Beautiful Pain

Today, is the one year anniversary of losing our baby grandson. Due to a rare growth abnormality that began in the womb at 10 weeks, he lived only nine hours; nine hours that were some of the most difficult and sacred of my life and the lives of my beautiful daughter and her family.

Those nine hours were an amazing feat for a child who was missing the top of his skull. No one expected him to live through the birth, or consequently, to survive to a near full term pregnancy. Yet, he did, and what a miracle he was and is.

The pain is still very real and present. Although nine hours seems like a very short time, the mingled hope and trauma that accompanies a birth and death of one so small is indescribable.

Having only shared a few thoughts here and there over the last year of what it means to grieve, I suppose in a way of celebrating life through pain I thought it appropriate and healing to express some of the lessons gifted to one who has so wished to avoid pain in all of its forms over the course of her life.

I have always run from discomfort and become an olympic champion at it. But this particular pain, perhaps divinely designed, I could neither avoid nor run away from, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Just two weeks prior to losing our sweet little grandson, a childhood friend committed suicide. Before that, I had watched, not just one, but several dear family friends lose sons to suicide, and with agony for them followed their journey through the grief process, wondering how they managed to live with such a heavy burden of enduring pain and loss.

In writing this entry, I know that my grief is just one perspective, and although no one can truly quantify pain or grief into any kind of categorical threshold structure, I imagine there is loss that I have no way of comprehending even though I have experienced a form of it.

Today, I am simply offering my personal experience and the gems of wisdom that are now mine because I, like so many, indefinitely carry the beautiful pain of loss with me.

A little back story

Why on earth would I use the word beautiful to describe my pain? Isn’t that a little disrespectful?

Before I got the call from my daughter that our little grandson wasn’t developing properly, that he had a rare disorder called anencephaly, there wasn’t a pain I wouldn’t have avoided if I could find a way to do so. I hated movies or books or anything really that would make me feel anything other than happiness. I only wanted to feel happy.

It’s not that my chronic avoidance of pain made me somehow immune from it, far from it. But my overtly sensitive nature and empathic tendencies had made me a constant open wound since childhood and I desperately sought solace from the daily and hourly burden of feeling so deeply and so much. Avoidance in the form of filling my life with inspirational happiness was my only reprieve.

The older I got, the harder it was not to feel everything and everyone around me, despite working to close off the constant flow of emotion. The 2020 lockdown was a relief, as it gave me a much needed break from social interaction, although it also made it hard to go back to life as usual.

I know that sounds so pathetic. But I continue to work on my sensitivity and my avoidance of discomfort, and this last year has been a real lesson in understanding both.

The months that followed my daughter’s phone call with the devastating news were hyper-emotional for all involved. Hardly a day would go by without some form of worry, conversation, and sadness over the inevitability of what was coming.

Truthfully, I wanted to pray it all away, and I tried. But the answer that came as a result of that attempted prayer was an immediate, honest and heartfelt knowing that this particular soul—our strong and brave little grandson—had taken on this difficult journey fully accepting the outcome.

I also knew that my role in his chosen form of life, albeit a short one, was to simply offer the support only a mother could and help my daughter and her family bear the weight of his short sojourn on Earth.

Oddly enough, this understanding gave me a kind of fortified peace and I was able to move forward without constantly questioning why this was happening. I knew why, and I couldn’t change the outcome, I could only learn to love and support my family in new and important ways.

When our daughter decided to carry him full term despite the risks involved, instead of terminating the pregnancy at her doctor’s recommendation, it was like a scary door appeared that we all knew would have to be opened and walked through in less than nine months, despite the pain that lay on the other side.

Many of our conversations took on a sort of sacred knowing that, no matter what, this was going to hurt like hell and the only way through it was to hang on to each other as we all walked through the door of pain together.

The months were long and difficult, but finally the week of his birth arrived. He had stopped growing and an induction became necessary.

I absolutely hate flying, but that was the only option. My dear husband was unable to join me and so I boarded the plain alone headed for pain I knew I would never be free from again, to help my daughter, her husband, and their two little sons, my sweet little grandsons I love so much, bear the impossible hardship of loving and letting go of someone we all held so dear.

Beautiful pain

There is no way for me to adequately express the emotions and challenges of the days that followed, the memories of which haunt me, especially at night; feelings that don’t always make sense, like overwhelming guilt and shame for thoughts you wish you’d never had or the horror of watching those you love suffer in body and soul that only a tragic death provide.

Yet, despite the awfulness of such events, or maybe because of them, I’m not really sure, I learned a lesson I will never forget: pain, especially love-infused pain, has an indescribable divine beauty about it.

Science may dismiss it away as a euphoria brought on by hormonal shifts in the body, and I’m sure that is probably part of it, but it is much more than that.

The experience of loss and the pain that accompanies pain, loss, and grief opens not just a door of inevitable hardship, but a door to the world beyond the hardship where new kinds of understanding and growth reside.

There is a divine connection when one is experiencing certain kinds of pain, a bridge of knowing, that I can only describe as beauty. You feel yourself growing stronger, more significant, wiser, and more solid, as the pain does its work in you.

When my daughter and I look into each other’s eyes now, we see that deep-seeded knowing that we share after sitting together in agony. Not only did the sinews and fibers of our body and soul become more tenacious, but our capacity to love and to understand grew as well.

With all of that said, it is not what I would describe as happy work. Much of it feels like a nightmare and the trauma has been unrelenting. However, the work of the pain on your soul, regardless of the horror, can only be described as godlike.

We often think of beauty as a simple happiness booster, and it is, but it is also a truth teller, an honesty filter, a link to the divine, and a sort of soul spinal column that holds you up when you think you can’t keep going any more. It inspires and it teaches. It is a godlike power that transforms one from feeble to mighty.

Lessons I’ve learned from grief

When I think of the pain and the horror of this last year, I am often brought to my knees in tears. It was harder than I ever thought it would be, and I have a great imagination for disaster.

Yet, I also must admit that I am changed for the better. I am a new soul, one who is more in harmony with the divine and happier with who I am becoming as a work of my own soulful art.

People who experience or observe suffering often ask, “Why is this happening to me?”. Believe me, I’ve asked that question myself many times before this particular growth experience. But now pain and why we experience it makes so much more sense, although I still have a long, long way to go in accepting the full implications of that statement.

We live under an easy misconception that the divine rejects pain, if god existed than this or that tragedy and horror wouldn’t happen; that for a god to be a god they must only promote perfect happiness, whatever that is.

Beautiful pain and the grief I’m continually processing has taught me much more about the dynamic and intricate qualities that make up our divine inheritance.

To be godlike is not to be devoid of pain. Instead, to know suffering is to comprehend more about what true happiness is.

To understand happiness or what a god’s perspective and reasoning might be, one must become more like a god, more solid and enduring themselves, and develop the capacity to Be, to embrace the I Am inside of one’s soul and self that can’t be rattled or removed with outside circumstances; to become a resolute and eternally minded being.

Can that kind of awareness and density of soul grow in a vacuum of utopia-like happiness that’s completely devoid of pain?

Even from my limited awareness I have to admit that a perspective that magnificent and limitless must include pain, and I imagine lots of it. Even a chicken knows not to help a chick remove its shell. The difficulty fortifies the chick, its lungs and heart strengthen as it struggles to break free. It is a necessary, so-called, evil, if you will.

Growth is painful, as we all know, and as much as I am loathed to admit it, I suppose that true happiness is also born from knowing sadness, loss, and grief as well.

Asking “Why?”

It’s difficult to get answers to questions one is not capable or prepared to understand.

Beautiful pain is, in my experience, an essential key to grasping, even simply, the “why’s” behind the most difficult to answer questions we face while we are here on Earth—who am I? where did I come from? why am I here? and why is it so damn hard?

For me, pain has opened up my very weak and scared little heart and mind to the possibility that experiencing loss is, in many ways, of divine origin, and that what I’ve gained from it was worth the risk of being completely ruined by it.

Our little grandson and his courage in choosing a body that would never provide him with a full life, at least not the way we humans fathom it, taught me more about divine beauty than all of the happy lessons I’d had up to the point that he came into my life.

However, horrors much more grotesque than the nine hours of watching one you love gasp for breath while their mother tries to bravely let them go, happen every day. How could I possibly suggest that a loving god and goddess—divine parents—could allow, or even more inconceivably, require their children to suffer so contemptuously to become like them?

The truth is, I don’t have an answer for that and other similarly difficult to answer life questions. I am, like you, piecing together the puzzle of my own identity and worth in the grand scheme of things.

Yet, from my limited understanding and the experience that has come from this sacred tragedy, this beautiful pain, I see things a little differently, a little less myopically, and the question of why seems a little more relatable.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still suffer traumatic nights of burning tears as the wailings and moanings of my heart toss me like an overturned ship on a raging sea.

Perhaps, the trauma will accompany me to the end. I took that on as a consequence when I boarded that plane to be there, no matter what, with my daughter as she, my little grandson, and her family went through this tragic, refinement process, and I bear that consequence without regret, not only because I would do anything for my children, even share in their deepest sorrows, but because of what I have personally gained from accepting the growth from it.

Bearing the pain also means I am growing stronger each day, becoming a vessel that can hold it, and that strength, although enjoyed at an enormous cost, is empowering and fortifying to my character and soul.

Conclusion

Perhaps, we all, at one time, boarded a similar plane, leaving a divine world behind, knowing that while we were on Earth we would carry heavy burdens, burdens that now seem almost impossible to shoulder. Maybe we were too naive when we said yes to this experience to comprehend the horrors we are now facing, that often feel like a cruel joke a so-called loving and divine parent couldn’t possibly be the source of.

Is it all worth it? Is the pain really worth the cost of learning for ourselves what beauty, love, strength, power, corruption, hate, prejudice, happiness, and a godlike fortitude are and why they are valuable enough to give all to know and understand them?

Here we are doing it, and it’s hard. It’s much more challenging than I ever imagined. But, yes, I can see now, in my pathetically small and reluctant way, that it is worth it.

Someday, I hope I’ll have a really good and interesting story to tell, and because of it, stand in eternal presence with the family I love, having acquired a greater understanding of what it means to be divine and to be, what I want above all things, truly happy.

I love you little Rune Campbell. I look forward to our happy and priceless meeting and hope that my life is worthy of your respect. I hope that I can live as courageously and choose the road less traveled in order to gain the precious pearls of divine wisdom that come through brave and selfless living, as you have modeled so well for me, and all of your family, who love and miss you so much.

It is my prayer that our shared experiences of loss, grief, and suffering will bring us closer together as a human family; that when we look upon each other we will see that our individual pain is a beautiful, divine, and collective journey toward greater understanding and awareness of love and happiness.

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