The Good News is

 

We are all here, still goofy and squirmy, and at times grumpy.  You know, fully human.  I must start by saying thank you: it has been incredibly moving to receive such love and support from friends and family near and far.  We have experienced an outpouring of love and it has sustained us.  The last week has been a roller coaster.  We have found ourselves feeling perfectly cheery and fine one moment and feeling utterly devastated the next.  Grief is a strange and powerful thing.

With each passing day we have experienced a deeper peace and understanding (okay, let me be honest: there are still days we wake up just feeling emotional.  Who knows how long that will last).  But we know that this sadness has its place in the bigger picture: there is meaning and purpose to this part of our stories.  This, too, is good.

Yesterday we released balloons to the baby.  Ben and I had thought up the idea for the kids: a way to release our sadness.  But as soon as we explained it to the kids, they started shaping it with their own ideas. "Oh," Zosia said.  "We're sending balloons for the baby to play with in heaven."  Of course.  It would take the heart of a child to understand the perfection of this sentiment.  "It's a party for the baby!" Lily exclaimed.

Each of us has been dealing with our sadness in our own way.  Lily wants to talk talk talk about it, asking about where the baby is, saying she is "sad for the baby to be in mama's tummy."  Zosia  has been quiet and independent, and then every now and then will smile as she looks at me to ask, "Is mommy pregnant?"  Ben and I have been fine one moment, sad and grumpy the next, bickering for 30 minutes about Zosia's lunch sandwich, which is really not like us.  And then we spent the weekend organizing the basement like the cast of some home improvement show.  Yikes, there is a lot of energy here.

But the good news is that God is still good, that we have an incredibly powerful love sustaining our family, and this loss has made us so incredibly grateful.  Because even in the moments that being entrusted with all of this life seems terribly exhausting, there is such infinite beauty and miraculousness in each moment of it.