The Name You Chose and Never Got to Use

Ten past four in the morning, and Cara is sitting on the floor of the small room with her back against the wall.

The chest of drawers is still in its box. It has been in its box since March, leaning flat against the radiator, and her husband has not asked about it and she has not said anything about it, and it is going to stay there because neither of them can be the one who says the sentence.

In her hands is the going-home outfit. It is still in the packet. White, with small yellow ducks, size newborn, and she bought it in a supermarket on a Tuesday afternoon in a good mood, holding it up in the aisle to see how small it was.

She has been sitting here since about half three. This is the third time this week.

Downstairs the boiler comes on. Somewhere on the street a car door goes. The world is doing the things the world does, which is the part she cannot get over: that all of it simply carried on, in order, on time, as though nothing had happened, when the whole of everything had happened.

Her sister keeps saying she is so strong. People say that. They say she is strong, and they say at least she knows she can carry, and one woman at work said something about a reason, gently, meaning nothing but kindness, and Cara smiled and said thank you and went and stood in the stairwell for four minutes.

She has said the name out loud eleven times since March. She has counted. Eleven, and nine of those were in this room, in the dark, to nobody.

That is what nobody warned her about. Not the pain. She had braced for pain. What she was not ready for was having a name in her mouth with nowhere on earth to put it. A name they chose in the car on the way back from the twenty week scan, both of them saying it a few times to hear how it sounded, laughing because it sounded like a small solemn judge. A name they told her mother. A name that is on nothing. Not a school list, not a birthday card, not a nursery peg, not one register anywhere in the country.

And now it is you, sitting on that floor, so I am going to stop telling it as though it were somebody else's.

You know the box that stays in its box. You know the outfit. You know the eleven times, or the four hundred, or the one time you said it and could not do it again for a year.

You carried them. You know exactly what that was like, in your body, better than anybody who has tried to comfort you.

And you never brought them home.

Nobody gets to make this mean something

I want to say some things plainly, and then I want to stay here rather than move us on.

This should not have happened. It is not a lesson. It is not a plan you cannot see the edges of yet. Nobody up there needed your child more than you did, and no door closed so that another one could open, and there is no reason, and if somebody hands you one, put it down without carrying it a single step.

What happened to you is a death. Not a disappointment, not a setback, not a chapter. A person you were making room for, whose name you chose, is not here, and the room is still there, and that is a bereavement with almost none of the ordinary furniture around it. No coffin most of the time. Often no funeral. Sometimes nobody outside your house ever knew there was somebody to lose. You have been grieving a person other people never met, which means you have been grieving mostly alone, and doing it while being told you are strong.

You are not strong. You are enduring, which is a different and much heavier thing, and it costs you every single day. Nobody wrote that down as a failing. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and His Spirit is what carries that nearness up the stairs at ten past four and sits it down on the floor beside you, with the outfit still in its packet.

There is one place in Scripture where a father speaks in the hours after his baby dies. He does not explain it. Nobody in the room explains it either.

But now he is dead. Why should I fast? Am I able to bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.2 Samuel 12:23

I am not going to build you a guarantee out of one sentence spoken by a man in the worst hour of his life. I will tell you what is actually there.

He stops trying to change it. That is the first half, and it is not surrender, it is the end of a fight nobody could have won.

And then he says something with a direction in it. I shall go to him. He does not say the child is somewhere better. He does not say he understands. He speaks of his child as somebody who still is, and of himself as somebody still on his way, and then he gets up and he eats, and later that day he goes and sits with his wife, who has lost the same child.

He does not stop being that baby's father. He never once stops being that baby's father. Nothing in the text ever takes that off him.