My Grief Journey This Year

Today I noticed how empty our house is. I notice that despite the yelling of a toddler and a preschooler how quiet it is. I notice how spacious our home is without two additional littles despite it being a modest home with small rooms. I notice how free my wife and I both feel without being tied down to caring for and nursing beautiful twin boys.

Today should be a day of abundance, joy, chaos, and exuberance despite exhaustion all while repeatedly telling my girls to stop touching their baby brothers while they are sleeping. Today should be a day I invite my Mom and Dad over to help with the beautiful chaos of newborn twin boys that have come into this world.

But, we are short three. Our family of five kiddos is now just three (one on the way next April) and we are missing my Dad (their Papa) who passed just this past April as we found out we were expecting.

It was Tuesday, May 14th. The week before Mother's Day. Seems cruel, right? I remember the text while I was in a meeting. I had been to many of the doctor's appointments since we were tracking this pregnancy so closely but I didn’t go to this one since we heard a heartbeat the week before.

“It’s bad. I’m in shock. There were twins. No heartbeat.” my wife texted.

I didn’t fully understand and asked for clarity since I was in a meeting. “No baby has a heartbeat”, she said.

I still didn’t understand, thinking that one of the twins didn’t have a heartbeat.

She replied, “Babe. There is no baby alive inside of me. None. We lost them both.”

I was in shock.

It was hard reading the text messages before and after this because they paled in comparison to the weight of what we just encountered. Just two weeks prior, we said goodbye to my Dad in a hospital ICU room as a family. We had told him of the good news while he was still earth-side. But for that night we just had to continue living life. I guess that’s what you do when you experience such grief and hard things in the middle of a life that has to be lived, things attended to, and schedules to keep. We quickly had to make plans for a D&C procedure just a couple of days later. It seems so cruel that you have to pay the cost of a birth for a D&C, except you don’t birth life out of you, you have death removed. So on this Mother’s Day and my wife’s birthday, we celebrated about as much as you can when you are overwhelmed by sorrow and grief.

“My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol…You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves,” says the Psalmist in Chapter 88.

It was the last text from my wife that would ring around in my head for the next several months: “There is no baby alive inside of me.”

The Psalmist also writes, “Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.”

It’s been a heavy year for our family. We’ve been through a lot of grief and hard stuff. It feels like we are barely surviving, much less thriving. We have been surrounded by reminders of death and loss. I am thankful that we are expecting another little boy this upcoming April. I am also still confused and saddened by our loss.

This season has been a disorienting one. Ephemeral joy. A rollercoaster of highs and lows. Feeling like life is cruel at times.

We’ve battled a lot of things over the last several months. Communicating with each other. Sharing our grief with each other. Having time to feel our feelings and share with one another while not being exhausted from parenting and full-time jobs. Being present with our girls. Channeling my grief towards something helpful instead of it coming out as frustration towards those I love the most. Processing how I could lose so much in such a short period of time. Processing how to grieve two very different losses; one as a son and one as a Father of twins I haven’t met yet.

There have been times of crying out to God. Times of grief. Times of sharing with friends and loved ones.

“Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry!… Every day I call upon you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you…in the morning my prayer comes before you.” - Psalm 88

Time with God has mostly been dry but sprinkled with a little richness. It still feels that way for the most part. Our relationship is getting richer and closer, but I have to fight for it and stop to allow the presence of the Lord to become real in my life.

I know that grief lessens and changes with time. I actually pray that I don’t lose the emotion yet. I don’t want to. It reminds me of the love that I have for them. A pastor at our church recently said, “Grief is love that has no place to go.” Wow. That one stuck with me. There’s a lot of my love sitting around going nowhere. I wish it would go to tears more often, but it doesn’t. But boy, when it does, it feels good.

For me, and maybe for some of you, I can honor the grief of this season not by crying or through tears but by silence and time spent with God. It reminds me of the gravity of my loss and the love that has no place to go. It reminds me of how different my life could look right now with a full house.

I recently looked at my Spotify Wrapped collection. Topping the charts was an album I played for my dad in the hospital as he was in his final days. It’s a beautiful piano album that has spoken to me and soothed me countless times since late April (David Tolk's Blessings). It’s a reminder of the past and the loss I’ve been through. It feels honoring to have songs that I play in remembrance of my Dad and twin boys.

Psalm 88 doesn’t end with a positive refrain. It ends with the word “darkness.” It’s a really hard Psalm to process and pray through unless you’ve lived this kind of a story. While there is hope and there is still the goodness of God in our lives, we still wrestle with the reality of the losses in our story.

I think the next step for me in my grief is to, when I can, acknowledge to others that I have more than 2, almost 3 kids. That I actually have 5 kids, 2 who are with Jesus. If I don’t say that, it doesn’t start to feel real for me and it should be. The trade-off for the discomfort that might ensue is healing on the other side. It’s the path that my wife and I have had to persevere through with the grace, closeness, and friendship of Jesus.

— Mark