Walking with Mary: A Mother’s Day Reflection on Loss and Faith
Not every Mother’s Day is filled with flowers and joy. This intimate reflection explores the deep ache of child loss—and the sacred presence of Christ and His mother for those who grieve.
Mother’s Day: Celebration and Sorrow
Mother’s Day is a wonderful time to celebrate the mothers, grandmothers, and mother figures in our lives. It can be a beautiful day of celebration and remembrance of the women who gave us life and helped shape us as we grew.
It can also be a day of great sadness for many, especially for those who are mothers of loss. When we celebrate Mother’s Day, it can be easy to forget that there are many mothers who are not celebrated and many who are grieving due to the loss of a child.
Losing a child may be one of the hardest things to endure, if not the hardest. It is unnatural and goes against what we believe is the logical idea of parents passing before their children. Child loss can take many forms, whether it’s miscarriage, stillbirth, losing an infant, child, or adult child, or even infertility. All of these bring great suffering to the parents, but especially to mothers. To carry a life inside your own body and then to see that life fade away is a tragedy that many women are sadly familiar with.
I am one of those women.
While I would never presume to be the expert on this subject, I do have a story that I hope in sharing will bring healing to some, open doors for others, and shed light on a common tragedy that many face but often go unnoticed. Mother’s Day is a day for grieving mothers, too.
The Day I Grieved
“There’s baby, but there is no heartbeat.”
The ultrasound technician said it in the kindest way possible, but it was the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I stared at the blurry screen through my tears, at the tiny baby that was still in my womb but whose life was now gone. I had carried this baby for ten weeks, had heard its heartbeat, and had seen it grow. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing now.
How could this baby’s life be gone? How was there no heartbeat now? We had prayed for this baby, dreamed about who it would become, and trusted the Lord. How could this be happening to me? Why was it happening to me? Why did God create this baby just to take it away? These questions flashed through my mind as we met with the doctor. It all felt so surreal.
In a matter of minutes, the picture of my future family drastically changed. I felt like my body, which had miraculously held life, was now a tomb. The tears would not stop, and I could not wrap my brain around what was happening.
When we finally got home from the doctor, I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to sit around and wait for the worst to happen. I needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere that would help take my mind off of what was going on. Somewhere holy. As much as I was questioning God in the moment, I knew there was no use in turning from Him now. As much as I didn’t understand, I knew He would be the only way out of this.
“I need to go on a walk,” I told my husband, William. I knew there was a church within walking distance of our house, and that’s where I was headed. We walked to Holy Rosary Catholic Church, where I knew a prayer garden existed. We had walked by it before, and it seemed like a peaceful place to be in such a chaotic time.
We wandered to a bench to sit down, and looking up, I saw a statue of Christ’s mother, Mary, before me. This statue of Mary was unlike any other of her I had seen before. Typically, statues of Mary portray her with her arms out wide by her sides or crushing the head of the serpent. This statue was different. Mary looked younger, and in her arms, she held an infant. The infant’s face was slightly turned toward Mary so that it was obscured from the onlooker. In my mind, I knew that the infant she was holding was her son, Jesus. But in my heart, I believed that baby could be any baby, maybe even my own.
In that moment, I thought about Mary in a new light. I knew that it had been prophesied to her by Simeon that “a sword would pierce (her) own soul (Luke 2:35),” and that she watched her son walk through the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering, to His crucifixion and death on the cross. But it was then that I realized that Mary and I now had something in common: we were both mothers of loss. Mary experienced something that I, and countless other women, had. She had lost her child, her son whom she loved with her whole being.
As I looked at this statue, I thought, other than Christ Himself, who better to look to in that time of suffering as a mother of loss? Who better for Christ to use as an example to suffering mothers than His very own mother? When Jesus looked down from the cross at the Apostle John and said, “Behold, your mother (John 19:25-29),” not only was He giving His mother to John’s care, but He was giving her as an example to all of us.
Grief, Grace, and the Suffering Servant
I wish I could say I was healed of my grief then and that my story ended in that prayer garden. But I wasn’t, and it didn’t. Grief is a long road, and everyone’s path is different. I learned there’s no right way to grieve.
Before that day, I had never given suffering much thought. I knew that everyone must endure suffering in some way at some point, but it felt like something inevitable that we all must face and get through. But I learned that suffering is much more than that.
While I began to see Mary in a different light, as a mother of loss, I also began to see Jesus in a new light. I saw Him as our suffering servant, as the sacrifice who willingly endured every agony on the cross.
Through my loss, I had to wrestle with who I believed God to be. If I believed He was a good God before this tragedy happened, then why would He not still be good after? And if I believed He was good, then I had to believe that He didn’t will or cause my suffering, even though He allowed it. I had to believe this in my head until it became true in my heart. Because He is good, I could trust that He welcomed my baby into His kingdom, where there is no sadness, and my baby is completely whole and loved.
In my suffering, I had the choice to ignore it and push my way through, or I could choose to let Christ work in me in a new way that HE could not before. Suffering wasn’t just something I had to face; it was something that I was able to join in with Christ. Through this suffering, I could be made to be more like Jesus.
On the cross, Jesus knew every sin and suffering that would happen. He knew this pain of losing my child. Did He cause it? Absolutely not. But He knew it, and He suffered with me in it.
Walking through seasons of suffering provides us with the opportunity to join with Christ in His suffering. It’s an invitation to become more like Him. In our suffering, we can either choose to walk in our own way or we can follow the example of Mary and humbly submit to whatever life in Christ means for us.
For Mary, it meant that she would live her whole life knowing that her son would die, and still obediently gave her son to the Father. We know in our lives that suffering is guaranteed. But we also have the promise that the Lord, our good Shepherd, will walk through the valley with us. He will be there in the heights, and when our beds are made in Sheol, He will be there too. He is with us in the celebrations and in the memorials.
Where Grief Meets Glory
Through this season of grief, I found it helpful to have concrete things to help me process and mourn. One of these things was liturgy. The book Every Moment Holy was a place I turned to often. In it, there is an illustration that accompanies the liturgy for losing a child. This picture shows the saints welcoming a baby into heaven from the hands of what could be assumed is the baby’s mother.
While the picture shows the saints grieving, we know that there are no tears in heaven. But I took comfort in this picture, knowing that God’s heart is saddened by loss, and the hearts of His people are too.
In the illustration, we see Eve, the mother of life, taking the baby in her arms, with Mary standing beside her. I imagined my own beautiful baby being lovingly taken from me, into the arms of Eve, passed to the arms of Mary, and finally into the arms of Jesus. I found so much comfort in this. Where there had been death and darkness, now there was life abundant for my child in Christ’s perpetual light.
While there are so many things I could say about this season of loss and grief, it is my hope and prayer that this snapshot of my story could bring comfort to others who have experienced similar sadness. If nothing else, I pray that it opens doors that might need to be opened. Child loss is something that is incredibly common, but the commonness doesn’t make it any less painful. However, knowing that you are not alone in the suffering can help lessen the pain.
Christ’s own mother has walked this path before, and Jesus is so intimately familiar with our suffering. He longs to take it onto Himself if we will only give it to Him. In suffering, the way to renewal is through surrender, in joining our suffering to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Through Him, we have the hope of resurrection life, where we will get to meet our children who are in heaven.
I pray that this Mother’s Day, we can remember the beautiful lives of the children God gave us, in whatever way he gave them to us and for however long we had them. And in our memorials, we can celebrate the goodness of God and the hope that we have through his own Son, whom God gave up out of his great love for us, His children.
TL;DR
Mother’s Day can be a day of joy and grief, especially for mothers who have experienced child loss.
The author shares her personal story of miscarriage, grief, and wrestling with the goodness of God through it all.
Suffering, when surrendered to Christ, becomes a path toward deeper union with Him.
The story calls us to remember grieving mothers this Mother’s Day—and the children they hold in their hearts.
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