Give Sorrow Words

I moved to Chattanooga in the spring of 2007 and I have enjoyed being grounded in this beautiful area, but during my lifetime I have actually resided in 7 southern states, the country of England, and I have even lived in five different cities within Tennessee. You could say I have been a bit of a vagabond. I often get asked if my moves were because my dad was in the military and while he did serve in the army, his tenure in the service was before I was born. He worked in insurance and about half of our relocations were moves we made while my dad was attempting to climb the corporate ladder. The rest of the moves were made on my own for college, graduate school, chaplain school, and working my very first jobs.

The most recent city I lived in was in was Beaufort, South Carolina. If you haven’t been to Beaufort it is a beautiful coastal city with lots of Spanish Moss trees that oozes with Southern charm and is a smaller version of a cross between Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. Beaufort is actually just 45 minutes from Savannah and if you are making a trip to this area, I suggest taking the short detour to visit Beaufort. While you are there I encourage you to check out Beaufort’s historic old homes and charming downtown, the civil war history, local plantations, the African Gullah art and culture, and Hunting Island State Park.
While I lived in Beaufort, I served as a chaplain and bereavement counselor for a hospice and one of my roles in this job was to provide grief support for people who recently experienced the death of a loved one.

One of the grief support groups I led was for people whose spouse had recently died. One of these grief groups ended up being composed of about 8 women. One thing I have learned about grief is that when we are grieving a recent death, it often brings up old grief wounds. The women in the grief group I facilitated spoke about the death of their husbands, but three women in the group also processed the tragedy of their stillborn births. The ladies in the grief group shared their respective similar experiences and explained that at the time they had their babies, their babies who died in utero were rushed away and they could not hold them or name them, there was often no memorial service, and they were not encouraged to talk about their grief.

Today when a stillborn baby is born with no heartbeat, the parents are encouraged to name the baby, hold the baby, do keepsakes such as foot and handprint art, do other rituals to create memories with their child, have a funeral, and talk about the grief and loss they are feeling. Research validates that mothers and fathers who hold their stillborn babies experience lower levels of depression and anxiety. It is when we befriend and hold our grief that we actually can alleviate some of our suffering.

I can still remember the first time I performed a baptism for a baby who was born stillborn. I was serving as a pastor in England and I was called to the hospital to see the sister of a parishioner whose baby had died in utero at 40 weeks. After the woman had given labor to her deceased child, who she named Skye Rose, I came to the hospital and was asked to perform a baptism. I can still see Skye’s lovely face and black hair and I can also remember the shock, grief, and horror her family felt. She was dressed in a beautiful white gown that her mother had picked for her. The ritual of baptism was healing for her family, because it was a reminder she was loved and belonged to God.

When I moved to Chattanooga, one of the hospice teams I worked for was a perinatal hospice team and when there was a stillborn birth, depending on the family’s theological framework, I was called to lead either a baptism or a blessing with water to anoint the child, read sacred Scriptures, and pray with the family. Before I performed the ceremony, I often put the baptismal water I planned to use in the service in a small porcelain angel or shell, so the family could keep this and also a paper certificate of the blessing with water or baptism, as a tangible reminder of this sacred ritual.

Over the course of more than ten years, I officiated approximately 20 baptisms for stillborn babies and also offered follow-up bereavement and pastoral counseling for the parents and siblings going through this time of deep despair. While being in the midst of this pain was a difficult space to be in, especially at a time in my life when I was facing my own different grief of unexplained infertility, I know the families needed to hold their baby, affirm their love for the child, process their feelings, and have rituals that provided a reminder of how beloved this child was to God and their family.

I also remember working with a hospice patient in her nineties, who had never had the opportunity to talk about the death of her son, who was born stillborn. She started to open up to me and her hospice team about this great loss in her life. She told me that after he died she was told to carry on and so she internalized this grief and rarely talked about this loss, until the anticipatory grief over her own impending mortality brought up the sadness about the death of her baby son. My patient had never picked out a name for her son and so a few months before she died, she chose a name for him. Our hospice team printed a certificate of life with her son’s name on it and she proudly displayed it in her nursing home room, where everyone could see it.

In the tragedy of Macbeth, Shakespeare said, “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” When we hold our grief in we start to break-down emotionally, spiritually, or physically.

There are many types of loss, including the grief experienced through a stillborn, miscarriage, or infertility, the death of a pet or loved one, a traumatic experience, divorce or separation, the loss of a home or job, grief related to a health diagnosis or aging, or even feeling despair about the current violence and polarization in our country and world.

Whatever grievances you have gone through or are currently facing, I encourage you to be mindful to give voice to your suffering through speaking about the loss, journaling about your feelings, and creating rituals to express your pain. Verbalizing and naming your grief is your pathway forward to alleviate depression and anxiety, but to also move towards healing and life.

A version of this article was originally published in The Lookout Mountain Mirror. http://www.mountainmirror.com