Body Grief

Can a body grieve?

Tomorrow was my due date for the baby we lost in May. I have felt a general sense of malaise the last few days, a sadness that lingers on the margins, making me irritable and quiet. But strangely my body has just plain hurt. From my eyeballs to the soles of my feet. My hands hurt, my teeth hurt, what I think might be my spleen hurts. So much so that Becca had to try to convince me this weekend that it probably wasn't liver failure or cancer.

I woke up this morning feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. It doesn't feel like sickness; it feels like brokenness, like protest, like groaning.

Is it possible that even the cells in my body know that things are not as they should be?

Somehow I am still tempted to cave to the accusation that to say that out loud, to say that things are not as they should be, to say that women should not be barren, that babies shouldn't die, that my body shouldn't know what it feels like to create life but not give birth to it, indicates a lack of faith.

There is so much good here. So many gifts here. There is so much God in this pain. In small ways, sometimes, I'm even grateful for all of this. Like Naaman seeking a cure for his skin condition from the prophet Elisha and receiving as well a cure for his heart condition, it seems clear that I am being healed from diseases far bigger, far deeper, far more insidious than infertility. And I am so grateful.

It feels like a betrayal of all the good to acknowledge that things are broken.

But my body is more honest than I.

I grieve not because I lack faith that this pain has meaning or that our story has a good end. My grief does not nullify or deny all the good here. I'm sure (nearly almost most of the time) that it is grace that has brought me right here - to this shaky, post-traumatic-y ache.

I grieve because things are not yet as they should be. Not yet as they will be.

This is my act of faith.

"In its peculiar way lamenting is an act of faith because it speaks to our understanding that things are not as they should be." - Enuma Okoro, Silence and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent