Capture Your Grief, Day 17: Secondary Losses

August 2015 | Home | Longview, Texas

Day 17: Secondary Losses

Though no one can prepare you for the loss of multiple pregnancies, in some ways the grief that comes after is anticipated somehow. In the weeks following each loss even though it was hard for me to wrap my heart and mind around what I was experiencing, there was some kind of a meter within me that helped me assure myself this is how it works. Grief, unpredictable as it may be, still moves the same way through all of us and somehow this knowledge prepared me in a way I can't articulate. It didn't make it easier, it didn't help me validate the pain or know how to navigate it. But it did feel natural, and in my later losses, familiar. What I wasn't prepared for at all were the secondary losses; the domino effect of grief that came after that I had no idea how to legitimize or prepare for. The second wave after the initial blow. The biggest secondary loss that weighs on me daily is the loss of expectation. It's the loss that I feel when I'm on my back with tears streaming down my temples as I stare at florescent lights during painful and invasive tests. The loss that courses through me during my bimonthly blood draws and while I wait at the counter for my prescriptions to be filled month after month. It's the loss that I feel when I realize that this won't look like what I always dreamed it would, and then not knowing how to cope with that realization. The pills, the appointments, the schedules, the calendars, and the empty room in our home are all little losses in their own rights. They are the losses I face in private, the ones no one knows how to address or help with. We all face it, we all know what it feels like when our reality uproots and a new normal takes hold. And on the days when I feel like the ground won't stop shifting beneath my feet I'm reminded of our constant anchor in this life. Our God is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). My prayer is that God will mold my heart and my desire to that of His plans and not my own; his reality rather than my expectation. This journey has been peppered with more losses in more shapes and sizes than I ever could have anticipated, but one thing I haven't lost is hope. Hope in this journey, hope in the future, hope in Him.