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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…

We spent a weekend at Faith’s Lodge on a retreat for grieving families. A place of healing tucked in Wisconsin’s woods, built by one broken-hearted couple to share with others. We canoed, painted, and played together. Laughed around the campfire. Hiked through hills and fields. Walked the labyrinth over and over. What caught me were the stories. They were thick around…

Our daughters have been dead for longer than they have been alive. This is a terrible sentence. It is also our new life. Every day I live in the space in between. I swing between extremes, a dizzying pendulum from possibility to reality. What I thought my life would look like – and what it is now. What…

Allow me to embarrass some of my nearest and dearest. (What’s the good of being a blogger if you can’t do that once in a while?) Let me tell you how my best friends from college have cared for us since Maggie and Abby died. Every single month – read that again: every. single. month. –…

Last week was the anniversary of the baby we lost to miscarriage. I could not bring myself to enter into it. I am sick of being heart-sick. . . . Remember when you were a kid and you got sick? Strep throat or stomach flu or whatever winter cold cough crud kept you home from…

Infertility. Miscarriage. Infant loss. It is not lost on me that the story of our family has become a story of three deep losses. Who gets ALL of that? A girlfriend asks me, half-kidding, half-despairing. I know, I laugh in that dark way we learn to laugh when Irish blood runs through our veins, tragedy and comedy flowing together so…

My older brother died twenty-five years ago today. I was ten years old. I grew up with grief. All week I expected that today would hit hard. When someone you love has been gone a long time, you get used to the strange, unpredictable nature of anniversaries. Sometimes another year passes by without great sorrow; instead there…

Ten years ago we started being married. It is the vow that started our vocation. But what does it mean when a vow becomes an everyday verb? When a calling is shared as a single story? When we think about a wedding, we often think about a beginning. A clean slate for a new couple. An…

After our twins died, mothers from all over wrote to me. They had lost babies before birth, after birth, in childhood, and beyond. They wrote to me with love and compassion, empathy’s impulse to reach out in shared suffering, even to a stranger. And to a person, they all said the same thing. God was with me…

The pale pink tulips are drooping, stems withered beyond saving. I carry their vase over to the sink, dump out the water, crush the stems into the compost bin. Absentmindedly I wonder aloud. “I really thought we were going to get more time with these.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, we are erupting…

And then from the backseat, you hear a fidgeting restlessness. He begins to speak, and from the second the sentence ends, you feel the air around you change. “In the last chapter of Narnia that we read, they killed Aslan.” You grip your hands tighter around the steering wheel. Your knuckles turn pink-white, hard. You…