NEVER DONE GRIEVING

I once heard someone say that you are never done grieving. They said that if you wait for grieving to end before moving on, you’ll never be able to move on at all. I know from experiencing the loss of our first two children, that this is as true as ever. Grief is one of the most difficult experiences I have ever faced. Grief is unwavering at times, and other times manageable. It is messy and unfair and awful and life changing. It is also strengthening and moving and empowering, all at the same time. The only thing that grief is not, is easy.

We were questioned whether or not we were “ready” to begin the adoption process so soon after loss. The only people who consistently never questioned us were the ones who had known loss on various levels, some grieving the loss of biological motherhood due to infertility, some grieving loss through miscarriage, stillbirth, and the like.

Yet as we walked through our own grieving, we realized that grief wasn’t leaving us anytime soon. We saw that there were choices we could make daily, hourly even, that would sooth the ache of our hearts, yet we knew that expecting to wake up one morning with wounds that no longer hurt was simply unreasonable.

We sat across from our social worker and spoke about our family. Our story. Our experiences and our desires to bring home a child. What we experienced at that table was balm to our souls. It was the experience of choosing to hope. We were choosing to open ourselves up to the complex journey of adoption, a journey not guaranteed to be easy or free of trial. We were choosing to step into the unknown because we knew that while our grief would be with us forever, we could position ourselves for blessing. We could position ourselves for joy.

Not every family who grieves will have the same timeline. There is no right way to navigate life after loss and there is no wrong way to grieve. What we can do, is come alongside those who face grief daily, and help to position them for hope. Love and joy and peace and encouragement are the things of life that make loss manageable. Judgement, criticism, and aggression regarding another’s choices and feelings are the things that inflame it.

Four months after burying our second child, we welcomed our son. His mother’s loss was now our gain. Her grief was our joy. Grief is a funny thing–tied to life and death and adoption and love. Adoption will always be interwoven with it. And now our dance with grief is very different, yet still existent. Did our adopted child sooth the pain in our hearts and the emptiness of our arms? Yes. He did. We chose to say yes to the uncharted territory of adoption, and in doing so, we stared at our heartache and fought to bring life and joy to our family.