Resurrection

Today was the day my first child was supposed to be born. 

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We’re quick to speak of other worlds. I can imagine another world where today I hold my child in my arms. It’s an inverse fate. Rather than being doomed to this singular life, we have randomly stumbled through one door which could have just as well been another.

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With our particular kind of miscarriage, surgery was required. An extra tenth chromosome, a single duplicate of a single strand of DNA, doomed any possible life at the moment of conception, and changed our lives forever.

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Is there another world where our child has two chromosomes rather than three? Would I recognize that Austin, an unscarred father, as myself? I saw a picture of Amelia and me from just a year ago and couldn’t believe how young we looked.

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In War and Peace one of the main characters, Pierre, is changed for the better by the deprivation he faced as a prisoner of war. Three years ago I wrote: we can look back, even at the hard times, even at the dark time, and answer with Pierre, “but if I were asked at this moment whether I would rather be what I was before I was taken prisoner or go through that all again, my answer would be, ‘for heaven’s sake, let me have captivity and horseflesh!’” Now, I know that I might wish suffering on myself for what I might become, but I would never wish that upon my wife or my child. I remember that when Pierre said those words he was alone.

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I love the tears now, because it is good to remember.

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When Amelia and I watched the War and Peace miniseries, we’d been married for six months. We were in a small cabin in the ice and snow of central New York. I cried when Prince Andrei died, which I didn’t expect. I’d read the book and knew his death was coming, yet all the same I wept for some time after the credits rolled. Being newly married, I could see what sort of joy Andrei would have entered into had he lived. And when I watched Andrei, the character in whom I saw so much of my past self, die, I cried for who I might have been, and I cried for Andrei.

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I don’t care much for the multiverse, setting aside the possibility that it is a more accurate model of reality (which I can’t quite believe). If I have other lives, I can’t access them. They’re merely delusions or hopes or both of what may have been if luck or the universe had been on our side. It’s the hope and desperation that we could have been someone other than who we are, that we can rewrite the immutable past. Here, in this world there is evil, in this world we have failed, in this world we are not who we wish we were, but there exists some universe where we are good, and great, and unbroken.

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You discover who else has lost a pregnancy when you lose your own. In that company a few weeks ago, we talked about our losses, lives, how we try to live, and how we actually live. And I was happy for the chance to shed more tears. I love that the Book of Genesis ends with Joseph saying, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Even after the Fall and the Flood and the broken lives and broken families, even after paradise is lost Joseph tells us a promise which carries through to Revelation, that our God will take what is evil and make it into good. Evil and failure and loss is not the last word. We don’t choose the evils we face, but when we face them, it is the nature of the Creator and Sustainer of life, the universe, being, and existence to bless us in and rescue us from captivity and horseflesh. 

Happy are those who mourn. This is not a statement about mourning. It is a statement about God.

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I never believed, truly believed, in the Resurrection of the dead until our loss. If God will make all things right, nothing short of Resurrection will do. And in my trust in the goodness of God I feel that it will be so. Death shall be swallowed up and he shall wipe every tear from our eyes. And on that day I will say, “Behold this is our God… This is the Lord we have waited for.”

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Today I woke up, and our child was still gone. Life follows a singular path. The sun rose, and I had the day. Life shined through the windows and the bread I made was warm and crusty and perfect with butter. And we were still pregnant with another child, a child who would never have been born if we hadn’t lost the first. They’re growing ears now, beginning to hear, and every morning I tell them “welcome to a new day, I love you, and I can’t wait to be your dad.”