After over a year of not writing, I knew I had to write about Sarah. I talked the article through in my head and it went fine, but when I tried to write, it just wouldn't come. It was cold, awkward, disjointed.
By the by, I have been having a hard time praying recently. Just really dry prayers. Then two nights ago, I finally just prayed--I lay on my stomach and prayed. I usually have just too many words going on in my head; I read other people's words with a constant ear for what is true and usable in my own work; I plan talks or articles. Too many words.
Last night, I was going to try to get back to my clugey article on child loss after my church meeting. As I drove home, I suddenly didn't want to try to describe it--I wasn't having any success, anyway. I just thought, "Sarah!" And I suddenly began to moan. I moaned and sobbed with every movement of my breath in and out, unceasing sound. I had to keep my eyes open because I was driving seventy miles per hour, but for the first time, I cried with no words.
I use words as my sword and shield and they have been the means of great healing. I truly believe--and know--that naming something takes away its power. But it has also buffered me from my emotions. After Steve got off the phone with the Tennessee state trooper who told him Sarah's car had run into the back of a parked truck on the interstate, Steve made a sound that I have never heard from him before or since, a sound of wordless, animal agony. I did that all the way home last night. When I stopped occasionally, I would think of words. I would get angry--just a flash--at their coldness and insufficiency--and the animal came back.
When I was in high school, we had a cabin in Indiana. On the first night of a visit, I went into my room to get my pajamas out of my drawer and a rain of little thumps hit my ear. I looked in the drawer and saw four little pink lumps, baby mice whose mother had made a nest in my pajamas. After running shrieking to my mom, she calmly suggested I dump the drawer outside, which I did. I was creeped out, but finally went to bed. As I lay there trying to fall asleep, I heard something I will never forget: the mother mouse crying for her babies. I killed them and she mourned. She just squeaked and cried for hours. A mouse in a mousetrap is a horror; but this one mother mouse was grieving and I felt with her.
In all my losses of my children, words were a tool of healing and I've been grateful for them. When I gave up my daughter for adoption, I told the story to anyone who would listen for years and it was not until I wrote a memoir of it thirty-five years later that I really felt I had recovered. When I had my first miscarriage after baby #8, I spent an entire day writing letters to all my other children to work through the loss of that dream child. For a year-and-a-quarter, I have been talking and crying with dozens of people, including my husband and children who love her just as I do. But words really cannot express that raw, unnamable pain and for the first time time I resist them for how they buffer that emotion, trying to make it tidy and contained with this pain that is ragged and boundary-less, able to tear a hole in the sky--for what? For what? To reach her? I don't want to reach her. I have wanted to before. It just doesn't feel right to feel this way and want to reach into heaven to bring her back because I hurt when I know she's so happy there--and I do know this. I had a vision of her in heaven looking new and fresh, even though she was only twenty-two when she died. I don't want to reach her or bring her back; I just want to be allowed to feel this great dim mass of grief and the only place I could was alone driving down a dark highway without even the stars and moon looking on, just the beast of grief. I could see how alluring it might be to live with him, to feel so very much, a way of feeling for her, even if I can't feel her. I can't live there though. I have other children. How would that make them feel?
The beast will not overcome me; he will not win and rule my life. The words have come back and I can name him and contain him. He is there and I had to face him, to acknowledge him. I wanted to experience him to indulge myself. I needed to do that to recognize that he is there, that he could win if I let him. He will live with me for the rest of my life; I've seen him in the eyes of a woman who lost her first son to SIDS and all three of her next sons spent their first two years on sleep monitors. She was transformed from who she was before her son died--a wildly joyful young woman--into a woman who carried the beast of grief on her shoulders. There is a difference between him being in your pocket and him being on your back. As I discovered when I wrote my book on giving my daughter up for adoption, just because you don't feel the grief doesn't mean it's not there. Thirty-five years later, after all the talking I'd done, there were things I had forgotten, tentacles of grief that had gotten into the crevices of me that I hadn't explored. After Sarah died, I wanted there to be some reason for her death. I was so insistent that she had an appointment with God; she knew she did. She and her husband Caleb had been asking God what His plan was for them; God said, "You'll know it when you see it." I assured people that her death would be for God's glory; her sister Becki told us how often she said she wanted to die for God. I knew she was where she longed to be; my vision of her confirmed that. I was so bright and "godly" about her death. But the beast was still there. He will always be and I know how big and dark and consuming he can be. But, he is not all there is in my life. I will take him out of my pocket and squeeze him every now and then just to let him know I know he's there--no more secret explorations into my interior with those insidious tentacles. I will moan and cry like the bereaved mother mouse, wordless and nameless, and then I will pack him back in my pocket, button him up, and NAME him, describe him, dissect him so he will do me no lasting harm. And one day, I will be in heaven with her and will have no baggage, no pockets even for him to hide in. He will be left behind because he doesn't belong where "there is no dying or crying or pain."
