girl that we loved had already gone home to be with Jesus. Because we are human beings and our experience is limited to the physical boundaries of this Earth for now, we wanted to hang on to her physical being. We held her and kissed her and spoke to her, knowing full well that she was no longer there. Letting go of her physical body was the hardest part of it all. Knowing that she was gone wasn't all that bad, somehow. When she was born still, I didn't burst into tears. I didn't sit around that day crying because my baby wasn't alive. I didn't truly lose it until it came time to let go of her physical body, and to this day, that's the part that hurts the most. I just want to hold her one more time, kiss her one more time. I don't even need her to be alive, as strange as that may sound - I just need her to be here, just for a moment, just to hold her body again, or to feel her wiggle in my belly again. I'm ok with the idea that she has passed away, that she never lived outside my womb, and that she has gone to be with God. I just want to feel the weight of her in my arms again, even if only briefly. I just want to feel something, physically. Some evidence of her. I often find myself resting my hand over my tattoo of her handprint, or running my finger along the scalloped edge of her angel wing charm on my necklace, just to have something to physically touch and feel.
This more distant vantage point has also brought me to a deeper understanding of God's love for me in all of this. The inner happenings of the soul are difficult - if not impossible - to put into words, but so much has changed. I know that it is not "of myself" that all of these changes have taken place. I didn't somehow muster up some sort of super human strength to be able to deal with all of this and come out the other end feeling grateful. God has simply granted me a new spirit and a new perspective. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
Before Gracie, my biggest fear in life was losing a child. While I was pregnant with her, I was terrified. I imagined all sorts of scenarios in which something was catastrophically wrong with her. I told myself that I was being crazy (and at the time, I was... I had no real reason to believe that anything was wrong). That "God wouldn't do that to me", as if God is up there conjuring up terrible things to "do to" us. I feared Him, to be honest. I saw Him as this all-powerful being who could, with the snap of his fingers, make my worst nightmares come true. Yet even when one of my worst nightmares did come true, He somehow managed to use the experience to change that perspective of mine, and flip it 180 degrees. Today, I see Him as a loving God who carries us through the horrors that we must endure in this fallen world in which we live. Terrible things happen to people from all walks of life, but not because God is up there designing evil plots to enact in our lives. It is because our world is fallen that these horrors exist - He did not design our world this way. But He is too big and too good to allow these awful crises in our lives to be wasted. There is opportunity for blessing in all things - even in the loss of an innocent baby.
I learned so much through the experience of Gracie. Through her life and death, God proved His love for me, His faithfulness to His promises (even when we face our worst nightmares), and that truly, NOTHING is impossible for Him. There wasn't a single fiber of my being that would have believed that I could survive something like this without coming out the other end deeply despising God. I had imagined such scenarios in my mind before all of this, and I remember thinking that I could never "forgive" God if something like that happened to me. The loss of a child is just inexcusable - how could He allow such a thing to happen? And to happen to ME?!! Surely I would never again be able to trust God if He were to stand by and allow such horror to befall our family.
Yet here I am, singing the purely opposite tune. I feel more sure of God's love than ever, more reassured in the perfect goodness of His will for my life, and more at peace with whatever is to come, because I have seen the way He works. I have seen Him take the worst of circumstances and bring me peace and joy through them. I have seen my own best-laid plans crumble and fail, and watched His plans blossom into something beautiful and incredible that I would have otherwise missed. I have learned that regardless of what it is I think I want, He knows better.
Living in complete surrender to His will, whatever it may be, is so utterly freeing. I cannot claim to have cut ties to every stronghold in my life and given every last fear and worry and desire over to God - I am human, after all. But I feel so much more free, like I have shifted an enormous weight from my shoulders. I have only been able to let go of so much because I have gained such a burst of faith in His will - that it is good and perfect and will ultimately lead me to where I am meant to be, which is ultimately where my truest joy will be found. And really, that's all I want out of this life - I want to find the joy that God has in store for me. I have my ideas about what I think will bring me joy, but He has proven to me time and again that I don't know what I want quite as well as I think I do. Fundamentally believing and accepting that He knows better than I do has been the greatest blessing of this experience, and has brought me an incredible sense of freedom and new found courage. I can tackle whatever is to come, not only because I survived this (which was pretty awful!), but because I know, in the deepest sense, that He is leading me toward my greatest joy.
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