If you do not believe that life begins at conception, you may not appreciate this post.
I met a local friend for coffee a week or so after our loss. I reached out to her when it happened because I knew that she had gone through her own painful journey with miscarriage. She was amazing. She listened to me, answered my questions and listened to me some more. She recommended coming up with a name for the baby we lost in order to pay tribute to its tiny life. I remember feeling torn at this notion. To me life begins at conception, but with this miscarriage, all I had were several pregnancy tests and an ultrasound with thickened uterine lining to prove that I was pregnant. There was no heart beat, no picture of a gestational sac and little for me to hold on to. Giving this short lived entity a name sounded strange to me at first. I could picture the people in our lives who would scoff at the idea that this was actually a baby and that it should be named. But there in the coffee shop, talking to my fellow miscarriage sister, I knew that naming this baby is what I needed. And to me- that little life deserved to have a name. To me, that little life was a baby. Our first baby. My friend gifted me two things that day- a framed quote that hangs at the top of my stairs, and the freedom to feel how I wanted to feel regarding that tiny little life. This quote reminds me each day when I wake up and head downstairs for my morning coffee that one day, I will be reunited with my first little love. (Thanks a million JB!)
Tony asked me to be his girlfriend on a summer evening on Notre Dame’s campus back in 2011. He gave me my first tour of the place that night and after we became “official,” we stopped by the Grotto at Notre Dame. For those who are unfamiliar, it is a beautiful place in the heart of campus. This place is appreciated by all- believers and non-believers. The Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes is modeled after the actual Grotto located in Lourdes. Here on Notre Dame’s campus, hundreds of candles can be lit at one time. Students, faculty and visitors stop here, light a candle and kneel in prayer. I remember feeling awed by the number of candles and simultaneous prayers each candle represented when I first visited the grotto. Tony and I prayed here for me to get the NICU job in Chicago, so our long distance relationship (from Kansas City to South Bend) wouldn’t be so long. We’ve stopped here several times throughout our marriage and decided that the Grotto seemed to be the perfect place for us to say goodbye to our first baby.
As for the name, we decided that there would be no more perfect of a name, than Hope. Desmond Tutu once said, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.“ Hope is what kept me going in those early weeks following our loss. Hope is what I need to believe that one day I will hold our child in my arms. There are many great promises that God makes to man throughout the bible. One of my personal favorites comes from Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you Hope and a future.” I held on tightly to that promise in these weeks. And after attending a baby shower for our dear friend and fellow miscarriage sister, we headed to the Grotto to say goodbye to our baby, Hope. We waited until there was no one else lighting a candle, and then we approached the Grotto. We lit our candle and placed it on the upper right corner so we would know which one was ours from a distance and backed away to the kneelers. I started reading the prayer that we printed out, but the tears flowed to the point that I couldn’t read the words. My rock of a husband finished reading the prayer, and I remember crying on his shoulder after he read the last words.
Think of this what you may, but I didn’t want to leave our little candle that night. When I did, I found comfort that it was surrounded by so many other candles in such a peaceful place of prayer. We left our prayer card underneath our candle and left the Grotto, feeling like we had honored our first little love. Closure seems like such an inadequate word to describe how I felt when leaving the Grotto. Merriam-Webster defines closure as “a feeling that a bad experience has ended and that you can start to live again in a calm and normal way.” I will never be “normal” again. “Calm?” I was the last thing from it. To say that this act offered some type of closure for me is inadequate, because it couldn’t possibly heal the hole in my heart that I felt and still feel now. But I did feel like lighting the candle and saying goodbye in this place helped make it more real for me.
