The Same Pain?

As some of you may know for the past 8 months or so I have been working with refugees in our community.  I have loved getting to know each of the families we've worked with, watching as they have grown accustomed to our culture and also observing a hard work and faith that far exceeds anything I believe myself to be capable of.  These families have suffered great injustice, unfathomable loss.  They have arrived in the US because the government has seen no other alternative; they cannot return home. They will be rejected, persecuted or killed if they return to their country of origin. And yet, I have seen greater joy in the faces of these women, men and children than I have seen on the faces of most of my fellow church goers!  These families believe so strongly in the goodness of God, which amazes me when you consider the immense evil they have lived through.  I seek to be like them, to have a faith that lights up in the face of adversity.

With all of this being said I would like to recount and try to wrestle with a topic that continues to haunt my brain.  I haven't landed on any sort of conclusion, but I want to discuss it anyway.  A few months ago the mother of my first refugee family, for this post I'll call her Anabelle, suffered a miscarriage, and from my calculation she was further along in her pregnancy, maybe 14 or 15 weeks.  She was far enough that the doctors had to do a D & C.  After hearing this news, I was crushed.  I wanted to show up on her doorstep with ice cream, flowers, a box of tissues, a chick flick, and my own grief slung over my shoulders.  I wasn't able to get over there that first week but one of my team members reported having visited her and seeing this beautiful woman wear a smile on her face.  Anabelle said that she was good and everything was fine. Was that true?  How was that even possible?

I've spent weeks turning this over in my head. My first inclination was to believe that she was just telling us what we wanted to hear.  Perhaps she believed that Americans smile at everything, don't let their guard down, refuse to show emotion or tears.  After all, didn't I have those moments after Hope's death where I just smiled and said I was fine because it was easier than getting into the whole big long thing?  They were rarer on the scale of my responses, yet they were still there.  And I would say that the grin and fake it method is far more commonplace in American society than we think (or maybe we all know that the other person is faking it and we just don't dare to dig deeper.)  I met and read so many stories of women who, after losing a child, never did really work through their pain, nor did they feel like they were free to.  They felt obligated to move on and try again because their loss really wasn't "that big of a deal".  The loss of their baby wasn't a real loss because "it wasn't really a child" and "it's not like you knew them".  I think it is a pedestrian truth in our society that losing an unborn child is not real grief, and unfortunately many grieving mothers are shamed into believing this.  But I digress.  So it is possible that Anabelle was telling these American friends what she believed they wanted to hear.  Yet I've been wrestling with another possibility.

I think it is distinctly possible that this loss was not as hard on her as it was on me.  Anabelle lost a mother and father, siblings, her country, her world, everything she ever knew.  Perhaps when one has suffered such immense loss, the loss of a child feels far less significant.  I have tried to think this through.  Is it possible that loss itself becomes commonplace in one's life?  Is it possible that after losing friend after friend, family member after family member, one just becomes numb to the experience?  And is it even possible that with such poor health and living conditions, the death of unborn children is unexceptional, the norm?  Do these women in such distressed parts of the world not truly become attached to their unborn children because they know the terrible risks of losing that child?  These are questions I want to know the answer to but feel uncomfortable asking Anabelle.  How do you ask someone to rank their pain and loss?  Would my questions be helpful and healing or merely intrusive and hurtful?  I think I need to know her better, to know the family better before diving head first into such personal topics.

But I think regardless of her answers to those questions, I am having to answer my own questions.  Is it possible that a loss that completely shattered my world, reshaped my God-view, defined who I am, could just be a blip on the screen of another woman?  Could it be that my safe, healthy and comfortable life made the pain of loss so very intolerable?  And then is my response wrong?  Did I allow my loss to have too much power?  Was my pain really no big deal?

I have to believe that my pain was the completely appropriate response to the magnitude of loss in my own life.  Perhaps if I had had different life experiences or if I lived in a disparate land my response could have, or perhaps would have, been different.  But I lived here, in my comfortable suburban home, amongst the richest 10% of people in the world, with food on my table, my family within reach, my place of worship down the road, all reachable with my very own car.  So the loss of my long awaited child shattered me.  And then slowly I allowed God to pick up the pieces and rebuild me, shape me, mold me into the woman He wanted me to become.  From immense, world shattering pain, came healing, joy, peace, freedom.  These gifts I carry with me today, knowing deep down that Isabelle, Herb, Kevyn, my mom, my friends and family are on loan to me.  I hold them, but I hold them more loosely than I might have before.  When God plans to call them home I will be devastated, but I hope I will have more peace, that I will be able to rest in God's perfect plan.

So it is possible that Anabelle's pain has already brought her to that place.  Perhaps the loss in her life has given her the ability to hold more loosely to the children God has given her, and to trust in Him when He takes them away.  Maybe she already sees the plans God has for her, maybe she sees the purpose for the pain and trusts God in her loss.

Her response actually gives me hope, hope that when loss comes again, for I know it will, perhaps I will be able to respond with joy.  Not false happiness, and I certainly know that I won't be full of wide smiles, but true joy in knowing that God has a plan and that I can rest in Him.