This is the meditation speech I gave on October 15, 2014 at the Marian Devotion at Sacred Heart Church in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Throughout my pregnancy, and after the birth of my still baby boy I was constantly comforted by the Blessed Virgin. I hope that this brings some measure of comfort to those who may go through what I have, and need help finding their way in faith in this dark time.
26 years ago, President Ronald Reagan declared October as the month of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance. It was put forward by a grieving mother, who founded the October 15 organization and envisioned this day for all grieving parents to come together and be surrounded by love and support by their friends and families, and a day where the community could come together to better understand their pain and learn about reaching out to those grieving. Well, here I am to bear witness to that mission. I welcome any visitors with us for this devotion. I know first hand how much courage it takes just to open your eyes every morning after the loss of a child. To come here tonight, shows a great testament of faith. We are in this together.
I'd like to speak to you about the idea of Maternity. Especially in terms of infant loss, that the quality of motherliness, of tending to the physical, spiritual and emotional needs of others has not died. We are mothers to our babies forever, in a spiritual love only matched by the divine love of God. I have often thought about the hands of Our Blessed Mother. When we face the death of a child, we have faced something far too big for our hands. We must, therefore trust them to her. Place them in Mary's hands, and ask her to bring them to the Lord for us. We can not hold them. We similarly resign ourselves, and release our worries to her and allow the will of God to be done. There is no peace until we can relinquish our foolish notion that we can solve these worries.
In the Gospel verse we just heard from John, we see a brief glimpse of this important conversation between Mary and Jesus. These simple words prompted Jesus to perform his first public miracle and is the moment when his friends become his disciples. Mary's simple statement recognizing a need and bringing it to the attention of her Son, convey not only an all encompassing trust in Our Lord to accomplish His will, but also a relinquishing of her own will. Resignation to the knowledge that God always works on His time. That if it is His will, it will be done. This is the gospel reading that firmly establishes Our Lady's mission as mediatrix between the Son of God and us. She is our example of ultimate maternity. Likewise, Jesus addresses her as “Woman” the same “woman” that St. Paul writes in his first letter to Timothy when he says “she will be saved through motherhood, provided women persevere in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
We have recited the Sorrowful mysteries tonight, and I have a confession to make. These have always been my favorite. In meditating on the Passion of Our Lord, I know that no matter what physical pain I ever encounter, whatever illness, disease, surgery, weakness, torture, or humiliation could possibly happen to me, that it is nothing to be afraid of, that I can bear it with patience. My Lord has already gone before me to the very end of divinely human capacity to endure and has triumphed... Physical pain has no more fear, Death does not loom frightening. For me, the Sorrowful Mysteries are the Triumphant Mysteries. I love Tuesdays and Fridays. They are the days of renewed fierce strength in the faith of our Savior's sacrifice.
Even so, in my own recent pregnancy I struggled with my faith, but not with the Sorrowful mysteries. In the past year, the Joyful mysteries have been the biggest challenge, perhaps because I needed them the most. I firmly believe that Our Blessed Mother, Queen of the Rosary, Comforter of the afflicted, needs us to likewise know that whatever we face as mothers, she is with us always bring us to God and bring our needs to Him.
The first Joyful mystery – The Annunciation.
It is hard to believe for the majority of normal people that the idea of a new baby, of a new life could be greeted by anything other than overwhelming joy. But, we, my sisters in sorrow, we know better... Maybe this was an unplanned pregnancy, maybe the doctors were worried from the start, maybe the fear of loss was so great that the joy never fully came, maybe there were health issues of your own that made the news frightening, maybe there was guilt from a former miscarriage or abortion. Our Mother Mary's first reaction upon hearing the words of the angel Gabriel? “How can this be?”
My own - How can this be Lord? How can You the giver and sustainer of Life, How can You make this happen? How will I survive this pregnancy? How can I share this news with anyone?
You see with a troubled pregnancy the news breaks simultaneously as a wave of joy and a wave of sorrow. And yet, Mary kept the news to herself. Did she have no friends, sisters cousins to tell? Did she know then what the Incarnation entailed? Had Saint Joachim and Anne taught their daughter all the stories of the Savior's life and trials? Could Mary read? I doubt she was allowed near the Torah scrolls in the Temple, but had she heard the stories?
The Second Joyful mystery – The Visitation
As if she hadn't been told that she will bear the savior of the world, Mary goes to see her cousin Elizabeth who is pregnant with John. She is giving of herself even in pregnancy and unknown circumstances. I assumed she went to help with cooking and cleaning for Zechariah and Elizabeth, and preparing for the baby Baptist to arrive. We witness John's quickening in scripture, we hear Elizabeth's outpouring at being overwhelmed by the reaction her baby has to Jesus's presence and then Mary utters the words of the Magnificat, the Canticle of Praise for God from his lowly handmaiden. Just before that though are these words of Elizabeth “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” When you have felt your baby move inside you, is there any doubt that this is life? Even when the medical terms “Incompatible with life” are the official diagnosis? Were you counseled to “terminate”? Were you looked upon with distain for your “choice for your fetus“? Were you constantly questioned whether you wanted “to continue”? Were you admonished that waiting for “Nature to take it's course will only be harder for you in the long run”? Did you pursue hope anyway? Did you persevere in faith and trust anyway? And even if you did not, would you make a different choice now? “Blessed are you who believe that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” We are on a journey. The death of our children is not the end of it. Perhaps it is just the beginning.
The Third Joyful mystery – The Nativity of our Lord
We all know the Christmas story, in a simple manger with animals and all, behind an overcrowded inn in a noisy bustling, packed city swollen with the census the Savior of The World was born. In the basest of means, in the poorest of shacks, among cows and sheep and donkeys and who knows what, the Light of the World came in stillness and holiness. The King of Love descended from heaven into the dirtiest most poor cradle to be had. In this we find the depth of the compassion of Our Blessed Mother. She had to endure this... I will not ask you, my sisters in sorrow about your birth story. It is the most sacred and powerful experience you have had to face, I am absolutely sure of that. To find someone with whom you can share fully the brutal reality and will enter into true compassion with you is a wondrous gift. I am still not very good about talking about my own experience. So, here I will use the words of Maria Grizzetti, a grieving mother and Catholic writer and thinker who was prompted by her parish priest to write a letter to all of us, this is excerpted from her blog
“Incarnation and Modernity”.
“I am so sorry that you have lost your child. I am so sorry that death comes so suddenly. I am so sorry that you have to face it, possibly alone. I am so sorry that our bodies play so real a role in this loss. I am so sorry that you have no words. I am so sorry that this is so tragic. I am so sorry that your heart is pierced with so hidden a pain. I am so sorry that life can be so very hard, and that you are paralyzed by grief. I am so sorry that so few know, and fewer still know what to say. I am so sorry that so much of what is said to you is so wrong. I am so sorry that few understand the immensity of this loss. I am so sorry for you, and for those who love this child as you do. And I am so sorry to know that the agony of sorrow you live is real, because I was so sorry to live it myself. (...) No mother expects to live through the death of her child, whether the tragedy unfolds, as it often does, in the death of a child before birth in a ‘miscarriage’, or whether one receives a fatal pre-natal diagnosis, or lives through the brutally hard pain of stillbirth or early infant death, or the tragedy of accident or terminal disease in early or later life. And no father is prepared for this loss either, for the powerful waves of grief that follow in the woman he loves, and in his own heart as well. It is critically important, therefore, that those of us who have lived through this harsh reality, and bear its effects on a daily basis, take on the maternal and paternal mission to speak of our hidden love, a love known only in grief, so as to offer to others the olive branch which unites their grief with affection, and so becomes healing balm to the broken-hearted. True charity demands no less of us.”
The fourth joyful mystery – The Presentation at the Temple
Mary and Joseph brought their infant to the Temple in Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. There they met Simeon and Anna. Simeon asked the Lord to let him die happy, because he had seen God's salvation in Jesus, he also told Mary that her heart will be pierced by the travails of her son. From this we see the Immaculate Heart of Mary is depicted with seven swords that represent the seven sorrows of Mary. After 9 months of waiting, after visiting her older cousin Elizabeth and learning all she could about the Savior, after witnessing angels, shepherds foreign kings, come and pay her child homage in a barn, is this the moment she knew? Was that the day she knew the truth? 8 days after Our Lord's birth. Did she know right then that she would not be able to hold her baby forever? That the day would come that her arms too would be so empty? And did she then have to live with this for 33 years minus 8 days? That is a very long time to know, to bear, to live with that knowledge. I only had to live with it for 28 weeks.
The fifth joyful mystery – The Finding of Jesus in the Temple
For three days Mary searches at wits end to find her son in sorrow. Then she finds him with joy in the midst of the teachers in the temple. I desire a Zeal for the Glory of God.
The most important words offered to me after I gave birth to my still baby boy was “You are different. You are the mother of three now. You will never be the same.”
Again here I use the words of Maria Grizetti upon having a similar conversation.
“These are daring words to offer a woman who has known a most intimate, almost personal death; so very personal is the death of one’s child, formed of one's own blood and body. And yet they are true. They remain as imprinted in memory and as engraved on the heart as the very voice of my child’s first cry would have been. I remain forever grateful for them. They are the fundamental and deeply necessary acknowledgment of the real existence of that hidden life — the life of our child — and of the real maternal love that was born into the world the moment his soul was conceived into being. Every new life, no matter how brief, is received with a powerful and pre-existing maternal love. I say pre-existing, because in desiring them, we love our children before we even bear them in body, and we love them ever more strongly once they no longer live. This is the high dignity of maternity. And death has no power over it. It will simply not be crushed. The image is divine.”
This is the Love we carry as mothers, whether our children live on this earth or are already in the eternal kingdom of heaven. We can hold these children in our hearts even as our arms ache for the weight of them in our arms. This is fact, as true as the stars which we know exist whether we can touch them or not.
Yet even as our loss is almost too much to bear, it is compounded by the laws of our government. The state of New York, which simultaneously did not recognize my child's life as anything other than “Pregnancy material”, which then sent teams of social workers and nurses with questions and interviews to probe me as to whether I was fit to be a mother to my remaining children. One has to be able to speak and breathe before one can defend one's maternal instinct. Similarly, one has to fight hard to get an acknowledgment at all by our laws of the life lost. You see for a baby that never breathed, there is no birth certificate, and there is likewise no death certificate. In New York state, there is a very simple record you can request with no official space to name your child. I repeat, no legal way to name for the life you carried, you sang to, you read to, who leapt in your womb at the sound of your son reading him a Train book, who pushed his hand out to reach towards his sister's singing voice, the child whom you wept for, you prayed for, bled for.
And this is where the Mercy of the Mother church is revealed. There are rites to name and recognize these children in death and call them home. The church honors all life from conception to death, and in this it at the forefront of women's issues. One that we need to know and declare as important as all the others. That the church recognizes life even life that arrives at the same time as death, with joy and grief. Our children thus named allows us to also call them our own angels. It may seem a cliché and trite notion, and yet so they are. They never suffered a moment of pain on this earth, they returned to the Love that created them wholly unblemished and perfect. Our church, which gives us everything we need from God above gives us this last most sacred dignity. To bury our children, and know they did not slip away uncounted, unnamed, uncared for, unremembered.
I ask you all now, in your own hearts to take the time to utter the name of your child. For so they are named and loved and called back to the light that created them, there to dwell without ever having known darkness, doubt or sin. Our own perfect babies.
(Moment of Silence)
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful,
I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Psalm 139: 13-16
“You are fearfully and wonderfully made” again, daring words. You see from the 11th week of our pregnancy, we knew there was something very wrong with our baby. We had a diagnosis of Trisomy 18 confirmed by the CVS test. Afterward, my husband would second guess whether we should have had this test done, he would have "liked to enjoy the pregnancy without worry more". I countered with, at least we knew it was never in our hands, so we had no choice to live and take every day with our baby as a gift with no expectations for the future, to live fully in the present moment.
It was never in our hands to decide, to fix or break in the first place. It just was never in our hands. I had to place my son in our Blessed Mother's hands, knowing that my arms would never get to hold him for as long as I wanted to. But, in so doing, I was never alone, truly even when I was left in a hospital and yet completely alone as I gave birth to my still born son, I was not alone. I can only attest that this faith and unyielding trust comes from knowing that every place we have gone, and every place we will go Our Lord and his mother eternally pointing us back to Him, have already been. And so, the courage to open your eyes every morning, comes from this trust. That we are never alone. That we must pray, and be compassionate for one another and “persevere in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
I want to thank Deacon Jerry for asking me to speak tonight.
I also want to sincerely thank Fr. Jim, Fr. Lukasz, Fr. Peter and Deacon Jerry for their prayers, support and acts of mercy they have shown me especially in the last few months. I am awed and astonished by the generosity and love that these men are capable of. We are truly blessed to have such wonderful clergy.
A manger crude, and bare
