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a miracle, months later

7 Comments

What was that?

Whatever else crosses my mind in morning’s first moments between sleeping and rising, there is always one thought, persistent and urgent.

What was that?

The intensity of grief’s earliest weeks and months has settled into a dull acceptance: this is our life now. We pack lunches, fold laundry, drive kids, talk about work over dinner. One day after the next.

But in the middle of every day, the thought rises and stays, stubborn.

What happened in that NICU room? What are we supposed to do with it now?

You can read the whole story here. More people have read this than almost anything else I’ve written. I still get stories regularly from readers, people who have experienced something of the same – the strangeness of joy in darkness, comfort in despair. They don’t need help to make sense of what happened to them; they know exactly what – or Who – it was.

But what most of them say is this: I never told anyone else. People don’t understand.

. . .

We didn’t get the miracle we wanted. Our babies died.

We wanted answers, and we got presence. We wanted healing, and we got love. We wanted a miracle, and we got joy.

(Maybe these are all the same thing.)

For months since our daughters died, the understanding has been growing in me, deepening its roots as I rise and wait and wonder what was that?

The realization is this. Though I have given my life’s work to theology’s questions, answers are not what matter. Reason and logic are human constructions, a scaffolding built higher and higher to try and touch God.

But answers crumble.

This is why there is no satisfying solution to the problem of evil or suffering. You can create what seems like a solid, strong explanation (and believe me, people offer them to me on the regular), but human reasons fall apart.

The choice is clear to me. I can spend the rest of my life chasing a slippery why? Or I can set aside my scrambling after answers and learn how to live into the presence of God.

. . .

We wanted a different NICU miracle. We wanted our daughters healed and saved, healthy and here.

Instead we got – I don’t know what to call it. Joy and God and heaven wrapped into one. Love’s fullness in which we had no questions.

And this is the point that my husband and I still talk about all the time: No questions. No answers. None.

All my life I’ve been collecting a long list (growing over the years, bitter in places) of Questions I Am Going To Bring Before God And Demand To Know Why And How, When I Get The Chance.

I got the chance. Every question fell away. I learned logic has no place in the fullness of Love.

I realize this could sound trite or ring hollow. I do not dismiss our yearning for understanding, our struggling in the face of suffering. This is what makes us most human.

All I know is that when I got closest to God, my lifetime’s worth of gnawing questions disappeared. I noticed they were gone, but I could not even tell you what they had been.

The fistfuls I wanted to fling at the feet of God had simply evaporated.

. . .

So now what? This is my question when I get up each morning and when I sit down to write.

What do you do after a miracle?

A life based not on questions-and-answers is a tricky proposition. There are no owner’s manuals. All I can do is live into the presence of the One who was revealed to me – and to the person I love most in this world – as love and joy and comfort. All I know is that much of my scaffolding has crumbled, and I am left with the solid knowing that God is, that God is love, and that God is love eternal.

I always wondered what happened to people after the miracle. Did Lazarus lead a long, lovely life? Did the daughter raised or the leper cured or the servant healed go on to a charmed existence? Or were they made outcasts, the odd ones whose lives did not add up to the logic and standards of their society? Did the miracle continue to transform them, changing them over time?

Maybe all miracles are unexpected. Maybe this is part of the definition. We decide the world works in a certain way, the way we have always known it to work. And suddenly – startlingly – we find God intervening in a way we never saw before.

Our lives are undone and remade because of this. We cannot be the people we were before.

What does a miracle mean, months later?

We wanted answers, and we were given God.

We didn’t get what we expected. (This may be the entire story of faith.)

We cannot yet see where this miracle will lead.

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Comments

  1. Beth (A Mom's Life) says

    14 October 2016 at 6:53 am

    We didn’t get what we expected. (This may be the entire story of faith.) – Yes! This!

    Thank you for your beautiful words. I lost my daughter to Trisomy 18. We had her for 5 beautiful, painful days and I cherish every moment of that gift that we were given. I have added the question of her life and death to one of the many I had gathered to hurl at God. And yes, that one was going to be hurled. However, as time passes (it’s been two years now) the whys and wonderings aren’t quite as loud because I’m trying to whisper thank yous.

    Reply
    • Melissa Borgmann-Kiemde says

      14 October 2016 at 7:01 am

      Thank you…..

      Reply
  2. Melissa Borgmann-Kiemde says

    14 October 2016 at 7:00 am

    “We wanted answers, and we got presence. We wanted healing, and we got love. We wanted a miracle, and we got joy.

    (Maybe these are all the same thing.)”

    Amen.

    Reply
  3. kimberly jaskulka says

    14 October 2016 at 9:39 am

    “Logic has no place in the fullness of Love”, thank you for this. As always, your words ring in my heart today.

    Reply
  4. Kellie says

    14 October 2016 at 10:32 am

    It’s the closest we will ever come to understanding the beauty and mystery of the cross. It was the greatest, most profound experience of my life. I spend every day trying to get that feeling back, all the while praying I never have to go through that again. That is the beauty of the Cross.

    Reply
  5. Julie says

    14 October 2016 at 11:09 am

    It has been 15 years since our daughter died of leukemia at the age of 8. At first it was so hard to see that the world kept on spinning, that lives were continuing as if nothing had happened. Then we, too, went on living, but living with more purpose, more direction–our goal was/is Heaven and we let our other children know that THAT is our true purpose here on earth. Living for God and His Will is the only joy we can truly know. May God bless you and your family on your journey.

    Reply
  6. Tara says

    23 October 2016 at 7:14 am

    I needed this today! We lost a son in the second trimester (15 weeks) in February. We got pregnant again and lost that baby too. I am also grieving the idea we may not have another baby. Your post helped me see our situation in a different light. Thank you!

    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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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. 
 
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“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.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

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.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

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.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

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.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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