Those Who Mourn

by Elizabeth Leon

In 2018, my sixth child died in my arms from complications of Trisomy 18. John Paul Raphael was born full-term and lived for 1,690 minutes. I freely chose to carry my son to term and embrace his life. In faith, I surrendered the numbering of his days to the Lord. In return, God showered me with grace to endure my pregnancy and celebrate the gift of John Paul Raphael’s short and shining life.

But humanly, there was grief.

I knew my child was going to die. I didn’t know exactly when, but I had every reason to expect it in minutes, hours, or days after his birth. I loved my baby so much already. My love grew along with his tiny body until it filled my whole being just as he filled my womb. That love exploded into the world on January 4th, 2018 and hung thick in the air like clouds, drenching us with its purity and holiness – no longer just my love, but LOVE Himself present with us through our son in the freshness of his life and the expectation of his death.

The cost of this love was grief. For every measure of love, there was an equal measure of grief. Grief and love are indivisible in their very nature. The greater the love, the greater the grief. As long as I love my son and we are apart, there will be grief.

In order to prepare for the grief, I researched it during my pregnancy. I read memoirs of child-loss. I searched out blogs of families with sick babies who were going to die. I spent hours reading stories about Trisomy 18 children to glean whatever wisdom I could from their experience. Without realizing it, I pre-managed my grief. I convinced myself that learning about loss would take away its power. If I could examine the experience of child loss, it would help me survive when the time came.

I was right. Mostly.

When John Paul Raphael died, grief hit me like a tidal wave. Life changed instantly and brutally. As the months passed, we survived, and I naively thought I knew what there was to know about grief. Then my cousin had a baby. After a weekend meeting and holding newborn Celia, I began to disintegrate. The foggy depression I had been living with gave way to a razor-sharp edginess. I felt brittle. I was snippy, irritated, and angry most of the time.

I would soon realize I had not, in fact, learned all about grief.

My feelings came to a head one evening when my husband shared a text he received from a co-worker. She had recently delivered a little boy and had some life-threatening complications near the end. She texted my husband to thank him for his support during her pregnancy and ended with the line: “It must have been your prayers that saved my baby.”

Instantly, I knew the emotion that had lurked inside me for weeks: Rage. That rage now had a target. There is no way to sugarcoat the firestorm of emotion that roared through me. Angry, violent thoughts and ugly words filled me. I was shocked at my vicious and brutal reaction, but it was there. I ranted and screamed. How dare she suggest that my husband’s prayers saved her baby! Don’t you think if his prayers were going to save a baby THEY WOULD HAVE SAVED OURS? I felt like a madwoman.

It didn’t take long for a still small voice in me to recognize my rage was not truly directed at this grateful, new mother. This is one reason rage took so long to emerge. Rage, like anger, seeks a target. Shooting an arrow off into the air is nowhere near as satisfying as launching it with intention. When John Paul Raphael died, though, I had no bullseye. I wasn’t angry at God or the doctors or the hospital or Ralph or myself or even John Paul. There was no one to blame. No one at fault. Yet, the rage still arrived, barreling through me in ugly, violent spasms.

For weeks I raged as the ugly grief inside me incited a rebellion against the unacceptable reality that my son was dead. I wanted to act as unreasonably and irrationally as that truth felt. In one frenzied moment, I grabbed a Costco-sized box of cornbread mix and hurled it to the ground in my kitchen, desperate to find relief. Its unsatisfying thud heightened my craziness. I grabbed the next thing I could find, a two-cup Pyrex measuring cup and hurled it onto the hardwood floor. The sound of its crash and the explosion of thousands of tiny pieces of glass were exactly what I needed. The destruction matched the chaos in my heart. The “Smash Pile” was born. I began to gather unwanted breakable items and piled them on the bench in my kitchen to await the next round of rage.

When it arrived, as it surely did, I grabbed a pile of dishes and stalked through the snow and ice on the back patio to the cement steps coming up from the basement. I hurled piece after piece into the stairwell, relishing how they broke into shards and fragments. The strong motion and intensity of using the muscles in my arm forcefully were satisfying. The cold air in my lungs made me feel alive. The sound and sights of destruction calmed me.

Another day, grief and rage roared through me, and I fled the house for a nearby river. I stalked in below freezing temperature and high winds down to the riverbank, areas of ice crunching beneath my feet. Wildness grew inside me. I looked at the rushing water and longed to be swept away. Not to end my life, but to end the feelings that engulfed me without hope. I found a huge branch on the ground and hoped that cracking it against a tree trunk would bring relief to the storm in my body. I picked it up and swung with all my might, but my body absorbed the force and instead of splintered wood, I shook with pain. As a last resort, I howled into the wind and water. I had no words, only a guttural, raw, raging lament.

One day, rage fueled an argument with my husband. I tried to flee the intensity of my heart by hiding out in our basement bedroom. I curled up in the dark under the covers with a pillow over my head, sobbing and wailing. When Ralph came in to soothe me, I shrieked and raged at him to GO. GET OUT. JUST GO. JUST GOOOOOOOOO. My wails left me empty and drained. What I really wanted to scream was BRING HIM BACK. When I was empty, my kind and patient husband gathered me gently into his arms.

I barely recognized myself during this time but knew that many people found rage to be a part of the grieving process. I believe I needed to fully experience rage in order to move through my grief in a healthy way. But, why now? Why was I so angry ten months after John Paul died?

What I really wanted to scream was BRING HIM BACK.

After working with my therapist, I learned that in my longing to trust God during my pregnancy, I minimized the human reality of what we were facing. In trying to be prepared for what John Paul Raphael’s death might be like, I normalized the unthinkable. In order to cope with the unimaginable scenario that our baby would die in our arms, I over-imagined it to feel a sense of control.

It was effective because when the time came, I was prepared. I was able to savor the hours we had with our son without fear, and I did not have to worry about making decisions.

The disadvantage is that I had over-prepared to such an extent that the agony of what we endured hadn’t fully impacted me yet, even ten months later. Rage was my body’s attempt to integrate my intense interior emotions with an equally intense exterior experience. Wanting to smash, hit, and break things; the need to curse, yell, and scream; even shocking thoughts of violent actions – these were all part of my body processing a traumatic and horrifying event, an event I had apparently managed to convince myself was not so horrifying.

It took a newborn baby to awaken my heart. As I held my cousin’s daughter Celia, I replayed the scene of John Paul Raphael’s death in my mind. He was alive and pink one moment, dying the next. John Paul was loved just as much as Celia. What if she were to just stop breathing here in the living room? What if she were to die and we were powerless to help her? I saw her death over and over. It would be horrifying. Devastating. Traumatic. Life-altering. I knew with complete clarity that to lose Celia like that would rip her parents open with a pain that no person should ever have to endure. Well, there you go. Without my conscious mind connecting the dots, my heart managed to: if losing Celia was all of those things, then so was losing John Paul Raphael.

I now understood the rage. It was righteous rage that screams that losing our son was not fair. We did not deserve it. It was the rage of love against death that was never meant to be a part of life. It was rage at the enemy of our souls whose insidious lies exiled us in this valley of tears.

I see now that as a woman of faith, I put pressure on myself to “grieve well” when in reality, I just needed to grieve.

Giving myself permission to feel rage was essential to my grieving process, but it was also dreadful and humbling. I am grateful that with God’s help and my husband’s presence, I did not hurt myself or others.

Self-compassion keeps me from judging myself for how I needed to process our devastating loss. In order to heal, I need to be truthful and authentic about the surprising intensity and ugliness of my journey. Nothing that I felt was a surprise to the Lord or would ever scare Him away.

If you too have experienced ugly grief, I pray you may let yourself be loved in the darkness. Give yourself permission to feel your story deeply in your heart. Don’t make it neat and tidy. Sometimes we need to be wild and fierce. I have found that my unruly places are an invitation from God to pay attention to a part of me that needs love, compassion, or comfort. The Lord wants to walk with me there, wherever it leads, even to a pile of shattered dishes and a throat sore and raw.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

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