Suddenly, as I cried and cried out to Him, a flood of Bible verses came pouring into my head. Verses that I’ve known since childhood. Verses that I’ve been reading for so long that they had started to lose their meaning. They’d become so familiar that I forgot how special they were.
Some of the other losses we grieve after our child dies have to do with the relationships we had before their death.
People that we imagined would be there supporting us in our darkest hour were nowhere to be found.
There are so many facets to our losses that it is no wonder that our grief can spiral back and catch us off guard sometimes, rearing its ugly head and reducing us to tears at different times throughout the year.
This week, I’ve found myself feeling grumpy and short-tempered with my family.
The everyday demands of life with four young children have been overwhelming me. I know it’s a hard job, but suddenly it feels impossible. Like I can’t possibly survive another day of arguing and getting cups of juice and changing diapers and picking up toys. I just can’t do it. I want to get in a car and drive away from here.
There are so many things that I can think of that, if they’d been handled differently, might have resulted in her still being here.
Or they might not have.
I will never know.
Any parent who has lost a child knows how painful this seemingly benign question can be.
To most people doing the asking, it’s just a way to make small talk. Just getting to know you a little bit more. They have no idea about the internalized chain reaction of thoughts and decisions they set off by asking this.
Jesus has saved me in more ways than one. He heard my cries and called me by name, offering me an invitation I couldn't refuse. Jesus claimed me as His beloved daughter, crowned me with dignity and worth, and healed the deepest wounds in my heart. Through healing, He gave me freedom and a purpose. He showed me to whom I belong: He is my beloved, and I am His.
It is precisely this Sword of Sorrow that the Blessed Mother used to connect with me, as I came to know her. I have the moments spent cradling my own lifeless daughter etched permanently in my mind as such a heavy and sorrowful memory. It was through this memory that I was able to put myself in her place, and she showed me that she was not someone who was distant and unrelatable, as I had once thought her to be. Rather, she was a loving and compassionate mother who had also lost her precious child.
Mary knows firsthand that the cross is the way to salvation. She knows that we are all given crosses to endure that are meant to lead us to heaven. Can there be any question that as a good and loving mother, she wants to help us to endure them well?
As a mother who has watched my own child suffer and die, I can attest that there is nothing more difficult in all the world. But despite how painful it was, I wanted to be beside her at every moment, comforting her and telling her how much I loved her. I would have given anything - my own life - to have been able to take her place and prevent her suffering. Any loving mother would do the same.
Sometimes, we undergo suffering that does not seem to us to have a purpose. We may be left with many unanswered questions about our painful experiences, and the greatest one may simply be "why?" Why did I have to go through that? What was the reason for it?