The Promise

Warning: Mentions miscarriage

The Promise

They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said “I am making everything new!” Then he said “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

Revelation 21:3-5

There are some stories that you just know are somewhere inside of you, probably fully formed. They’re simply waiting. I couldn’t tell you where, exactly, they live. Your heart if you’re a romantic; your brain, if you’re not. Maybe your gut. I don’t know. But they’re somewhere somewhere in you, and you can sort of feel their presence, pressing against your skull or rib cage to whatever it is, wanting to come out. Stories always want to come out – don’t you know? From your mouth, your hands, the ink of the nearest pen. Through songs and music, fingers splayed over strings and keys. Through sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends. Through everything.

I’m not sure where this is going. I mean, I do, because there’s this story, fully formed like I said, waiting inside of me. Because I’m a romantic when it comes to words and a realist when it comes to life, it’s in all of me. My brain, my heart, my eyes and hands, and my stomach, where it hurts. Probably because it wants to escape so desperately. But somehow I think it would hurt more to let it out.

Tell me – how many people have told their stories, desperately painful stories, in the most beautiful way? Songs that make you cry and books that give you that tiny, terrible dose of real sadness. Sometimes it almost feels good, like a drug. And then sometimes it just feels too real. People hate reality. Me included. But I’m a writer, so I see it. Don’t all writers – I’d call it a curse, but it’s more than that. Worse. It’s just called life. Or death. Take your pick.

This story in me, I know it ends with a promise, and that’s all I really want to write, but we need something more to get there. And that’s the worst part. The longest part. At least that’s how it always seems.

I wish I made more sense, but I don’t. Not yet, anyway.

I should just write it.

We’ll give it some time.

—--------—

You know, I was going to start writing. Really. Or at least I thought I was. But I do this thing, this stupid thing, where I let the words take over my story. The place, the time, the situation – down to my every emotion. It’s nothing but words to me then, a well-spun tale. Not my life because, you know, it’s easier that way. Even a little dose of sadness is so much better than a big one.

When my great-grandpa died, for example – and see, now I’m going to have to say it all as plainly as I can lest the words take over – we were riding to the hospital to see him, and in my head I was beginning to narrate it all. Stop, I finally told myself. It’s death. It doesn’t deserve to be romanticized. It’s not good. It’s not romantic.

Words let me both see the world for how it truly is and disguise its horrors. And yesterday, in the car with my mom, I was already narrating, already pulling myself out of the pain. Running away. Oh, it’s so easy. It makes me feel so wonderfully detached from all of it. Words can both reveal and hide. They have so much power, and sometimes it can be used to make something like raw, brutal pain, or a million little, indescribable aches seen… easier to manage. When the monster speaks your own language, you’re less afraid of it, you know?

So maybe I shouldn’t write it at all.

Maybe I won’t.

But I will. Even this is just the narrator again, not me.

Words never belong to us. Words have no master.

—---------—

Have you ever noticed that there’s sadness everywhere?

Look closer. There is.

I could help you see it. At least for a little while.

Am I that cruel? I guess. Truth is cruel. I hate truth. Especially since I can never understand it.

—---------—

I’ll tell it plain, like I did when I was a little kid to my friends:

I had a twin.

You did?

Yep. It died when we were still in my mom’s stomach.

Oh. Was it a boy or a girl?

We don’t know. It was too little.

I’m sorry. That’s really sad.

I know. It was sad. It is sad.

I’m sad.

Maybe if I write I won’t be sad anymore.

—--------—

If no one ever wrote about their sadness, where would we be? I mean, you have to use some emotion to write and it seems like sadness is a general favorite. People call it all sorts of things: heartbreak, anger, fear…

Love.

Wait. No. Not love. Love and sadness are still separate. Right? I mean, not our love, not from our sadness. But God’s love it. Isn’t his still separate?

I think I get it now. That’s why they call it holy. God’s love his holy.

ho ly

Separate; set apart

Love… set apart from sadness. Can you imagine that?

Only in words. Not in my heart. Not in real life. At least, not yet.

—----------—

I hate myself a little for writing this. For trying to use words to turn all of this right side up and make it make sense. For trying –

Just stop. Just stop, Eden. Stop being a writer for just one second. Just stop.

But here I am, writing, because isn’t that good writing material? Isn’t feeling pain and shame and hurt and anger and your hear beating and your brain just screaming at itself to shut up and just let your heart do all the stupid, obnoxious stuff it is supposed to do like feel even though maybe you don’t want to, you know, didn’t you consider that? Maybe I don’t want to feel because I feel so stupid for feeling this awful over somebody who hardly even existed. We’re all just little blinks in comparison to all of time but they weren’t even that. They didn’t even get to be that.

And now I’m crying.

Can we just get to the promise? This is all so bleak. Everything is so sad and broken and I don’t know how to fix it.

I just want to fix it.

—-----------—

From the blog, written by ma:

Today as we were driving to the zoo Eden again spoke up suddenly, saying, “Mama, when Jesus comes back he’ll make our baby alive again. That’s why I love him.” It is almost impossible for me to say how happy I am that when Eden thinks of her twin brother or sister, she does so in the context of the resurrection, and that at three years old she is able to articulate that that is the reason she loves Jesus – – because he brings life out of death.

I think little me was wiser than I am now. I had forgotten about this.

I forgot about it last night, while we were driving, and in school, and all that time since which has seemed like so long, you know, because I’ve kind of been thinking and acting for two. Me as I am, and the me I imagine I would be if my twin hadn’t died. Waking up, making breakfast, shopping, all these things… and forgetting that whole time that, someday, I would be reunited with them, and I would know what they are really like. Because God already has the plan laid out. I mean, he didn’t just have a half-formed idea for how this baby, this person, would be and then scrapped it. God doesn’t work that way.

So then why did they die? Why did he just let them die?

Do you know how much people ask that question? So much. It’s ridiculous. You’d think we’d know the answer by now, or at least we’d get that there isn’t an answer, not yet. Just a promise.

People love answers. They don’t trust promises. I can’t help but be the same, can I? I mean, if I could, would I still be leaking sadness? But I guess no matter what I believe, I’m broken. I live in a broken world. And broken things leak.

There’s your answer, Eden.

…

I still don’t get it.

Here I go, forgetting again.

Jesus. Will. Make. Them. Alive. Again. Every day we have to say it. Is that what ma does? Does she forget, too? She says she thinks about them every day.

How often do you think about them?

Oh… Maybe once a day. Sometimes more.

That’s what she had said, in the car. That’s when I had started to cry. Big, fat tears that rolled silentely down my face. The romantic kind. The kind you see on beautiful people’s faces in movies. But I didn’t feel beautiful. I felt ugly and wrong.

There’s nothing romantic about death.

There’s nothing romantic about a dead baby.

There. I said it. I wrenched it out. Wasn’t that the point of this whole stupid thing? Getting the story out?

Only that’s not the whole story. Not the beginning or the end.

I keep forgetting.

—-------—

I’m going to tell it now, in as plain language as I can.

I’m in a class this year called human development, where we learn about just that, both the physical and psychological parts of it. This unit is about the development of a baby in the womb. Prenatal development, it’s called.

Part of my emotions while I learned about this, probably just because I felt it was due, awe at the miracle of life, and the other part was… sadness. Just a tiny bit, but in some parts of the lesson, seeing the pictures of the alien-looking creatures we all used to be, I just kept thinking, “I did this with my twin. Our hearts beat together.” A little red lump of a heart, but still, it was beating. And maybe around the end of the first trimester, I thought, “this is where they died, and I started doing all this on my own.”

And then another day we learned about how it affects the mom – pregnancy, I mean – and I said, “this must be a form of torture, or something.” Discomfort and sickness and stress… so much stress. That’s when the fear came in. If I had a baby, would I ever not be terrified every second that I would lose it? Especially if I had twins. Would I be able to bear the pain of it if that did happen? How could I ever think of having a baby when there was a possibility of it dying? A likelihood, even? And the weight of that… the weight I now know my mother carries with her every single day.

Last night, when ma and I were driving home, the questions came to me suddenly and I just wanted to know the answers so badly. Like I said, people love answers. But I was scared of hurting ma, of making her think about things she didn’t want to think about. I didn’t know that she had probably already thought about them that day, maybe even more than once. Eventually, though, I just needed to say something, so I asked: “Ma, how did you know you were going to have twins?”

“Well…” she said slowly, and explained to me how it had happened. She told me about how her heart had been beating so fast when the doctor told them that there wasn’t just one, but two babies. Then she stopped, and I knew I had to ask another question to get the rest of the story. I was even more reluctant with this one, though. We were maybe five minutes from home. I guess if I hadn’t asked, we could have gotten home and left it at that one part, maybe never talked about it again. And maybe that would have been easier. Maybe it would have been harder. I don’t know.

But sometimes you know that a question is going to eat you up from the inside until it escapes, just like stories do, even if it isn’t yet. So I asked, in a very quiet voice – almost like I was hoping ma wouldn’t hear me and wouldn’t answer and I could say “oh well, at least I tried,” and “maybe she did actually hear and just didn;t want to answer, so I should just leave it.” – “How did you know that it had died?”

(Isn’t it so awful that I have to call the baby, my brother or sister, ‘it’?)

My mother faced the question like a soldier going into the battlefield, square-shouldered and expectant. She’s strong like that. There was a pause, but just a little one. Then she told me how the doctor had done an ultrasound a few weeks into the pregnancy. How they saw that one little red lump of a heart, one little life, had stopped. Just like that. “No reason in specific,” I’m sure they had said. “Nothing you did,” in comforting, apologetic voices. Like it mattered. Either way, one baby was dead. And my mother would think about it every day. Someday I, the one who lived for no reason just like they died for no reason, would think about it every day.

That’s when I started crying, just staring out the window. I narrated just enough to keep the sobs away. I didn’t look at ma, maybe because I didn’t want her to see my tears. I was still a little ashamed of how sad I was for something that didn’t seem like a real death, almost. Not the kind you hold a funeral for. No churned up earth. No gravestone. No blemish on the earth marking my loss.

Moms always know when you’re crying, though. They have plenty of practice from when you’re a baby and that’s all you do. So she took my hand and didn’t say anything. Just drove home to where there was a dad and a brother, but no one else. No twin.

And because it suddenly hurt so badly, and I needed comfort so desperately, more than anything this other broken, helpless person’s soft hand could offer, I prayed to God – begged, really – Promise you’ll fix it God. Promise you’ll fix it.

I don’t know what, exactly, I had been expecting him to say. Maybe a reprimand: “I already have” or “be patient.” Probably just silence. But instead I heard, in my heart more than my head because everything about God is beautiful and romantic, the words my Father knew I needed to hear right then.

I promise.

---------

So there it is. The promise I said was coming. Isn’t it wonderful? I think so. Just a plain promise, no excuses or reprimands. No explanations, either. But someday the time of pain will seem so short that it will be like two minutes in the plan when everything went wrong before the hero came back and saved the day, you know? Before the chaos was righted.

And there’s the story. I told you it would come out, and it did, not exactly like I expected. But they never do.

I am a little less sad now. No because of my words, though. Because of God’s. Because of him. Because of his love. Perfect, set apart from sadness, promising and promise-keeping love. And I just had to write a bit to remember it.

I’ll have to keep remembering it every day, especially as the death toll just keeps adding up, which it will. I don’t doubt that it will. It does for all of us.

That’s that curse. Death.

Life is the blessing, though. God’s eternal blessing.

The promise.