One of the worst feelings I remember associated with miscarriage is the feeling of powerlessness. There’s no way around the horror of miscarriage, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You are stuck with only one outcome. No creative thinking, no dedication to finding a different solution, no hard work or pleading for an exception will change the fact that your baby has died and your body can’t (and shouldn’t) hang on to the pregnancy.
This feeling of powerlessness is probably familiar to anyone who has lost someone. I’m not qualified to say for sure, but if I had to guess that’s where the “Anger” stage of grief comes from. We face the inevitability of death, and realizing that we’re powerless to stop it triggers anger. It’s scary to face a threat you cannot match.
Henri Nouwen talks about this feeling in A Letter of Consolation. He speaks of how even if you think you’re confronting death by planning for it, etc., there’s still something that throws you off-balance when you lose someone you love dearly. “Whatever we felt, said, or thought about death in the past was always within the reach of our own emotional or intellectual capacities. In a certain sense, it remained within the range of our own influence, or control. …But mother’s death was totally outside the field of our control or influence. It left us powerless. When we saw how slowly she lost contact with us and fell away from us, we could do nothing but stand beside her bed and watch death exercise its ruthless power. This experience is not an experience for which we can really prepare ourselves. It is so new and so overpowering that all of our previous speculations and reflections seem trivial and superficial in the presence of the awesome reality of death” (40).
And here, in this discussion of powerlessness, he delves into one of my favorite topics—”befriending death.”
He says that this powerlessness leads us to ask new questions about death, “open[ing] to us levels of life that could not have been reached before, even if we had had the desire to reach them” (40). This powerlessness makes us look back, reflect on our memories and realize how short time was. The coming and going of events was always moving forward toward this moment of death. I love this part:
“I think that from the point of view of mother’s death and our own mortality, we can now see our lives as a long process of mortification…It sounds unpleasant and harsh, and moralistic. But mortification—literally, “making death”—is what life is all about, a slow discovery of the mortality of it all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it were a lasting possession. Our lives can indeed be seen as a process of becoming familiar with death… I do not mean this in a morbid way. On the contrary, when we see life constantly relativized by death, we can enjoy it for what it is: a free gift” (42).
Is this not true? Life is beautiful! And how do we know this? By seeing the horror of death. We ought to avoid death for its horror, but befriend it for stripping away any doubts of what is good.
Nouwen speaks of reminiscing after his mother’s death—encouraging his father to look through old photos, of their early years, the years of vacations, raising Henri, and seeing him leave the next. “All these times have passed by like friendly visitors,” he says, “leaving you with dear memories but also with the sad recognition of the shortness of life. In every arrival there is a leave-taking; in every reunion there is a separation; in each one’s growing up there is a growing old; in every smile there is a tear; and in every success there is a loss. All living is dying and all celebration is mortification too” (43).
This brings us back to powerlessness. Realizing that all of life is mortification doesn’t feel good. All of the autonomy we might have thought we had goes right down the drain. Nouwen posits that this moment brings us to “the great paradox in life.” The choice is to give up autonomy, to be controlled by grief and loss and stop living in the future but continue on in the past. A more “human” move of even greater autonomy, is to “be so in control that we can surrender ourselves” (49). To what? To “an unknown future” (51).
This, he says, is taking the “option to understand our experience of powerlessness as an experience of being guided, even when we do not know exactly where” (51). Nouwen uses the apostle Peter as an example, to whom Jesus said first “feed my sheep” three times, and then reminded him that age brings autonomy, and then dependence. “..a growing surrender to the unknown is a sign of spiritual maturity,” Nouwen says, and this “does not take away autonomy” (52).
It’s unbelievable, really, when you think of it—death as a means of new life. We see it on the grandest scale in the story of Christ’s death and resurrection buying new, eternal, life for his people. But Nouwen brings us down to a little, physical, perhaps earth-bound parable of Christ’s death, reminding us that the apostles could not fulfill their vocation until after Christ’s death.
And in that way, this redeems the feeling of powerlessness when you lose someone. Powerlessness does not have to be a terminal destination, but a launching point. It can be an invitation to freely give up your attachment to transient things, and move just as freely into new spaces, to invest in people in a new, more abandoned way. When we are not bothered by pretending or hoping to be immortal, we are free to experience and pursue new depths of life that we may never have thought possible.
We also gain freedom by resting in the one who is not powerless in the face of death! I’m reminded of Augustine’s City of God. In the very center of this massive work Augustine zeroes in on the power of Christ in his incarnation and resurrection (I’ll have to find the reference later—my copy is in the room with a napping baby). There are other immortal beings (angels, demons), but none are a suitable mediator for man because they either do not want to help (demons), or are unable because they have nothing in common with us (angels) by which to mediate. Jesus alone, the immortal and blessed one, had the incomprehensible power to both take on mortality andbreak the power of death.
If we rest in that power, we have no need to cling to our own. We can walk willingly toward our own demise, and that of those we love, without anxiety or regret, loving life all the more for knowing the one who, by his own power, won victory over death.