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a eulogy for maggie and abby

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People often lament that while there is a word for those who have lost parents (orphan) and those who have lost a spouse (widow/widower), there is no word in English for those who have lost a child.

People often say this is because the death of a child violates the natural order. That parents should not have to bury their children. That life should unfold in neat, tidy, predictable progression from one generation to the next.

I mentioned this to my husband last week. His response blew apart the whole argument.

Being a parent, he said, always used to mean that you lost a child. When mortality rates were high and health care was lacking, the simple fact of bearing and birthing a baby meant that death was at your doorstep. Centuries ago – and still today across the world – the odds were that every relative in your family and every parent in your community had experienced the death of a child: during pregnancy, in childbirth, during infancy or childhood. This was simply the way life and death walked together.

Parenthood meant loss. No new words were needed. 

Today we think this should not be so. We think science should save the sick. We think life’s former bounds should be extended in both directions: to let the littlest survive and to grant the oldest length of days. We protest that losing a child is unnatural and unbearable. 

We forget that loss was once inherent to what it meant to bear new life. 

This is the eulogy we gave at our daughters’ funeral. We are far from the first parents to suffer and speak this loss. We will be far from the last. Loss always lingers, whether great or small, within all our stories of parenthood: loss of control, loss of expectations, loss of ease or comfort, and even loss of life itself. 

But we gain so much from our children. We gain so much more than we could ever give.

. . .

Nothing but love. From the beginning of our daughters’ lives, they knew nothing but love. When we learned we were expecting again, we welcomed the news with love. Our parents, our siblings, our friends and family – all of you welcomed that news with love.

But even when we got the surprise of our lives – that we were expecting identical twins? From the ultrasound tech who “discovered” his first set of twins on that day, too, and then had to listen to us freak out about it – in non-G-rated fashion – for the next hour? Well, it took some time to recover from that shock, but we were still filled with love.

When we told our kids that mama was actually growing two babies instead of just one, their responses were perfect. One ignored us, one laughed out loud, and one declared, “That is gonna be HARD!” Our sentiments exactly.

But from there the love just grew. Our kids were so excited, our families and friends were so excited. It was nothing but love.

And because of that love – the love that surrounded us in prayer from the beginning, the circle of support that got bigger with every step of the journey – when we started to learn that our fears were coming true and the babies had developed the worst complications with twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, we were carried and held and supported by love in ways we never knew existed.

All of you in this room were praying for our babies. Family and friends across the country were praying for our babies. Perfect strangers around the world were praying for our babies.

Since they were twins, from the very beginning our daughters were never alone. During every ultrasound Maggie made sure to kick Abby in the head to remind us of this. And because of your love, we were never alone either.

We have never felt so held by a community before. We never really understood what prayer meant until all of you were carrying us through. And even though our prayers weren’t answered with the outcome we wanted, we have no doubt that all these prayers were heard and answered.

Every step of the way, we felt that God was with us through all of you. And our girls gave us this gift. They brought us to this place. They taught us what community is and how prayer works in ways that we didn’t know before. They taught us what love means.

Love means night after night of dinners showing up at our doorstep. Love means healing prayer in the corner of church and anointing both of us after Mass. Love means stacks of cards in our mailbox every afternoon. Love means buying baby clothes and sewing blankets for babies who may never use them.

Love means blessing your mom’s belly with holy water the night before she goes to the hospital. Love means watching our kids through all those doctor’s appointments. Love means traveling across the country to be here with us this weekend. Love means praying for us and asking others to pray for us, even after today.

Many of you have heard the story of how we said goodbye to our daughters and they gave us the greatest gift in return – that we experienced the deepest joy we have ever known and felt the power of God’s love and got a glimpse of heaven in an incredible way that we still don’t feel like we can adequately put into words.

But part of the story that we haven’t yet shared is that while we were in that NICU room holding Abby, we did not have any anger. We didn’t have any regrets. We didn’t have any questions for God. We didn’t have anything but pure joy. In that moment when we should have had more questions than ever before, there were none. They simply didn’t exist. They were gone. There was only joy and only love.

The power of Maggie and Abby’s story did not start when they were dying. Or when we learned they were sick. Or when we absolutely lost our minds in that ultrasound room when we discovered we were having twins. Their story started way back at the beginning, when we were ready to welcome them with love.

So their story does not end now, either. While Laura was pregnant, we were preparing for all the ways our lives would be forever changed because of twins. And in the weeks since Maggie and Abby have died, we are still discovering how we will be changed by their lives and their deaths.

We still don’t know what all of this means or where it will lead us. But we hope and pray that we will not be the only ones changed – that all of you who held us and our daughters in prayer, who carried our family through the darkest days we have ever known – that each of you will be changed, too.

We know this is our watershed moment, our transition from Before to After. We hope that it will be for you, too – in whatever ways, big or small, that our daughters have touched your lives. We are standing before you promising that our lives are going to be different because of them.

The night we came home from the hospital, as we were putting the boys to bed, one of them asked, “Do Maggie and Abby keep growing in heaven?” We told him that they don’t – that their bodies are perfect now and don’t need to grow anymore in the way babies do on earth. But we also realized that this is our task now: we are called to grow. All of us are called to be forever changed because of the experience of knowing and loving Maggie and Abby.

Because there was only ever love.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Heather says

    20 March 2016 at 8:21 am

    ❤️

    Reply
  2. Sherry says

    20 March 2016 at 9:40 am

    Beautiful. Just beautiful.

    Reply
  3. Nell says

    20 March 2016 at 1:18 pm

    Such stunning remarks. Thank you for including us in this painful depth.

    Reply
  4. Elaina says

    20 March 2016 at 1:37 pm

    I needed to read this today. Thank you.

    Reply
  5. Cristina says

    20 March 2016 at 6:54 pm

    I’ve been grieving my second second trimester loss that happened last November, both little girls, and I really appreciate your sharing all of this. It’s been very helpful to me personally. I’ve been keeping you in my prayers.

    Reply
  6. Nancy says

    20 March 2016 at 10:19 pm

    Wish I could have been there. Thank you for sharing this here!

    Reply
  7. Alexa says

    21 March 2016 at 12:30 pm

    Hi Laura – This is such an eloquently written piece. I lost one of my daughters to TTTS – we were so blessed that one stuck around. TTTS has sucked so much joy from so many people, but you, you are a source of light and encouragement to anyone suffering the loss of a baby. God bless you.

    Reply
  8. Laura @ Life is Beautiful says

    21 March 2016 at 3:57 pm

    I’ve been following your blog and your writing since I first found you through Blessed Is She, when you shared about your previous miscarriage– weeks after we had lost our first child through miscarriage. You have one of the most beautiful, womanly, motherly hearts and I admire you so much as writer, mentor, and person.

    I prayed for you and your whole family at Mass yesterday and offered my Mass and Communion for you. I have cried for your loss of your daughters and also from the beauty of their lives and your interactions with them.

    Thank you for writing even in the hard times.

    Reply
  9. Sarah R. says

    21 July 2017 at 2:05 pm

    Thank you for sharing all that you do. I just wanted to mention: while there isn’t a word for a person who has lost a child, there is a word for the particular grief of child-loss and childlessness: orbity. It’s a word I learned from John Donne’s poem, “Upon the Annunciation and the Passion Falling upon One Day,” which I first read on Good Friday, 25 March 2016 (in Donne’s time, on such a day, the Solemnity would not have been transferred to make way for the Fast, so instead they would have been observed in awkward — but strangely fitting — tandem). (See here: http://fullhomelydivinity.org/articles/john%20donne%20poem.htm ) It meant a lot to me to discover this word, and to know that the same word applies to both varieties of grief in the absence of children — both the absence of children who once were, and of children who never were.

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

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So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

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Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
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Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
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