Another Set of Empty Arms

My heart is breaking. I received an email from a friend asking for prayers for a family member who just lost her baby. She was thirty-nine weeks pregnant. Her scheduled C-Section was just hours away, but she went in because something felt wrong. Her daughter had already died.

I just feel sick for what this family is going through. My heart hurts for the mother. I have spent the day vacilating between heartache and numbness, trying to wrap my head around another baby lost. I don't understand why these things happen. I don't understand how so many babies are born healthy every day, and this sweet baby was not.

I want to take this mother in my arms and give her warmth and peace and strength, and yet I know that is impossible. I can not do anything to help her. Only be available to sit with her in grief, if she wants. Only offer up prayers for everyone. Painful, tear-filled, sobbing prayers.

I think about how her pregnancy innocence is lost. I think about the devastation she must be experiencing. Reliving those moments over and over and over again. The painful love and adoration she had for her daughter when she held her in her arms.

I think about how terrible it is to leave the hospital with no baby. How horrifying it is to see everyone going about their business when you feel like the world should stop. When you feel simultaneously numb and completely shattered. When your life and world will never be what it once was.

I think about feeling angry and lost and terrified. I think about wondering how I could survive the loss of a child. I think about the terrible guilt I had, feeling like as his mother I should've been able to protect him. I was supposed to keep him safe.

This mother will probably feel many of the same things I did. And many things I didn't. I know how difficult it is to be on the receiving end of condolences, yet how helpless friends and family must feel when they give it.

It is hard and heartbreaking all around.

I am thinking about sweet baby Reese in heaven, and praying for her mama, who's arms are surly aching with their emptiness.

xoxo, christine