We’d been married 205 days when my body failed my first (un)born. We’d been apart for 148 of those days.
My soldier left in the fall, in the brilliance of the dying leaves. He left, and I was pregnant and blissfully naive in the way you can only be when you have yet to suffer real loss. I said goodbye to my husband at midnight in a nondescript gravel lot, with my head tucked up under his chin, breathing in deep the smell of him, and holding my breath to keep it for a year, or maybe forever, if the worst should indeed come to pass.
It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, the 205th day of our first year together, when I sobbed out my goodbyes to the life I had cherished for a joyful, hasty, twelve weeks. And it was Thanksgiving Day, the 208th day, when my sturdy, handsome soldier strode down the driveway and gathered the broken pieces of me into his arms. Five days we had together, to grieve, to repeat goodbye. Five days of emergency leave for us to calibrate loss, to weep in the night, and to welcome grace as we learned the new, unwelcome lines of our story.
Thanksgiving is a bitter, unwilling sacrifice when measured against what we have and lose ….
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With love,
~M.
Molly, thank you so much for your Thanksgiving Hallelujah post. So very beautiful! My most favorite line of all is… “But, oh the Almighty, the Namer and Counter of Stars, He is good always, and merciful too, in our bitterness and grief.”
Just this morning, at 3:30 a.m., I was wide awake and stepped onto my back deck to see a midnight sky filled with stars. I prayed and thanked the “Counter of Stars.”
Four hours later, I was in the ER with my daughter who was experiencing stroke-like symptoms. All is well and we are home now. Your post brought tender refreshment and thanksgiving to my tired heart.
Thank you most sincerely,
Jennifer
This is a beautiful post. I love your heart. And yes, while there is much in heartbreak I would not care to repeat, yet I am grateful for the depth of relationship it brings with Jesus. You write beautifully and I truly relate to your story. I lost my first-born as well. God bless you greatly!