Treading Water in Dark Seas
Everyone envisions a family. For some it is a picket fence, three kids, and a collie. My vision was a rowdy tribe, living one wild adventure after another.
For one in eight couples, when the time arrives to start a family Mother Nature doesn’t show up. We find ourselves wide-eyed in a fertility clinic, baring body and soul to strangers. Becoming walking science projects, we scan temperatures, swallow sticker-shock inducing pills, interpret hazy sonograms, grimace while our weary husbands administer shots to our backside, and test our marriages as hormones volley us between suicidal and homicidal.
For over a decade, my husband and I navigated those tumultuous waters. We invested heart and finances on fertility and adoption attempts, only to have our tiny life raft rise to the joyful heights of a monster wave before plummeting when the crest broke away. Lost in uncharted seas, we landed on shoals of inadequacy, confusion, isolation, and shame.
We fought the urge to ask every pregnant fourteen-year-old in the mall if she’s keeping her baby; we wondered why childless couples are often not considered real adults by their peers; we faked happy ooh’s and ahh’s at other’s ultrasound photos; and we racked our brains to understand why good people often struggle to grow a family, while others haphazardly breed like rabbits.
We endured well-intentioned, thoughtless comments like constant pleas for children, laughing that we hadn’t figured “it” out, callous offers to donate unruly children, and guesses about which one of us had the “problem.”
Snarky responses were created to silence intrusive questions: “Not yet, but we sure have fun trying.” And, “You have kids… what sex positions worked for you?”
About ten years into the journey we were contacted about potentially adopting an unborn child. Terrified at the thought of another fragile prospect, we risked moving forward. Months passed and hesitance gave way to excitement as we realized this baby was our sure thing — a beautiful son.
A few days before his birth, he died.
I collapsed as breath was ripped from me, like waves sucked from a shore revealing my scarred, murky seabed, and then slamming back in a tsunami of sorrow – destroying everything that should have been.
His death occurred while we were attending a ministers’ conference and we quickly learned to hide our grief. I’m certain I appeared aloof or shy, but I was just desperately trying to function: walk, eat, and breathe without sobbing uncontrollably. Silently, we were surrounded by others who never detected we were dead people walking, wanting to simply crawl to a corner, curl into a ball, and weep.
Though deeply painful, clear obvious losses offer a sense of concrete closure allowing us to comprehend absence and begin wrestling with grief. Loss without closure is an entirely different storm. Because there are no funerals, rules, or guidelines for mourning infertility, miscarriages, or the vanishing of something that was never truly yours, we found ourselves alone in a cavernous darkness.
The psychological term for this is Ambiguous Loss found in two forms. One, when a physical presence is gone but the psychological presence remains – like a divorce, missing child, abandonment, or deployment. The second is a loss when there is a psychological absence, but the physical presence remains – like loving someone with Alzheimer’s, a traumatic brain injury, addiction, infidelity, or mental illness.
Because closure is an important element in moving through grief, ambiguous loss brings a sea of unanswered questions, self-doubt, and mental paralysis. It is confusing and disorienting because it doesn’t make sense to say goodbye to what partially remains, or to grieve something we’ve never actually had.
Often the quest for closure involves finding some measure of redemption in loss. Without minimizing pain or justifying brokenness, there is healing in witnessing beauty in the midst of sorrow. For those who grieve what cannot be buried, this becomes a form of honoring what is gone and holding what remains.
As I found myself frantically treading the waters of unbearable anguish, I realized that although my heart had been decimated, for the first time I had also tasted the hope of parenthood. Cautiously, I gave myself permission to reach back into my mind and recall the moments of ironing my baby’s clothes, the giddy sense I felt decorating the nursery, and the love I felt whispering the name we had chosen. Gingerly touring the memories, my eyes welled with grateful tears for the gift of those few, fleeting moments of true delight.
For those of us who’ve sunk to dark depths of ambiguous loss, saying goodbye feels like an impossible ask. Yet, when we risk honoring both the fullness of what we’ve longed for and the emptiness that remains, we can slowly begin to find our way back toward the light on the surface.
