G is for Grace and Gratitude

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” – Anne Lamott

“If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?” – Hobbes of Calvin & Hobbes

Grief requires copious amounts of grace. Grace in the form of understanding and forgiveness. Grace in the form of patience and nurturing. Grace inward and grace outward.

The evening we got home from the hospital after losing Turner, we went to McDonald’s. It was our regular Sunday night tradition: evening church then the McDonald’s playground with friends. With 3 small kids, our ritual had become our lifeline.

After 3 days of hospitals and heartbreak and the hollowing of my soul, I needed respite. Something normal. To put the grief in a box for a moment.

I was worried about what people would say when we showed up that night. Weary of the unavoidable awkwardness. The stares of pity. The muddled conversations.

Staying home would have denied me a break from the unrelenting suffering. And it would have delayed the inevitable. There would always be covert looks, uncomfortable exchanges. So we ripped off the band-aid and walked through the creaky gate to the playground.

A friend I wasn’t particularly close to jumped up as soon as she saw me and rushed over. Without hesitation, she wrapped her arms around me and said “I’m so so so sorry”. She held me for a long time. I was bathed in grace in that life-giving moment.

Later in the evening, I sat with another friend, again one I wasn’t particularly close to, who barraged me with questions, chattering away before I could even answer. My broken heart stopped in my chest when she confided that she’d always prayed that if she had a baby who was going to grow up to disgrace God, that He would take that baby from this life immediately. From the depths of my emptiness, I was required to give grace to a woman who herself was disgracing God.

Well-intentioned people will say the wrong thing. People who don’t understand or are too busy to care or think their pain is bigger will say the wrong thing. Doctors and family members and neighbors and strangers will all say the wrong thing. And it will wound you.

But you will give grace because you will have been the recipient of grace along the way. You will be surrounded by love and support in your dark night of the soul. You will have a nurse who quietly takes a picture of your boy, the only one you’ll ever have. You will have a doctor whose pained face tells you his heart is breaking alongside yours.

You will taste grace in so many unexpected ways. The gift of a Willow Tree figure from a sister. The planting of what would become known as a Turner tree by your in-laws. Cards from people you haven’t heard from in years. Prayers from people you don’t even know.

Attunement to such grace gives birth to gratitude. Gratitude is the magic of grief. Miraculous possibility coming from the impossible.

When you are prostrate with grief, anything that glimmers with light and life breeds gratitude. Two on-call doctors advising you against a C-section because that’s what they would want for their own daughters. Finding a crematorium who charges minimal fees for babies when every other place is in the thousands. Getting a phone call with the baby’s genetic results and finding out your life’s great tragedy was a “medical fluke”: neither parent’s chromosomal fault.

My 35 excruciating weeks of pregnancy with Turner was grace. The faded copies of 3-D ultrasounds I had to investigate his extra amniotic fluid was grace. The fleeting moments I was able to hold his cold body and wonder about the color of his eyes was grace.

The people God placed in my path in those darkest hours were ministers of grace. And amidst the rage, the terror, the heartbreak, and the wounding, gratitude also grew. It was the gratitude that renewed my strength, inspired hope, and enabled me to keep going, keep breathing when I had nothing left.

There is always, always something to be grateful for. Look for it. Name it. Cling to it. It will carry you through.