In the days before Holy Week, I have found myself thinking about what might have been: a mother whose son outlived her; a teacher and friend whose days were just beginning; a Savior whose love and mercy would knit the unraveling world together. As it should have been and as it should continue to be, sacred stitch after sacred stitch.

I have found myself thinking about my own children who might have been. Conceived in love, knitted together in a mother’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully made. [Psalm 139: 13-16] I have found myself dreaming again of who these children may have grown to be and have imagined them seated at Easter dinner beside my other children, a cozy clutch of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. And again, I have mourned their absence. Perfect-buds-yet-to-be returned to spirit.

In her novel, The Light Between Oceans, M. L Stedman gives us Isabel, a woman desperate to be a mother and destined to miscarry all of her children. Stedman writes:

[the] losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length.

This is the biological reality of it all: there has never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. And the fact that countless women experience this thing that had to be gone through is cheap solace in a world of bubbling and bonneted babies. In truth, no guarantee lives too quietly alongside hope. It fails to be heard in the midst of life songs. And for a time, it ticks in the shadows in a dreadful and inevitable countdown to death.

Stedman profiles Isabel’s loss throughout several miscarriages. This passage, in particular, took me back to my own grief:

The old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill. Isabel had managed to sit up a little against the wall, and she sobbed at the sight of the diminutive form, which she had dared to imagine as bigger, as stronger – as a child of this world. ‘My baby my baby my baby my baby,’ she whispered like a magic incantation that might resuscitate him. The face of the creature was solemn, a monk in deep prayer, eyes closed, mouth sealed shut: already back in that world from which he had apparently been reluctant to stray. Still the officious hands of the clock tutted their way around. Half an hour had passed and Isabel had said nothing.

Daring to imagine your child as bigger, stronger–as a child of this world and not merely a child of your dreams is the courage of one who dares to thumb her nose at biology, striving, instead, towards love. For as Stedman writes: Once a child gets into your heart, there’s no right or wrong about it. There is just love and what might have been.

When a child who has lived solely in the heart and dreams of a mother dies, grief is often solitary and veiled in shame. Why did a body meant for child-bearing fail? What sins have manifested themselves in this death? How can one legitimately grieve in the overwhelming face of platitudes: You wouldn’t want a child to be born with such defects; You are young and can have more children; This is God’s will–who are we to question? 

When there is no tangible evidence of a life lived, grief is often swept away quickly. No child, no real reason to give yourself to the grief that is expected and acknowledged when a child has lived–if even for a day, an hour, a single moment. In the eyes of many, what might have been is a but a wisp of love and loss.

When there is no funeral, no memorializing of life, loss is silenced. Others too soon forget that you would have been a mother in five months, that the name you have held in your heart will go to another woman’s son or daughter, that an ultrasound picture is all you have to fill the empty pages of a baby book. You bear no stretch marks, and you wear your real jeans. Once again, you are a mother-in-waiting. You dread the visits to your OBGYN office where you are surrounded by beautiful, burgeoning bellies and smiling receptionists.

In her collection of poetry, Conquest, Zoe Brigley writes:

So many women come to me saying, “I have lost too,
and this one, and this one”. So many embryos retreat
to flesh: the live cell of the mother. Don’t tell me that it
will happen for me, when the only sure thing is a miracle:
the sperm nuzzling in its nest and the egg that opens, explodes.

In your world of brutal biology, when the only sure thing is a miracle, when so many embryos retreat to flesh, you drown in what might have been. It pulls you under just as surely as any loss. What might have been does not forgive the fact that your child was an embryo or a fetus–not a real child.

Still, as dark as Mary’s loss at Golgotha was, her child torn from the love and life that might have been, it gave way to life more glorious than she could ever have imagined. This is the promise of Easter: that death is overcome, and what might have been has come to be in life everlasting, in grace and peace beyond measure.

This is the promise that sustains all of us in the midst of pain and loss. And this is my prayer for others who grieve what might have been–children, dreams, loves and lives: that we never mistake the absence of the tangible for what is real and true and life-giving and that, each day, we claim Easter’s promise of what has come to be.

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”