Small Tragedies Still Matter

Image Credit: Public Domain

The world seems to have gone crazy lately, but the normal rhythms of life and death, its normal joys and sorrows, are still very much with us.

Yesterday, I  had an early first trimester miscarriage and delivered the tiny body of our third child.

It wasn't a total surprise for us, I'd been bleeding for a couple weeks off and on, but still a sad thing. I was thankful that we were able to recover the body, that's often not possible in early miscarriages.

We knew as soon as it happened that we wanted to honor the short life of our little one.

The first thing we did was choose a name, James Morris. 'James' is a family name on both my side and Chris's, both my and Chris's grandfathers were named James, and 'Morris' is a family name on Chris's side.

That evening, I got out the sewing machine and made a pouch with some fabric scraps to act as a coffin or shroud.

Front. The little yellow thing on the bottom is supposed to be a Marian M-Cross symbol, but my embroidery skills leave something to be desired. 

Back. 

We wanted to keep it private and simple (and we are in the midst of the Covid-19 panic as I write this), so we decided not to seek out a funeral mass or try to bury the body in a family grave site in our parish's cemetery (my mother has done this for a miscarriage she experienced, she got permission to bury the body in my uncle's grave from my grandmother).

If you have the option to do so and want to, this would be a wonderful thing to do, but we decided the best fit for us would be a simple burial at home.

I was most nervous about explaining what had happened to Little Boy and Little Girl, they had been excited about the possibility of a new sibling, but it went more smoothly than I expected.

This morning after breakfast, I pulled them aside and said,

"You remember how I told you that I had a baby in my tummy? Well, God decided that the baby needed to go to heaven to be with Him, so the baby's guardian angel took his soul to heaven, and his body came out of my tummy. We're going to go outside and bury his body today."

Little Boy had a few questions, but he was very matter of fact about it and seemed to understand. Little Girl, being two, was pretty much oblivious, but that's ok. 

We went out to the hole that Chris had dug earlier.

At the grave site. Chris and I dressed up, we wanted to, but I didn't make the kids wear church clothes.

Committing the body. 

Once we placed the body in the grave, we read the prayers from the Rite of Committal (burying the dead). 

Blessing the shroud with holy water. 

Burying the body. 

We decided to use a live oak tree we had started from seed as a grave marker. 

And that was our home funeral, and how we chose to commemorate little James. 

It almost seems ridiculous that small personal tragedies like this are still happening with everything else that's going on, but I guess that the normal rhythms of life and death still happen during large scale, worldwide cataclysmic events. Even in the face of the large and grandiose disasters, the smaller scale sorrows in our life still exist and have meaning. 

Even as the world seems to be spinning off into the unknown, James still mattered. 

Your 'smaller' struggles still matter too.