BECAUSE WE COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH: MISCARRIAGE AND THE BELIEVER
It happened during a painful meeting after a week of painful meetings at the end of months of painful meetings. I ran downstairs to the women’s bathroom and it was full. I hobbled over to the men’s, praying no one would come in. This wasn’t my first and I knew there was nothing I could do at this point. Nothing.
. . .
My husband and I had moved immediately following our late spring wedding to a new city where I was coming on staff at a new church in a new community. Everything was new and we felt ripe for it. We bought a house from which you could see the majestic Rocky Mountains. We walked every night around the lake by our house. We threw ourselves into life in this new place, life in a new marriage, breathing it in. Within two months of being there, though, the crumbling began. We, unbeknownst, had come into a church about to undergo a leadership crisis. My husband’s stable work contract let him know they were cutting back and, because he was working remotely, he was the first to go, effective almost immediately. We encountered gun violence up close and personal in a way my counselor said months later, “Just wasn’t normal.” It felt like from every direction we were being crushed into nothingness.
Around Christmas, though, when all else felt too much to bear, we began to suspect the new life within, talk about names, parenting, the world we’d be bringing this baby into. We were tender with it, we’d already had one miscarriage, but we were surer and surer of it. This one little space we could protect and care for. A few weeks later, though, after a week of difficult meetings at work for me, in the middle of a meeting where we were delivering painful news to our local church, and still no job on the horizon for my husband, the second miscarriage began.
I left the meeting as early as I could excuse myself and came home, hobbling in our back door, running to the bathroom. I knew what to expect but nothing prepares you for the emotional and physical toll of blood loss, hormone loss, and the tiny baby loss in the moment.
