“My Poor Baby” - Reflections on Life, Loss, and Healing
Author’s Note: The following post includes sensitive subject matter.
At the time of my last long-form post (written nearly a year ago), I was remarking on a mixture of joys and sorrows that had accompanied a season of change. Eleven months later, I am doing much of the same, but in a more significant way.
On November 26, 2022, I married my best friend, Chantelle Elizabeth, on a moody fall day in Georgia. We were surrounded by immediate family and a few close friends, and we desired to capture the sacredness and sincerity of our “yes” while also celebrating the union of two people whose journeys couldn’t have intersected at a more significant time.
A wonderful wedding on a wonderful day: November 26, 2022.
Despite being sick for most of our honeymoon, we returned to Port St. Lucie in mid-December, expectant for the future. We could not have imagined what the immediate future would hold.
Our First Pregnancy
On January 4, 2023, we found out we were pregnant. This was unplanned, and we were awash with a mixture of emotions, including shock, concern, excitement, and an immediate desire to prepare. We shared the news with our immediate families, who were stoked to hear they would soon be grandparents, aunts, and uncles. This all lasted until January 11, when what we know now as the earliest signs of miscarriage began to appear. After a disappointing and useless trip to the Cleveland Clinic Emergency Room, we returned home to wait for the inevitable.
Over the next few days, we lost our first baby to a miscarriage.
I pause here to express the intention of my wording. I am not naïve to think that a fetus in its earliest weeks of development resembles a baby. Yet, the argument that calling a fetus a “baby” is somehow a construct of religion falls short of scientific evidence¹. More significantly, such an argument potentially robs parents of their right to grieve honestly and fully when mothers do not carry to term.
In 2018, an anonymous author wrote the following:
I, a healthy woman, 32 years old at the time, had a miscarriage. Biologically we couldn’t have called him a baby, but damn science, I lost my baby at 11 weeks. And the worst part? I couldn’t do anything to avoid it.²
Similarly, in 2009, writer Alice Bradley shared these words:
I’m sure I’m not the only woman out there who has a problem with the word miscarriage. It sounds like a mistake I made: Whoopsie, I dropped the baby. I was carrying her all wrong. Forgive me. But what are the alternatives? ‘I lost the baby’? How bad [of] a mother do you have to be to misplace a baby who’s inside you? ‘The baby died’ is a little too direct for most people. And let’s not be dramatic about it; it wasn’t quite a baby yet. Almost. But not yet…I had miscarried a full week before I found out. The life inside me had ended, and I didn’t even know it. It took a doctor to tell me. For one whole week I was conversing with someone who wasn’t there…I wonder a lot about its soul. Maybe I should know better than to believe in a soul, especially the soul of an eleven-week-old fetus, but I do, and I’m not taking it back.³
Even proponents of pro-choice politics recognize this reality. Naomi Wolf, a longtime advisor to the Clintons and an ardent supporter of abortion, once wrote in The New Republic: “Clinging to a rhetoric…in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs, and evasions…The death of a fetus is a real death.”
Indeed, it is. And I know it firsthand.
I will never forget the words my wife cried out when she passed a clump of cells into our household toilet: “My poor baby!” This cry was not the result of opinion or worldview. Though unrecognizable as a human to the eye, that clump of cells was unmistakably recognized as human in the depths of her soul. She was a mother losing her baby. As she wept and I held her, I will never forget the helplessness, despair, and devastation in her voice. I will also never forget closing the lid and flushing this once growing, now lifeless, form away and thinking immediately and unmistakably: “That was my first child.” I was a father losing my baby, too.
Though I wept and wrestled internally, I admit that Chantelle probably felt the pain of the loss more intimately and personally in the days following. But oh, how I felt it for her. She writes in her post: “Even at five weeks old, I knew and loved my little gem. My baby was more than cells, more than a blob, more than an idea or option. The pregnancy was a precious baby, and I wet my pillowcase most mornings grieving the loss of their life.”
For three weeks, we were up all night most nights. Her body was particularly fragile, and she required near-constant care. Her soul was equally fragile, and I felt the weight of responsibility to provide a different type of emotional and spiritual care. On January 22, I wrote in my journal about her struggles: “I never want to see her like this or for us to go through this again.”
I did not know how quickly we would.
Our Second Pregnancy
After several weeks of suspecting, we discovered we were pregnant again via an early pregnancy test in late March. Again, we were awash with a mixture of emotions, though they were different ones this time. Shock, concern, and urgency were absent, and a peaceful resignation was in their place. Though quietly hopeful, deep down, we knew that Chantelle’s body was not yet fully recovered from the first miscarriage and that we could very well be on our way to a second. Despite the gravity of such a possibility, Chantelle and I felt a sense of peace regarding what could happen. However, that peace did not minimize our sadness when we lost our second child a few days later.
For Chantelle, our second miscarriage was more physically challenging than the first, yet the grieving process came more naturally. The opposite was true for me. During the first miscarriage and the following weeks, I was in a particular survival mode. As the second miscarriage unfolded, survival gave way to defeat, and I internally broke under the weight of successive losses. Eventually, the brokenness within found its way out of me, culminating with a breakdown in the shower, during which I lamented: “I will never get to hold my kids. I couldn’t protect them. There was nothing I could do.”
There was nothing I could do. This is a sentence often used by those aiming to console but failing to recognize the weight of those words. In moments of loss and unraveling, grievers already know this and wish the opposite were true. I was no exception then, and I am not one now. If there were something — anything! — that could have been done to spare us our loss, I would have moved heaven and earth to do it. But there was not, and still is not, anything I could do to change what happened. Sometimes I am unsure if knowing or acknowledging that fact is harder.
Something else accompanied this grief: trauma.
We live in an increasingly psychologized culture, and there is much conversation about trauma in our world today. Much of the discussion draws attention to a topic that has long been stigmatized, which is helpful overall. However, problems can arise when we fail to understand what trauma is. Psychologically speaking, trauma is a response to a distressing situation or situation; it is not the situation itself. This is why situations that result in trauma are called traumatic events — they are the events that lead to a traumatized response.
Within trauma, it isn’t easy to engage emotions. Both Chantelle and I experienced this uniquely through our losses. Though I have yet to share this in detail, I was still experiencing difficulty engaging emotions related to various life changes in 2021. I spent the better part of a year recovering and pursuing health. After the miscarriages, it seemed like I was losing my progress and regressing at a seemingly alarming rate.
A few weeks after the second miscarriage, Chantelle and I set out to engage our emotions. When she was physically able, we stepped out into a quiet place in nature, talked about our feelings, and set out to form a realistic, responsible plan for the immediate future. Of course, we recognize that this process looks different for everyone. But this was a small step forward that we hoped would be the first of many.
Our plan for the immediate future included significant efforts to avoid pregnancy. We wanted her to achieve a full physical recovery from the miscarriages so that we could begin to explore possible medical causes for our heartache. We also wanted time to process what we had just gone through back-to-back. Frankly, we were scared and wanted to avoid any more trauma.
Our Third Pregnancy
It turns out that no matter how well you plan, all of life is in the hands of a Sovereign God. For most of my life, I have found that comforting. But in late April, I, instead, found it terrifying when we found out we were pregnant again. The familiar feeling of shock returned, accompanied by near-panic. When Chantelle showed me the positive test, she burst into tears while I (somehow) calmly ended my Zoom meeting with a potential client and attempted to grasp what I was just informed of.
The rest of that day was a flurry. God is Sovereign, but we are responsible. There are moments in our lives when we must take responsibility for our choices, family, or simply ourselves. In my soul, this message quickly broke through the shock, panic, and fatigue: “Take responsibility.”
Responsibility is different from control, of course. I was as powerless as I was weeks previous to control the situation. We were pregnant despite our efforts, and whether baby three would survive remained out of our control. But taking responsibility meant doing everything possible to care for my wife and my child. This meant swift and decisive action.
That might sound noble and confident, but anyone who knows me well knows that I am anything but swift and decisive; I am pensive and slow and often indecisive, hoping to foresee every possible outcome to nearly any decision. Yet, this moment didn’t afford me time to analyze and consider. I had to make choices, unaware of how they would work out. Ironically, taking responsibility meant trusting Sovereignty fully and entirely. I suppose this is the essence of faith, but there’s nothing scarier or more challenging when it involves what and whom you love most. I experienced that two years ago when I left behind a place and people I loved, and I was experiencing it again on that day in April in far greater depth and magnitude.
The flurry of the following hours included frantically contacting a recommended midwife to get any quick medical advice, starting a prescription immediately despite being unsure of effectiveness or side effects, resigning Chantelle from her job, and searching for how to make up the loss of nearly half of our modest income that already wasn’t paying the bills. The weeks and months since have been spent essentially in survival mode. We do our best to live one day at a time (which is a Biblical concept, see Matthew 6) and live within the tension of personal responsibility and trust in Sovereignty. But, simply put, it is hard, and we do not believe it will get easier anytime soon.
We fight to protect one day off per week physically, but there are no days off mentally or emotionally. We often worry about finances. We wonder if enough project work will come through my business each month to pay our bills, and we have yet to determine how we will afford the expenses of raising a child. We continually circle back to the gentle words of Jesus “Do not worry…seek first the Kingdom and all will be added” (Matthew 6:33), while praying “neither poverty nor riches, but daily bread…” (Proverbs 30:7–9). We are exhausted, and sometimes it feels like “another shoe will drop” at any moment. We struggle to maintain our basic disciplines and find satisfaction in what often feels like a dry and weary land (Psalm 63:1).
Further, this pregnancy has had multiple minor scares, including struggling to find a heartbeat in week twelve and some bleeding. But by God’s grace, all is well with Mom and baby number three as we enter week twenty-one. That is why we are excited to announce that we are expecting a baby boy, Edmund James “EJ” Garrigan, due in late December of this year!
Edmund James Garrigan, due December 2023. Photo courtesy of New Life Imaging (@newlifeimaginginc on Instagram)
The name “Edmund” means “prosperous, protector,” and “James” means “to follow, to be behind.” We are hopeful our firstborn son proves to be a protector of the innocent and defenseless and one day chooses to follow after the Lord who created Him and preserved his life on the heels of death.
Alternative Perspective
If you have read this far and think the news of a healthy third pregnancy is the “happy ending” to our arduous journey, I would encourage you to consider an alternative perspective that is less storybook but no less real life.
Chantelle and I love our growing little son and pray for his safe arrival into the world daily. We are excited to be parents to Edmund James and rejoice that he is healthy and on his way. We invite you to rejoice with us! But within rejoicing, recognize there is also remaining sorrow. Each passing day toward Edmund’s arrival is also a passing day further away from two other children we never knew and lost so suddenly. Preparing for our child’s arrival and all that will follow leaves us with little time to grieve our other children.
I offer this because we must rediscover the harmony between hurt and hope. The prevailing perspective is that we should often look for the “silver lining” amidst grief. The encouragement is to “look for the good” in life. We force our laughter and fail to lament. To maximize rejoicing, we minimize sorrow, either our own or that of others.
In short, we cease to be human, and we fail to welcome the humanity of others.
A year ago, I wrote a friend to apologize for some of my failures in our friendship. Our writings expanded to discuss other things as well. During our conversation, she offered thoughts on this subject:
Without hope, hurt rots and consumes. But without hurt, hope evolves into a delusion. Hurt and hope can coexist not in opposition of one another, but fueling one another.
This could not have been said better then, and I recently revisited the letter to find that exact wording as I have wrestled afresh with the hurts of my present situation.
Again, we must rediscover the harmony of hurt and hope. We must do this for ourselves and learn to welcome it in our relationships with others, allowing them to hurt as they look for hope and hope as they wrestle with hurt. This is when we get closer to experiencing the human connection we lack and desperately long for. Bonds are often built within brokenness, for we are designed for partnership in life.
It is within these partnerships and helping relationships that healing can come about, and healing is what bridges the divide between hurt and hope. Irvin Yalom, a renowned American existentialist and atheist psychotherapist, asserts as much, citing that therapeutic relationships, not therapeutic approaches, bring about real change and healing.⁴
This healing can occur wonderfully and genuinely within human relationships, and I think it comes about most completely within a relationship with God. According to insights we have of God from the Bible, God created everything, but He created humans specifically to partner with and have a relationship with them. From the beginning, this is His intention seen throughout Biblical history, within which there is no shortage of suffering and trauma.
Yet, God does something extraordinary within the suffering that unfolds throughout the pages of Scripture. He bridges the divide by meeting us in our hurts and connecting us to hope. He offers us healing in the context of a relationship with Him. Most shockingly, He does this by becoming human like us (Heb. 2:17) and experiencing suffering just as we do.
This happens through Jesus Christ.
The story of who He is and what He has done changes everything about our story. Yes, He came to rescue sinners from an inevitable fate. But He also came to comfort sufferers while suffering Himself. So often, we miss this about God and the Gospel story. He, too, has suffered (Isaiah 53:3–12). He is also aware of our suffering (Psalm 56:8). God the Father willingly lost His child. God the Son willingly suffered grief and sorrow and gave His life to bear my miseries and my sadness.
So yes, Edmund James is indeed a blessing to rejoice about. But he is not everything. Jesus is everything. I write this today because I can say that with as much assurance now as ever. I have learned that hope is not about finding the silver lining in hurt, nor is it a fuzzy feeling that ignores the not-so-fuzzy ones. Hope is also not a way of thinking. Hope is a Person, and His name is Jesus. The healing He offers can bridge the gap between hurt and hope. I am very clumsily, wearily, at times angrily, trying to walk with Him in real-time for this reason. I am hurting and have a long way to go, but I am not without hope because I am not without Him. I know He is with me.
This is my story. I am not a mental health professional, and this is not a post offering any mental health advice. I also do not intend to package religiosity haphazardly. But I do intend to invite you to Jesus with your grief and sorrow. Trauma is not a disqualifier. He is ready and willing to help you heal within your relationship with Him.
If you would like to know what that looks like, I would love to talk with you about it.
Other Updates
Work
Since my last extended writing, I have left the part-time trash collection job in favor of other vocations to stay home through the miscarriages and now this pregnancy. Firstly, I transitioned my partnership with Rise Counseling into a full-service audio-video, digital marketing, and web design business: Assorted Digital Services. I stay busy with various projects while pursuing long-term monthly service contracts with new clients. Secondly, I partner with Waves IT to help small companies to manage and monitor their networks and devices. Thirdly, I am also on the pastoral team at Calvary Chapel Palm City. In these ventures, I strive to work excellently to help those I work for, pay my bills, and provide for my growing family.
School
Through these last few months, I have paused all my theology courses but continued my counseling courses. As of this writing, I will write final papers for two classes next week and have one more class scheduled for the fall. If I maintain pace, I will finish my counseling certificate at the end of the year and pursue further certifications with specific focuses (trauma-informed care, narrative therapy training, and crisis counseling). I hope to resume my theological studies in the future.
Ministry
As mentioned previously on my social media, I am now on the pastoral team at Calvary Chapel Palm City. I am grateful for the compensated opportunity to preach routinely, grow a small group ministry, and expand global missions’ efforts in the future. I am also thankful for their trust in me, the respect they have treated me with, and the flexibility they have afforded me to provide for my family and pursue other interests. These are sadly uncommon in many ministry environments. For my wife and I, Calvary is home as the Lord continues to shape and refine both of us and our future ministry goals.
Conclusion
At our wedding, my wife and I vowed before the Lord and those present that we would live with “open hands,” allowing God to give to us and take from us as He so chose. We could have never anticipated that would include His taking away two children and giving us a third before we reached six months of marriage, yet, it included just that. At our wedding, we also committed to living by a set of values, including “vulnerability.”
This is meant to apply both to our marriage and how we live our lives overall. We want to put ourselves before each other and share everything. We also want people to know the “real” us to the appropriate extent, including the hard things. I wrote this post, and she wrote hers, in honor of that value. We are not perfect, and our marriage is not perfect. But we love each other and are committed to living these values. Thank you for allowing us to do so with you. We pray our vulnerability invites your own with others and, perhaps, with God. That is where healing begins.
Sincerely,
Andrew Garrigan
In memory of the children we have lost. Artwork by Megan Renteria (@littlestudioartist on Instagram).
Footnotes
¹In 1981, Harvard University Medical School Professor Micheline Matthews-Ross stated: “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception…and that this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of life” as she testified before a 1981 U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. At the same hearing, Dr. Watson A. Bowes of the University of Colorado Medical School added, “The beginning of a single human life is, from a biological point of view, a simple and straightforward matter — the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political, or economic goals.” Over forty years later, scientific advances have prematurely born children living outside the womb in more significant numbers than ever before, and imaging advances have us looking at the detail of developing life with increased clarity, providing certainty that a fetus inside the womb is alive and intrinsically human.
²Quote taken from https://helloclue.com/articles/miscarriage/i-had-a-miscarriage-and-i-m-writing-about-it-for-the-first-time
³Quote taken from https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/408/eighteen-attempts-at-writing-about-a-miscarriage
⁴Yalom asserts this in most of his writings, including in his notable work The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients.
