I Still Carry Faith

Note: This is the story of our first miscarriage. Our first loss, although not our first experience with the reality of death.

The Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord in 2006 is etched into my memory in a way I could never have imagined. It was May 25th, and what should have been a day of joy became one of the great sorrows of our family life.

I was 15 weeks pregnant with our sixth baby, due on November 9th. I had always wanted a November baby. Like so many families, we scheduled the ultrasound and made it an event. We brought all of the children along…ages fourteen, ten, eight, four and two. They were eager to hear that tiny heartbeat and my husband and I wanted to share our joy and watch their excitement as they met their sibling for the first time on that familiar grainy black-and-white screen. It was supposed to be a treasured family memory, a simple, sacred milestone.

Instead, I remember the cold gel on my abdomen, the dim room, the joyful chatter, and then the silence.

The technician found the baby quickly. I could tell by her face before she said anything that something was not right. She moved the wand, paused, shifted, tried again. She spoke words that were likely meant to comfort but landed like a thousand pounds: These things sometimes happen… the heartbeat can be hard to find. Then came another phrase I have never forgotten: because this was our sixth pregnancy, it was somehow “bound to happen”.

Bound to happen.

As though the child we had already loved, already made room for in our hearts, was somehow less worthy of grief because we had five other perfectly healthy children. As though the death of one child could ever be explained away by statistics.

I was in shock. I was pregnant, just entering the second trimester, but my baby was dead. How could this be? I was past the point of worry about a miscarriage, wasn’t I?

There was a particular kind of silence that entered my body when I heard this heartbreaking news. Everything around me continued…my children were still in the room, my husband was standing there, the fluorescent lights hummed, the receptionist answered the ringing phone…but my own world had stopped moving.

Because we lived in Omaha at the time, the Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord was celebrated on Thursday as a Holy Day of Obligation. That evening, we went to Mass as planned. I sat in the pew surrounded by my family and cried through nearly the entire liturgy. The words about Christ ascending into heaven struck me differently than they ever had before. Heaven was real and personal. My child was there, commended to the mercy of God, hidden in His care.

I could barely breathe, let alone pray. Yet somehow, there we were, celebrating with the Church this feast of departure and promise…the leaving of Christ from earth, and His promise to prepare a place for us.

I clung to that.

And then life, in all its strange contradictions, kept moving forward.

Three days later, my husband and I were scheduled to leave for Napa Valley to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. It was our first trip away together since our honeymoon. A babysitter was driving all the way from Kansas City to stay with the kids. The plans had been in place for months. We did not want to cancel, though in truth, we did not know what we wanted. Grief had made everything uncertain.

Our doctor suggested a D&C on Saturday, the day before our flight. So that is what we did.

We went to the downtown hospital. The procedure was done. We went home. It was over, at least medically. But of course, that is never where it ends.

I remember asking what would happen to our baby’s remains. We needed to know. That little life mattered. The doctor assured us our baby would be buried along with others. We accepted that answer because we did not know there were other questions to ask. We did not know to advocate for our child. We trusted, and we moved forward carrying an ache we did not yet understand.

The anniversary trip was somber. My husband upgraded our rental car to a little convertible, and we drove with the top down along the coast and through the beautiful wineries. The scenery was stunning, but there was a heaviness that never left us.

Grief travels.

It sits in the passenger seat. It meets you at breakfast. It follows you into sunsets and laughter and all the places where you think beauty might drown it out.

While we were at the hotel in Napa Valley, my youngest brother called. He offered his condolences, but he also asked a question no one else had asked:

Were we going to name the baby?

I had not thought about it. To name our baby felt almost impossible. We did not know if the baby was a boy or a girl, and somehow giving our child a name made everything undeniably real. It made this tiny person more than a loss on a medical chart. It acknowledged that this was our child and that this child had a place in our family forever.

My brother encouraged us to consider it and asked if he could make a suggestion. He proposed the name Faith. He said he thought my faith was strong and knew how important it was to me, so it just made sense. 

That phone call was a gift. He stepped into a conversation others avoided and did not pretend nothing had happened. He recognized that this sweet, little life mattered.

And so we named our baby Faith.

Faith became the first of our children to be named without being held, loved without being seen, and entrusted entirely to the mercy of God. That name has stayed with me all these years, not only because it belongs to our baby, but because it became the word that carried us through. Faith in the goodness of God. Faith in the dignity of this little life. Faith that love does not end when earthly life does.

At the time, we thought this miscarriage was an isolated heartbreak. We had no idea it was the beginning of a long road.

In the years that followed, we would suffer four more loses…a stillborn baby and three more miscarriages. Each one carried its own story, its own child, its own wounds. And somehow each one was more difficult than the last because loss accumulates and grief can not be measured. It layers itself into your story. It changes how you enter every pregnancy, every ultrasound room, every silence before a heartbeat is heard.

That first loss on the Ascension changed me.

It taught me that motherhood includes children the world may never see. It taught me how casually others can speak into sacred grief, and how deeply words matter. It taught me that heaven is not distant, that the veil is thin, because part of my motherhood and our family is already there.

Twenty years have passed, and I still carry Faith with me.

Time softens certain edges, but it does not erase love. Some memories feel tucked into another chapter of life, and then suddenly they return with striking clarity: the ultrasound room, the silence, the tears at Mass, the trip to Napa, the quiet decision to give our baby a name.

Faith remains part of our family story. Not in the visible way we once imagined, but in a real way nonetheless. A child forever missed, forever loved, forever ours.

And this year, as that twentieth anniversary comes around, our family is celebrating new life. On May 13th, our son and his wife welcomed their third son, and our hearts are full.

The joy is real.

And so is the memory.

That is one of the mysteries of family life, and perhaps of faith itself: grief and joy are not separate roads. They often run side by side. One child remembered in heaven, one child newly placed in our arms here on earth, and all of it held together in the precious goodness of God.

Faith, William, Hope, John Paul and Michael, pray for us! 

“We will see our little ones again up above.” ~St. Zelie Martin