Grief

I know this probably isn't the post that you expected since I told you I would be back with one about my experience in Nicaragua. I have written that post a dozen times and never liked the way it felt. There was so much on my heart coming home from Nicaragua that it literally has taken me this long to figure out how to express it. But tonight as I thought about what our family is facing once again it all came to me.

Grief is a funny thing. Sometimes we grieve the loss of love ones that are precious to us. We grieve what we will miss about them, what we loved about them, everything that we hold dear.

Sometimes if a person dies that we have anger or issues with, we instead grieve what we never had in them. This was the case with my dad. I loved him but he wasn't always the greatest dad in the world. I think that left me to grieve the dad that I longed for him to be.

It wasn't until I graduated from Judson that I realized that we sometimes grieve the lost seasons in our lives. I still choke up thinking about being the last person to pullout of Judson the day that we graduated and hearing the "I try to say goodbye and I choke, try to walk away and I stumble," song. I grieve the lost conversations between friends, the appreciation for differences in opinions and beliefs, the sisterhood of dorm life.

Through every episode of grief in my life the stages of grief have followed me. Shock, denial, begging and then the rock bottom place of brokenness and tears.

So why did I have to come all the way to Nicaragua just to experience grief yet again? Unfortunately this episode started way before I ever left for Nicaragua. It actually started when Brandon was in Nicaragua in March on his mission trip and I found out that I was pregnant.

I never once thought that I would ever have trouble having children. My birth mother popped out 5 of us and left us to fend for ourselves. Since I am a responsible adult (most of the time), care about others, have the means to take care of a child, ya-dah-ya I just always assumed that I would be able to look at my husband and get pregnant. Instead, I have only been pregnant 2 times in the last 3 years and both of those times have resulted in miscarriages.

The last time we found out we were pregnant Brandon was in Nicaragua. I now know the exact spot he was sitting in when I Skyped him the news. Because we had had the previous miscarriage I never really allowed myself to believe that I was pregnant and stayed very cautious throughout the entire ordeal. When Brandon returned home, I started miscarrying.

I went through a few of the stages of grief. The shock in the doctor's office. The denial in the pastor's office. The begging at home in my bed pleading for God to just make it right. But instead of allowing myself to go through the remaining stages of grief I somewhere decided to shut it all down. Better to feel nothing at all than to feel the weight of that grief.

I sucked it up, charged on through, got through another end of the school year and boarded a plan to Nicaragua.

The trip was like any other mission trip. Lots of poor people, poor towns, work to be done. You grow attached the kids. We loved on them as hard as we could knowing that we would soon leave and rejoin our comforts of home. By Thursday I was ready to be home, to be cool, to be clean, to be in the arms of the one I love, so Friday was going to be a piece of cake when it came to leaving. Right? Wrong.

It was on the steps of an orphanage in Nicaragua that God chose to break me and usher me through the brokenness of the miscarriage. As I watched our group say goodbye to all the kids they had grown to love I began to weep. Somewhere in their goodbyes I found my goodbye for the child that we had lost. It's hard to lose something so small, something that never really was what it was intended to be.

I wept for the first time since the day we found out that we were miscarrying. It wasn't a loud, Oprah, ugly cry. It was a slow stream of hot tears accompanied by a painful feeling in my gut. But once the moment had passed, I realized I had done something that I had been afraid of doing all my life...I had said goodbye. I said goodbye to our child that day, along with the other faces and moments in life that I have needed to let go.

I never imagined that moment would come in a foreign country but I am so glad it did. I am so glad that I didn't check out on my emotions and become bitter with life. I am so glad that I went through that hard and painful moment because I know I can survive the pain. Does that mean that I want to go through grief ever again? No. I am no fool, I know it is a part of life. But this time I know that I am strong enough to handle whatever may come my way.

So there it is. Not the itinerary trip, picture slide show, you were probably expecting but somehow writing it has been healing and that's all that really matters.