Photos by Canva.
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Last week, I began talking about my first experience with death in ninth grade. It evolved into a discussion of church splits. A lot of my memories are connected that way. I hope you can bear with me. While I’m remembering, I need to toss in what I have learned since or none of us benefits me or anyone else at all. I plugged along through life with a lot of events: both happy and sad. I certainly didn’t have a normal childhood and even less normal teen years.
Moving to Philadelphia for Nurses’s training helped me find my people and find independence for the first time. I felt like an adult.
But I moved to Philadelphia for nurses’ training and found my people and profession. I loved living there where I could hop on public transportation and go almost anywhere in the city. After living in a dorm for high school and 1 1/2 years of college, this felt liberating to me. For the first time in years, I had my independence and loved it. Since I often worked different shifts after my first 6 months of nurses’ training, I loved being able to get out of the dorm. If I was running out of money, I had options to earn it either by baby sitting (the contacts through the school paid us really well) or ward clerking in the hospital (which involved taking off the orders in the hospital and making life much easier for the nurses on the later shifts.) It wasn’t heavy work and was a nice way to earn some money. For the first time in my life, I had options and I didn’t feel like my hands were tied behind my back every time I tried to get something done. But I digress.
A month after graduation, I got married.
A month after I graduated from nursing, I moved back to FL and married…September 21, 1968. It was a great day and the beginning of even newer freedom for me. Ron was not power hungry, nor was he big on making a big deal about who was going to do what in our marriage. I was working about 4 days a week: some days and some evenings. He had been a batchelor for awhile so we both knew he could fix a meal if he had to. I fixed most of the meals but he preferred the way he fixed breakfast so we did our own thing for breakfast.
I still wasn’t allowed to drive because of the last seizure I had, so I had to wait until that time up. Then I got my learner’s permit and Ron taught me how to drive. He was a great teacher. He taught me how to move at my own speed and not be intimidated by faster drivers behind me. I soon became confident to drive at normal speeds and did fine.
It wasn’t long before I was pregnant
We had been married a short time and discovered I was pregnant. We were thrilled. As it turned out, my sister and I were due about the same time. But at 8 weeks, I miscarried. It was so early, hardly anyone knew I was even pregnant. It wasn’t really a secret, It’s just that once you have lost the baby that early, it feels awkward to tell everyone. It was especially so back then. I needed a D&C because I was bleeding rather heavily(technically a D&E). But physically, I was fine after the D & E. There was nothing written to help me with the grief back then. At least, there was nothing I could find. There was no google.
I struggled with the why’s of the girls in our youth group who “had” to get married and we who were in a stable marriage having a miscarriage
Meanwhile, in Ron’s (and to some degree, my) involvement as youth pastor, we had kids who “had” to get married due to pregnancies. The likelihood that these marriages were going to last was slim to none. But they had to last long enough for the baby to be born and be technically legitimate.
As you can imagine, I struggled to understand where the fairness was in this situation. We had a stable marriage and had miscarried. They had no foundation in a good marriage and often divorced within a couple of years after the marriage. I struggled to wonder what God was thinking when He allowed these varied circumstances.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.Isaiah 55:8-9 ESV
It was going to take me a long time to realize and accept the fact that God’s ways were so much larger and grander than mine. I had so much smaller part of the picture than He did. Even now, I have a much better picture of the future after 55 years of marriage. But imagine what His picture of the future is?! Wow! It is beyond my capability to imagine. I’m only beginning to understand that.
It is certainly larger than who is going to and not going to get pregnant at this moment in time. It has a lot more to do with who is growing in grace and faith and trust in Him. Who is growing in oneness in their marriage? Years later, I was able to understand more of those things, but at this time, it was much more difficult to see. Basically, God is working on so many different things in us at once. He is working to make each of His children more holy. In the process, He uses marriage, pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths, healthy births, and everything in between. He also uses good health, chronic disease, cancer, old age and its issues, and death as well. He uses the happy and the sad to make us holy. It’s amazing.
Finally, our second pregancy happened
It took awhile to get pregnant after the miscarriage. But we found out we were pregnant just about the time that first baby would have been born…and just about the time our niece arrived. Of course, we were delighted. The pregnancy was normal in all respects until I woke up one morning in my 8th month with swelling in my ankles. It was usually gone by morning, but on this morning, it wasn’t. Since this was abnormal for me, I notified the doctor and they checked me out right away. My blood pressure was up, by not horrendously. But my urine was +4 and considering I had a seizure disorder, my doctor wanted me watched carefully. So I landed in the hospital. I was slightly alarmed, but not horribly. My symptoms were minor compared to many patients I had cared for. I was being watched. The baby was going to be watched too. They didn’t have the monitors they have now, but they checked her heartbeat every shift.
I was in the hospital almost a week and I had a horrible feeling that she was going to die. I told one of the nurses and it was true she was less active. But no one seemed alarmed. Her heartbeat was the same. A few days later, they came to check her heartbeat and no one could find it. The doctor ordered an EEG on my stomach so if there was any chance of getting a live baby, they would do a C-section. I looked at all the leads. the beat was the same on each one. The baby had died. After I was disconnected from the machine I went to the bathroom to shower off and sobbed.
Soon, the doctor arrived in my room to make it official. She had died. There was no sense in putting me through a C-section. He felt I was likely to go into labor before long, but it was possible my body could wait until the due date which was almost a month away. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. I was set to be discharged once my labs were settled down. That happened about 2 days later. The night before I was to be discharged, I was having enough decent contractions that I was able to be induced. The next afternoon, our almost 5# daughter was born. Back then, they didn’t show stillborn babies to their parents and I was put under for the delivery.
To make it worse, I was put on a non-maternity floor to recover for a day or two. It was very painful because I had been on the maternity unit for 10 days and knew all the nurses including my sister. The maternity floor knows how to care for you after a delivery and non-maternity floors don’t. I felt that we could have overcome the problems of my being on the maternity unit, but they wouldn’t give in.
That last day or two in the hospital was very dark and lonely
I have never felt so empty, dark, or lonely in my life. The hardest part was when our pastor “prayed” for us that we not question God. That was on the first day when we had just received the news that she had died. He was the senior pastor, Ron worked with him. If he had hit me in the face with a hammer, it couldn’t have hurt more. I had known him since I was in about 5th grade because my dad had worked with him at another church. I felt crushed. When we were discharged, we went home to our empty apartment. The crib was gone. We both sat down and cried.
I don’t remember much about the days and weeks that followed except that they were dark. On the days I felt up to it, I went to church. On the days I didn’t, I didn’t go. Ron did not push me. For the most part, I attended.
A welcome distraction–but it didn’t help me grieve.
Meanwhile, shortly before I went into the hospital, we went to an orientation for West Indies Mission. They had an opening for a teacher at Jamaica Bible College in Mandeville, Jamaica. It was only weeks later that I landed in the hospital and the baby died. But the process continued. We were accepted. Now we needed to start raising support so we could move there in January 1971.
It was a welcome distraction. I was doing nothing to grieve. I didn’t know how to do that. Few people around me knew either. In no time, I was pregnant again. The due date for this baby was about a week after our stillborn baby would have turned one.
Meanwhile, we were busy getting ready to move away…to Jamaica. It was January 1971 when that adventure began.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction,
with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.
If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort,
which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.
Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.II Corinthians 1:3-7 ESV
Learning to grieve came later. After I had tried distraction, comparison (it could have been worse), denial, and other coping strategies for my grief. But I didn’t actually grieve the loss much. I had to learn much later.
