A Sad Day in Our Home

There is deep sadness in our home today that many homes have known, but never this one. After a short pregnancy that still had the freshness and vibrancy of an early spring day, our baby has died. There is no good reason at such an early stage, just six weeks old, and there will be no great physical trauma. But the new trajectory that we had just been planning for our lives must now be recalibrated without this child, who we resisted naming even as my other children reveled in the process of coming up with new names and possibilities.

The joy, which I described in an earlier post, was strong and heartfelt, but it was not the opposite of this bitter taste of death. For the joy was mitigated with the view of danger—we knew this was a high-risk pregnancy—and the anticipation of the hard process of bearing and birthing a child. In this world there is little that can mitigate the terrible finality of the death of such promise, the end of a life before it can be truly celebrated.

Because we believe in life and know beyond doubt that human life begins when it is conceived as such, we also know that God took home this young addition to our family, who we had not even named except to call it our “little pumpkin seed,” and He has a name for it that is listed in his book of life.

Almost everyone we have talked to has suffered similar pain, and we know the loss is a common one. We don’t mean to heighten our own sorrow as something special or even unique. But we mourn the loss of this child and the suspension of this hope and the darkening of the light that this growing baby was already bringing to our lives.

We’ve prayed long and hard about all of this, and we don’t have any thought that God lost control. No, we recognize His hand, and we are sad that today His plan was for our home to suffer this loss.

Goodbye little pumpkin seed, until we meet again.

--James Jewell