When my husband and I were younger, I wanted to adopt. We went through two home studies. We attended classes, borrowed children’s beds, planned with our kids, and informed our neighbors. Finally, we brought in a young sibling group. Health and Welfare wanted a trial situation as part of the interview process. We didn’t finish the trial.
In the aftermath, when I was returning the crib and other items, I tried to hide my brokenness as I stood before the woman who’d loaned them. She looked at me and asked how I was “really doing” in that way of people who actually want to know—and aren’t just exchanging passing niceties. I told her I didn’t think I was doing good. “I might even feel a little…” and here is where I whispered my shame, “…depressed?”
She said, “Oh Hilarey! Of course you are. You’ve had an adoption miscarriage.” She explained that people bring casseroles for new babies but no one normally visits if you lose a baby. We mourn miscarriages alone. She also reminded me that even though I didn’t have the physical loss from my body, we had prepared our home, brains, and hearts for new family members. We had spent time (years) envisioning it and suddenly it was taken away. It was like a death had happened in our family and no one acknowledged it. Since then, if I have known of a miscarriage—I’ve tried to reach out.
A quick blessing for women in the light of Mother’s Day this weekend. Christ wept over Jerusalem and said how he had longed to gather her children like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. Any desire you have inside of you to nurture, comfort, or protect—reflects the heart of God. If you have unsatisfied longings for family, you are in that phase of pouring out from your body and lacking rest and comfort for yourself, your children have moved on, or you have been rejected by those you love… May you feel the tender promise that God has not forgotten you.
Death of a dream
It was painful to release the idea of our imagined family. It can hurt to let go of any goal or a dream. Recently, I’ve seen different dream-deaths in my close community. Major changes or plans of major changes. My husband moved to a new company and left the one where he’d worked for more than a decade. Even intentional changes can land you somewhere between feeling slightly unsettled to completely losing your footing in the overwhelm of irrevocable change.
Sometimes a dream dies peacefully in its sleep, and sometimes it twists and writhes like a B movie actor.
In my experience, that’s been the pain for me. The death throes. The last gasps of air when you thought the dream had already passed over. Any sudden reminders that you still want it—even though you thought you had let it go.
You don’t always know something is an idol until you cannot have it.
I used to visit with a refugee friend from Iraq who shared a verbal tradition about the story of Jonah in Nineveh. She told me that when the people realized their danger and the depth of their sin, they didn’t allow any man or animal to drink even a sip of water for three days. The mommas would not nurse their babies; they let them cry.
I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t imagine a nursing mom doing that. Forget the pain of swelling, mastitis and your milk drying up. Think of how a baby’s life at the time was already so precarious, infant mortality was likely high, a woman’s future was her progeny, and women risked so much in childbirth.
Ours wasn’t the kind of relationship where I could argue with her or express doubt, and she was so insistent. She assured me that the cows were screaming, and the entire city was wailing and crying out together as one. She’d descended from the people, so she knew.
I pulled out Jonah and reread the story. In chapter 3, verse 7 and 8 the king says, Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink.
It could be literal, but nearly literal would still get the point across. What I received in the exchange was another example of where I cannot help, at least initially, to understand the Bible through the lens I have. In America, we encourage drinking plenty of water while fasting.
Recently, our church had a corporate fast for lent. The preacher kept coughing. Someone brought him a water bottle. I was sitting next to a young girl from east Africa and she looked at me with incredulous confusion. After the service, she asked, “I thought we were fasting this week.” She likely wondered why he callously tempted the entire congregation. (It was not a mandatory fast. People took part in whatever capacity they desired.) Once we talked, I discovered that in her culture, fasting meant nothing touched her lips, food or drink, sunrise to sunset. She ate and drank water at night.
It wasn’t just culture that dictated how Nineveh reacted to Jonah—but contrition. I realized I might not have experienced that kind of remorse, certainly not on such a scale. There have been many times that I’ve felt so much emotion that I wasn’t hungry… but never so much impending doom that for three days I wouldn’t even put a bowl of water in front of the cat. And that the sound of my captive animal, crying out and maybe even eventually giving up in order to save energy, would resonate and echo within my soul.
But the communal experience—it would help you grieve with the sounds everywhere. And in the context of this, to mourn their pride and violence with a visceral ritual would be life-changing. You would cross over and never want to return to that sin.
I think our culture tries to hide grief. We keep uncomfortable things like disability and weakness hidden away. To the point than many people didn’t know their president, Franklin Rosevelt, was paralyzed from the waist down. Depending on your church culture, it could be worse. Because feeling pain must mean you aren’t trusting God if your religion promises finances, freedom, health and good married sex when you obey him. You can be sad about it for a minute… but now, where is your joy in the Lord? “Haven’t you learned what you needed to from that trial yet, so it can be over?”
Of course, some people never leave their pain to the point of wearing it as an identity. I know I have been on all sides of this. Either wondering why someone is still wallowing, hiding how I am not yet better, or letting my loss influence everything I say, do, and think. So we isolate.
Sometimes you need to grieve. And grief takes time. Your time, not someone else’s.
When you can’t move out of the grief
But sometimes the pain is just keeping something already dead connected to a machine. It’s clinging to the way you wish things were. I think we also refuse to mourn because either we hold the dream up higher than what God has for us, or we don’t want to admit failure.
I want to suggest that releasing a dream will be less painful than the alternatives of living in delusion or cultivating a deep root of bitterness.
I see now why some cultures hired mourners to wail at the home where a death had taken place. To voice your own heart-cry and legitimize the pain enough to let it pass. So that when you have mourned, you cross over. You stand up and wash your face. You do not camp in the slightly hidden shame of unprocessed grief.
Lisa Terkeurst writes in the last chapter of her book Good Boundaries and Goodbyes about this when she mentions having “a million little funerals” and opening up her hands to let each one go.
We have very little ceremony to mark the passing of something other than actual death, as a healthy way to grieve. Sometimes we don’t even know we need to mourn the release of a dream.
What I am proposing is to find a ritual to let something go. A sort of liturgy or ceremony to mark an ending. We have ceremonies for weddings and baptisms to show before and after. I think it might be worth creating a way to pass over the threshold and acknowledge the change when a dream dies.
Create a visual reminder of the change in your life. Light a candle, or blow it out, write a ditty, bake a cake, hang a banner… or throw a wake. And do it with your community.
Here is the way Mike Meyer’s character in So I Married an Axe Murderer mourned the end of relationships: