I am so honored today to get to share with you this beautiful guest post by my sweet friend Jessica. In honor of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, I asked Jessica to share her story on my blog. Jessica’s story is one of loss and heartbreak, but God has brought beautiful hope out of her sorrow. He has carried her and her family through so much grief and worked in powerful ways to bring peace, comfort, and healing.
Here’s Jessica’s story:
11 years ago we said hello and goodbye to our son.
For 11 years, I’ve lived with half my heart on earth and the other half in heaven. For 11 years I’ve carried grief in my knapsack, learning more every day about walking through the world holding tight to love and faith.
Jack and I got married young and knew we wanted children. But what nobody tells you about building a family is that often it’s not so picture-perfect. After experiencing miscarriages early in the process, we were both anxious and elated when we found out we were expecting our next son. What we didn’t expect is that he would be born 14 weeks early and live for just 17 short days before he died in October of 2009.
We named him John McDowell Allen IV, after his daddy, but weighing in at 1 pound, his name was longer than he was. We called him L.J., for Little Jack, and his life was a miracle. Even during our scariest moments in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), I never imagined we wouldn’t one day be bringing him home to our sweet yellow nursery. So when it was time to let him go, everything in me broke: my heart, my faith, and my hope for the future. I’d always believed everything was part of God’s purpose, but after L.J. died I had to reconcile the most unimaginable pain, grief, anger, confusion, and senseless loss.
As the numbness subsided and my pain became unbearable, I remember consciously deciding: I can either run from God, or I can hang on for dear life. God knows loss. He lost his son too. So I chose to hold on. I didn’t sleep for almost 3 weeks and read everything I could find on grief and loss. My desperate need for order and structure left me searching for how to fix this. I sought out the proper steps to take to come out of our heartbreak together as a couple, to ensure we beat the divorce statistics for parents who had lost a child. Jack initially clung to his faith too, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized he truly thought L.J.’s death was a punishment for all the ways Jack had failed in his life. It broke my heart. Jack poured himself into making sure I was okay, which made it easier to put his own grief on a shelf. We navigated the grieving process so differently.
Just one month after L.J. died, we got a call from a family with a baby on the way they were not prepared to raise. They asked if we’d be willing to consider adoption. We were shocked and scared and still shattered but set a meeting to talk.
We knew this baby wouldn’t be a replacement for our son. We understood a new life couldn’t erase the pain or the love of the life we’d lost. But there wasn’t a doubt in our minds when we left the meeting that we were supposed to say yes.
And so three weeks later, through a whirlwind of paperwork and prayer, we welcomed an angel babe into our home. Our sweet Grace was born just 3 days after L.J.’s original due date, in the same hospital room L.J. was born in, 1225, like Christmas.
She was light, and life, and hope for every single person who had walked our journey with us. Her smile brightened every room and brought a whisper of God’s redemption story right into our real life. She was the most humbling gift I’d ever been given and I fell in love with being her mother.
But as time passed, I could no longer ignore the seed of grieving anger that was still rooted and growing in my spirit. I needed help to process pain that had been rightfully put on the backburner when Grace came into our home. Remembering how hurtful it had been to expect Jack to grieve with me, I sought counseling on my own. I dug into the work of knitting my heart back together and making some peace with losing L.J. It was hard and very lonely.
I never imagined I would carry another baby. But because God’s plan is better than mine, we found out we were expecting our son Jackson. Life with 2 under 2 was chaotic and beautiful. But I still experienced constant conflict between the sadness I felt missing L.J., and a nagging feeling that “I should be so happy and grateful for the life I have now.” Nothing messes with your heart more than “should-ing” on yourself. I couldn’t talk myself out of my grief no matter how hard I tried. And as my mind and heart got messier, so did our marriage.
Press fast-forward, and a lot’s happened since then. Grief and life put such strain on our marriage that it fell completely apart. Simply put, I grieved and my husband didn’t. Looking back, that was the first big red-flag rift in our marriage. I came to understand that awful statistic about child loss and divorce. Marriage is hard anyway, and additional trauma can threaten to hurl the train completely off the track. But over many months we slogged through the muck to piece it back together.
We added our sweet son Elisha to our nest – a true double portion of blessings. We hit the decade mark on grief last year, which feels surreal. Now my children are 11 in heaven, 10, 9, and 2, and our marriage is the best it’s ever been. Ironically, we became that child loss statistic, and then we beat it too, with sheer determination and lots of hard work. We finally realized that you only get through the hard stuff together when you walk through it hand-in-hand letting God lead the way. One tender, faithful step at a time.
I can’t see the future. And my goodness, how I wish I could change the past. But what I can do is trust God right here in the present. I can count on Him to hold every broken and mended piece of my heart in the palm of His unshakeable hand. I can humbly offer my work to the world knowing I don’t have to have all the answers. I can be still and believe He’s working all these seemingly-unrelated experiences together for good.
My little boy lived his entire magnificent life to the fullest, and I get to pick up where he left off. Because God’s not done with me yet. There are hurting hearts in the world who need to hear and feel and believe the promises He made: that He’ll never leave us, that we’ll all be together again someday, and that until we get there, we’re held more tightly and loved more deeply than we could ever understand.
Grief never gets easier. It just gets different. And when I feel that ever-familiar lump in my throat and swell of my heart, I know that’s L.J., fluttering in on the breeze to keep making miracles in the world, as long as I’m willing to show up too. I’m the luckiest.
HP,
J
Jessica is a wife, infant loss and adoption mother, entrepreneur, and author of Joy Comes in the Mourning: Living in Love and Walking in Light after Losing a Child, available at www.getjoy.shop . For more on grief and faith-filled living, find Jessica online at www.heartfullypresent.com, on Facebook at Heartfully Present, and on Instagram @heartfullypresent.