loss 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.

Ordinary Days

I got married in my home church in Wisconsin on a day in January when the sky was blue and biting. The lake was frozen solid and dotted with shanties the sturgeon fishermen had hauled out and stocked with beer as soon as the ice was thick enough to hold a pickup truck.

I stood at the back of the church in a dress that could have been warmer with my brothers on either side. They were both as tall as my dad, or taller, and looked so much like him, it made my grandmother catch her breath because when she saw them, she could almost swear she was looking into the face of the son she lost so many years before.

It should have been my dad on my arm that day.

But it wasn’t.

I had my brothers instead, and it was fitting and right because we had been down so many other roads together. I wanted them there beside me the way I wanted them beside me when my father slipped into eternity without saying goodbye. We stood together when we looked into his coffin and we stood together then, stepping awkwardly down a too-narrow aisle in time to the music. On that bitter cold day in January, they gave me away in place of my dad to a man my father would never meet.

It was hard not to feel the loss. There’s something about a bride walking down an aisle without her daddy that makes people blink fast and swallow hard.

My dad with my older brother and me on just another ordinary day.

Dads should be there on days like that, on the red-letter days when the calendar screams of life-changing events like high school graduations and college commencements and birthdays and marriages and babies and the news of twins growing inside.

My dad missed every single one of those.

And I miss him on those days.

But I also miss him on the brown-paper bag days, the ordinary days filled with a million insignificant events like scraped knees and bedtimes and cold cereal mornings.

Dads should be there on days like that.

Because life is short. I learned that fast and young when a snowy winter road took my dad before I even had a chance to say good-bye. I watched him go, that morning, you know? I watched him go and I didn’t say good-bye because I thought he’d be back.

I missed him hard, at first, like some piece of me had been cut out and replaced with cold air that kind of numbed but mostly burned. I missed him every day and in so many different ways, I didn’t think I’d ever stop grieving because I kept finding new ways to do it.

Many years later, when I looked back on a grief-journey that spans more years than my father ever lived, I realized I have learned something along the way. It is something so important, I wish I could grab you around the shoulders, dads, and make you hear it.

Someday, you’re going to slip right out of your body and your kid is going to be left grappling with the loss. It’s kind of strange how one soul can be free and another weighed down by the same event. You will be gone, and they will be here, remembering.

Do you know what they’re going to miss the most?

I do.

I want to tell it to you because it’s important, and I’m a kid who lost a dad so you need to hear it because one day it might be your kid who’s learned it, and by then it will be too late.

More than anything, they’re going to miss the ordinary days.

They’re going to miss those brown-paper bag days, the days that drone on and on and you kind wish you could fast forward because they’re all so much the same. They’re going to miss the days you thought didn’t matter.

Turns out, those are the days that matter the most.

You know those soccer tournaments you manage to make it to? Those are important. So are the graduations and the weddings and everything in between.

But they are not the most important thing.

What is most important is all the countless minutes filled with nothing much but you and them and the span of time between waking and sleeping when you say and do the mundane things that make them feel loved and important and a part of you.

Anybody can show up at a wedding.

But your daughter is going to remember how you talked to her at breakfast.

Anybody can cheer at a playoff game.

But your son is going to remember what you did when you came home from work.

Anybody can drive the family to church on Sunday.

But your kid is going to remember what you said when he messed up, whether or not you showed up, and if you lived up to all you said you believed.

Your daughter will think of you on Christmas, it’s true, but she will miss you most on some Monday morning when the sky is perfect for flying and the smell of an engine makes her think of all the hours she spent in the hangar, watching you work. She will think of you when a wood stove crackles and someone makes popcorn late at night. It will be stale jelly beans and Risk games and badly-sung hymns and mustached smiles and grey-blue eyes that search out the hurt and motorcycle roars and coffee first thing in the morning that will make her wish she could bring you back, just for a second.

It’s easy to think it’s enough to be there for the big stuff. But I’m here to tell, dads, it’s not the big stuff she’ll remember, and it’s not the big stuff she’ll miss.

It’s the ordinary stuff, the stuff you never thought twice about because it was just life.

Hear me, dads–that’s the part of your life that is everything to her.

I know.

I think of it today because it’s Father’s Day, one of those red-letter days when dads get new ties and handmade paperweights and everyone is together because they’re supposed to be, and it’s good.

But tomorrow is Monday. There’s Wheat Chex for breakfast and groggy kids to get up and a long day before you come home again. It’s tempting to slide a bit because there’s a good show on TV and you’re tired and after all, you just made a memory on Sunday, if you believe holidays make the best memories.

I’m telling you, they don’t.

Give your kids Monday. Give them Tuesday too. Give them all the ordinary minutes you can, dads. Because one day, you’ll be gone, and those are exactly the minutes they’ll miss the most.

They will miss your ordinary.

Give it to them.

My dad enjoying an ordinary day with my younger brother

Let it Be

It was a little too dangerous to be out on the roads that had just claimed the life of a young father. Great, treacherous flakes floated down from the clouds that hid the heavens. But that didn’t stop them from coming.

Beautiful saints, every one, they came to give a soft place for the tears to fall, to embrace the broken, and to mourn with those who mourned the most.

Bonnie, who had been widowed younger than my mother—was my mother a widow?—was one of the first to come. She came in, soggy from the snow, and grabbed my mother’s hands without stopping to take off her coat. Her tear-stained eyes searched my mother’s face for the pain she knew was there and the pain she knew was coming.

They sat together in the steel light of the feather-frosted window, and Bonnie sobbed. She sobbed for her dead young husband and she sobbed for my tall, handsome father, and she sobbed for my mother because Bonnie knew.

She sobbed because there was nothing else she could do.

There was nothing else anyone could do, and so, like Bonnie, they came in, silent as snow. Dear friends from church, relatives, even neighbors–everyone came. Some came for a minute, heaving a potted plant into my arms or pressing a fold of money into my hand for my mother before they flurried away so as not to be a bother.

Others stayed until the shadows grew and melted into the freshly-fallen snow. They did not know how to leave a woman who had just been left all alone in the world with three young children and a house that needed fixing. So they lingered.

They lingered until the little green house in the middle of the forest was filled up with the scent of the saints. Even with the drafty windows and a wood stove that wasn’t quite up to the task, there was a warmth in that place unlike anything I had known before. It was warm enough to calm the shivers that convulsed through my body, warm enough to stop my teeth from chattering, warm enough to help me believe that somehow, it would be okay.

I watched from the corner of the couch, from my little refuge behind the tall-backed adults and the nodding heads and the sad voices, and I saw Him. Jesus. Jesus in real hands and real feet and real tears crying over our Lazarus- grave when it was too late and there was nothing else that could be done.

How beautiful He is.

I rested my head on a couch cushion. It smelled like my Sunday school teacher, who didn’t have any children but who loved children more than most women who did. She had been there with me, and her fragrance lingered and filled up my space like a slow, parting embrace.

The entire house smelled like Jesus, in the remarkable way that Jesus smells like Dial soap and Old Spice and a kitchen full of casseroles.

Had He been there that day?

In my mind, I went over all the faces. Some old, some young, some full of their own agonies and some who were just learning how hope could be shattered. Each with a story, but each willing to step in to the day when my story fell apart. Just like Jesus.

It left me breathless.

Somehow, Jesus had come to my living room garden, and He had whispered to me, “Child, child. Why do you weep?”

He said it in words that came through other lips, chosen messengers, but it was there all the same. I clung to them as the bitter sleep drifted in and I thought to myself, if this is what it takes to see Jesus, then let it be.

I think of it, all these years later because we are in a hard bit of the road, right here. I have told you about it, dear saints, and you have come in with arms that ache to hold me up and tell me it will be okay. Some of you have cried with me because you know. You have called and you have written and you have prayed for me even when you do not know me, not really.

You have been Jesus to me.

And I weep because it is so beautiful, I do not know that I could ever trade these moments even for all the answers I ever wanted that did not come. I am surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and it is you, dear friends, who cheer me on. It is you, dear ones, who minister Christ to me in real hands and real feet and real tears that cry over my Lazarus-grave.

You have shown me Jesus. I cannot wish for any other.

I am left with nothing more to say in my prayers but this: If this is what it takes to see Jesus, then let it be.