Grief Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Grieving Together

*For Sue, and all the mamas who have lost a child through failed adoption.

She is a dark-haired little girl with chocolate eyes and a sweet smile.

She is the little girl my friend held in her mind when she thought about what her family would look like, one day. She saw two sandy-haired boys and a little girl with those deep, brown pools of chocolate eyes.

The blond-headed boys came along the natural way, but God never gave her a girl. Time passed the way time does, and the family of four settled into the years. Still, this mama-heart felt that her family was not complete, not yet.

Then God made a way. Out of nowhere, like snow on a sky-blue day, a little girl came into their lives. She had never had a home with a mother and a father. She had never had a place where she was safe and loved, where people hugged instead of hit.

The best part of all was that this little girl already had a place in their lives! They knew her, and she knew them. When she came to their home, it was like the missing piece of the puzzle had been found.

With joyful expectation, we rallied around this family, praying for God to work through the adoption process. It was easy to pray when it seemed so obvious what God was going to do. It was the only thing God could do, because I’d already figured out that it was the very best way He could redeem this situation.

Didn’t it all make sense?

But just yesterday, I opened my computer and saw the message: the adoption failed.

I stared at my screen in disbelief. We all knew something like this could happen, but none of us expected it. We expected God to overcome the obstacles and make the paths straight because that is what God does.

He just didn’t do it this time, at least, not in a way that my eyes can see.

All I could think about was my friend, sitting in her home just a few streets away, grieving the loss of the little girl she had already began to love like a daughter.

I did not know what to say. How do you comfort someone who has lost a child through a failed adoption? No one talks about it like a loss. It’s just an unfortunate set of circumstances that didn’t work out like you’d hoped.

But it is a loss, and it stings like death. A woman like that can’t keep her heart from loving a child that might be hers, even if that child is born through a different body. She can’t help but make a place in her heart, and to grow in love in the waiting the way a woman grows in love for a baby growing in her womb.

The truth of it is, my friend had already started to become that little girl’s mother. That part of the adoption had not failed.

What do you say to a mother like that? What do you say to the woman who has cuddled the child she thinks will be hers, who has begun to dream dreams for that daughter and has spent secret hours shopping for bedroom furniture in white and pink? What do you say to the woman who has prayed for that child and held her breath, hardly daring to breathe in case it does not happen, and who now, in the absence of a child to hold, finds herself grieving alone because the rest of us just don’t get it?

It’s hard to know what to say. “How are you doing?” I blurted out yesterday when I called, even though I knew perfectly well how she was doing and I knew better than to ask something so trite. But we say things just to fill the void because we want to help, and we find that we can’t.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“You can always try again.”

“Maybe God is opening your home for another child.”

They hurt, those words, even the parts that are true, even the parts that are spoken out of genuine love and concern, because they don’t recognize that this child had already started to become her child, and this child has been lost.

And there is a mama who is crushed because of it.

I do not know, but I imagine that she tries hard to convince herself that it will be okay, that this little girl will be safe and cared for wherever she goes. But how can she be any more wanted? How can she be any more loved? How can this be God’s best for this child?

The hardest part of grief is always the questions it brings. They are the questions none of us can answer and most of us have trouble asking because they seem so devoid of faith. I think part of faith is trusting that God can love us even when we’re hurting and can’t find the right words, or even when we tell Him we don’t understand His ways.

He already knows it.

It seems silly to try to put a band-aid on the pain with words, whether they’re words to God or words to one another. Sometimes, there is nothing to say.

There is only grieving together.

We Are, All of Us, Americans

I remember the flags, the flags flying at half-staff in almost every yard in Wenham, flags carefully hung up on the sides of houses or draped sorrowfully over white-railed porches. Flags flew from the backs of pickups, and children stuck them in their backpacks and taped them to the mailboxes. When the hardware stores and shopping malls sold out of their summer supply of flags, people made their own.

It was almost a compulsion, this need to fly a flag in the days that followed 9/11. We needed to identify with the victims and their families, to stand with this violated country, our country, and to proclaim with vehemence, “We are, all of us, Americans.”

An attack on any one of us is an attack on us all. We crouched in our living rooms, huddled around our TVs, watching the horror of innocence lost, and wondered how such an evil could come into our own harbor. How dare they step onto this soil where so much blood was shed in the name of freedom. How dare they try to control us with fear.

We flew our flags in defiance to tyranny and we proclaimed, “We are, all of us, Americans, and we will never again bow to fear.”

Nearly a year after 9/11, I stood in the sweltering heat and looked down at the gaping wound where two buildings once stood. The streets had been cleared of debris but plywood boards still covered the broken out windows of the buildings surrounding the Twin Towers. It was still so fresh, still so agonizing, even though so many months had passed. Up above me, the neighboring buildings stood like empty sentinels, marked with shrapnel from the shattered buildings. They would never be the same.

But someone had draped those ragged walls with flags, and as we came from all across the country to look at what our minds could not comprehend, we stood under those flags and felt a certain sense of solidarity. We are, all of us, Americans.

Today, Ground Zero is a memorial, and 9/11 is a day of remembrance. Flags are flying on my street, and I am telling my children. Each one of us has a story of where we were on that day. Each of us has a memory that will stay with us forever.

We are, all of us, Americans, and we will never forget.

Sorrow and the Beautiful Love

The clouds, heavy with sorrow, bent over the sky, deep and gray and so full of tears they could not cry. It seemed the weight of their anguish would crush the earth, but the weeping would not come.

It had been such a beautiful thing. That was the irony: only a beautiful thing could leave such an ugly wound. Only a beautiful thing could hurt like this.

“It will get better,” they said, as if they knew. They who did not even believe such beautiful things exist.

But she did not want it to get better. She wanted the sorrow to roll over her and consume her. She wanted to feel it breaking her. It was all she had left, this side of love that felt like drowning, like flesh being torn from flesh. She couldn’t let it go, even though it hurt to hang on, because it was the closest she could get to what she once had.

“Someday, this is going to hurt,” her brain had once tried to tell her what her heart would not hear. “There is no easy way out of love.”

But by the time she realized it might be that kind of love, it was too late. Looking back, she was astonished by how quickly it had happened, and how irrevocably she was changed, so that now, in the darkness of her sorrow, she was unable to remember how to see, how to feel, how to be like before. It seemed she could only see in shadows.

Frenzied, her mind tried to find a way to put everything back the way it was. It woke her, desperate to convince her that nothing had changed. It told her they were wrong, that it hadn’t happened, that soon she would find out that it was all a big mistake, and she could run again to her love and hold on for all eternity.

But this was not the kind of thing that could be undone with wishful thinking or sheer power of will. This was the kind of thing that could never be put right, not while one piece of her was in time, and the other in eternity.

The morning came, hushed and dimly lit, with little to distinguish it from the fading of the night. Morning, noon, and evening were nothing but a collection of indistinct hours marked by indistinct rising and falling of darkness. Always there would be darkness, darkness in the air and in the sky, darkness in the shadows that seemed to be a part of her now.

But this kind of love cannot be darkened by shadows. This kind of love, this beautiful love, cannot be divided by death.

The tears came, and with them, the clouds began to lighten. Almost imperceptibly, the light filtered through, pushing the shadows to the edges of the pools where her memories drifted. The shadows sharpened as the light grew stronger, defining and outlining the very things she couldn’t make out before.

Suddenly, she realized she could see. With breathless clarity she saw the radiance of that beautiful love, not taken from her, but given back to her in its fullness, cleared of all imperfections. Indeed, it was more real than ever before.

She ran to it and clung to it, this kind of love, this rare, beautiful love, that had come through the darkness and emerged incorruptible.

*Dedicated to my grandma, who lost her beautiful love one year ago today. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face…”

For more of this kind of love, read the remarkable story of one woman’s grief redeemed in John 20.