In December, one of my dearest friends and her husband lost their first baby, 20 weeks into a pregnancy that was wrought with sickness and all manner of things gone awry.
I don't know how to follow that sentence. It's heartbreaking. Because not only did Tara lose the baby, but she had to deliver him or her. And that part hurts too, because the precious little baby was so ravaged by the process of delivery and illness that they could not tell if its body was that of a girl or boy. Tara & Trey Warrick could not hold their first child. They could not take photos with their baby. Everything went downhill so quickly, they had not anticipated making arrangements for giving birth and leaving their child's tiny body behind at the hospital. I walked beside Tara’s wheelchair as we exited the hospital and I heard the cries of newborns behind closed doors. It isn’t fair, I thought.
They named their baby Scout, and a couple of months after the delivery, we gathered in a church to celebrate the twenty weeks of life whose heart beat inside Tara’s belly. These months have been a battle for the Warricks, but never have I witnessed two people in such fierce pursuit of healing.
Early in January, Tara asked me to be her pen pal and we have written each other at least once per week ever since. I write from my back porch overlooking an ages-old mountain range, in my single-bedroom apartment with a poor excuse for a kitchen, cicadas singing sweet Southern lullabies all around. She writes from the front porch of her farmhouse, surrounded by two prissy puppies, a floppy and big-footed farm dog, a tall, dark and handsome husband, and row after row of carefully cultivated trees. Sometimes we dash off emails—I from the office, she from her BlackBerry en route to conduct another occupational therapy visit.
Tara is a childless mother. Her deep fear is that she and her husband will never hold babies of their own, or that all her pregnancies will end this way, or that childbirth will never be a joy for her. I am a single woman. My deep fear is that I will never have a husband, or the opportunity to create a family, or people of my own to give all my love.
When Tara’s husband called me late that Sunday night in December to tell me they were going to the hospital because “something’s wrong,” I did the only thing I knew to do—I emailed the rest of our friends to get the information out, and I prayed. From that moment forward, I did only what came by instinct. On Monday I left work midday to drive across the state. At the hospital, I kissed Tara’s head and I held her hand while she labored. I made stupid jokes, per usual. I cried when she cried. And so it went.
Our dearest friends are a group of nine women, with a few husbands and boyfriends in the mix now. But among us all, none knew how to handle the loss of a child. We didn’t know what to say or do, or what
not to say and
not to do. We wanted to be supportive of Tara, to give her hope, but she was fragile, and oftentimes choosing words that did not cause more pain proved difficult. Grief is a strange and unrelenting beast and everyone feels pain differently.
As my letters to Tara and hers to me have piled up, we have both learned how significant the actual writing of words to one another can be. We have learned that while our circumstances are different, the roots of pain can be the same; camaraderie is found there. As it turns out, walking together through life—the good yes, but most surprisingly, the bad, the “ugly cry” parts of life—is a privilege.
A great story involves a character that wants something and
overcomes conflict to get it. This one involves two, or many, depending on how you want to look at it.
Our friend Tara Beth wants to give Scout’s short life meaning. She wants to help other women who have lost children; it is a unique grief that is only fully understood by those who have experienced it for themselves. She is a daily encouragement to many such women. This October, she will host the event
Scouting for Hope, to which she has invited women of all shapes and sizes and types of grief to come together, to share in their hope. (Details will be
posted in the coming weeks, for those interested.)
I want to give the friends of these women hope as well. The other eight of us who have yet to be mothers, we don’t fully understand, but we walk beside Tara anyway. When I wrote
to and
about Scout in February, I was surprised by how many people were connected to women who had lost children by stillbirth or miscarriage or death. So many of these dear hearts long to encourage their friends, but feel confusion when they try to figure out what, exactly, to do.
Together, Tara and I plan to write a book. We want to use this friendship we’ve been walking together to tell a better story with our lives, to create something good where once there was only heartache. The book will be about grief, about the seasonality of life and its friendships. We’ll share from our own letters and we will be frank about our individual struggles. I believe there are times when people need an affirming voice to say: “Hey, I’ve been there too. It’s hard, but it will be okay.”
I want the story of my life to be that voice—that voice that encourages, gives hope, sympathizes, and tells it like is, even when that’s hard to do. I say that my deep fear is not having people of my own to give all my love. But I have those people. I have friends who belong to my heart and who I can pour love into constantly. Right now, that looks like writing a book with Tara, giving voice to the hurt of women who have walked those paths of grief, giving practical advice to friends who want to bring light straight into that grief, saying “it’s okay to talk about this,” and preparing the way for great hope to take root.
I’m writing about this because putting it out there makes it real. We really want to do this book-writing thing, and we’ve really started to do it. I’m also writing about it to enter a contest for which I could win a trip to
Don Miller’s
Living a Better Story Seminar. I want to go to this conference because, while I like to encourage people, I need that encouragement as well. I need practical advice. I need clarity of vision for my life and for my work—whether it’s writing in my spare time or sitting in my cubicle in an office building. I want to spend time around people who are motivated to live better stories themselves, and I want to hear those stories.
Imagine spending two days in a room filled with hundreds of people, each dedicated to living every day in a better story than the day before. You would leave encouraged. You would leave ready to take action. You would leave and you would
actually live a better story. That’s something I can get behind. If you want to register,
go here.
Here’s Don Miller to tell you more about it:
Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.
*Blog title is a line from an Andrew Peterson song, Many Roads.
