I wrote this on May 23, 2023, as a gift to myself on a day when I needed to spend some time healing. For a while, I was unsure about whether or not I ever wanted to share it. But after riding a roller coaster of grief for several months, I realized this may be a gift to others as well. It won't stop the roller coaster, but it might at least help some people to feel like they aren't riding it alone.

CARRIAGE

- - -

I know so much more than I used to.

I used to only see darkness, but I could feel light. Now I only know and feel light.

I am light.

With my new knowledge, I can articulate the thoughts I used to have, before I could speak. So I would like to tell you my story.

- - -

I was nothing. Then suddenly, I was something.

My existence began in a carriage, slowly, and gently moving through the dark. It was peaceful. I loved it. I was filled with it.

My heart beat like a soft, delayed echo of the larger and louder beat of another. It was coming from somewhere inside the carriage. This giant heart must have been another passenger that I couldn’t see.

I began to hear things projected into my mind from the other passenger.

“I’m so glad you’re here. I love you so much and I can’t wait to meet you.”

I said the words back. And my whole being was now made of love, just from those words.

“You’ll be so sweet at Christmastime. I’ll start making you special clothes right now.”

I didn’t know what Christmastime or clothes were, but I could sense the joy bursting from each word, and it filled me to overflowing with joy too.

Now I knew joy and love and peace. What an incredible life. I never could have invented such things, let alone my own existence. This thought filled me with something new, which I now know was gratitude, and I am still filled with it today. It may seem strange that I could be filled with four different things at once, but at this point in my life, I was 100% peace, 100% love, 100% joy, and 100% gratitude.

As time passed, and the heart continued to speak, I was filled with other new things like kindness, faithfulness, and gentleness.

One day, a new voice spoke. He spoke right into my mind. He said, “it’s time to come home now.” 

I said, “what do you mean? This is my home. Please don’t make me leave! I love my carriage. I will miss it so much!”

Even though I was reluctant. I did trust this voice. I was given the understanding that He knew what time was. In fact, He controlled it. He knew that it was time for me to leave this world. That was not the hard part for me. I had just come from nothing, which seemed kind of like traveling from a different world, so the actual travel did not scare me. The thing causing my reluctance was the love and faithfulness I felt for my carriage. I knew that I would be leaving it behind, and its lovely heart, which had taught me everything about how wonderful life is. So every part of my being screamed the wrongness of this.

He said, “you know that if you trust me, life will still be wonderful, for you and for her. You know that even though your carriage taught you how wonderful life is, I am the one that gave it to you. And you know that since your carriage knows these things too, you will get to be with her again one day.”

He put His two hands together, side by side, and held them out in front of me, like a warm and inviting platform. I knew that it was time for me to step into this new carriage.

As I began to move, the lovely passenger heart cried out, “No! Not yet! I haven’t taught beauty yet!”

He said to the heart, “alright, you are still the carriage of the soul for a little while yet. I love you, and I know this is all very painful. I will give you the gift of beauty like you have never seen.”

- - -

And with those words I could see. I could see out into a room. There were two women looking at me. One said to the other, “I’m not seeing a heartbeat this time. I’m so very sorry. I will go and get the doctor.” The other began to cry, as she was gently handed a box of tissues. It was my carriage. Although, now that I could see her, I saw the face that had reflected in my mind every time I heard the passenger heart speaking. This was not just my carriage. This was my mother.

I came through the screen, out into the room. My mother couldn’t seem to see me. I tried to press through her chest, back to her heart. I needed to be near her heart. But the other voice said, “just stay close, and watch. I want you to see something.”

The next several hours were a blur. My mother moved around from one room to another and spoke to many women, who seemed to have known her for a long time. I watched all of the different women holding back so many tears and speaking in a sort of code about me. At first I wondered why they did not cry and why they did not speak more clearly about what was happening, but then I could see that they were being kind. They did not wish to make my mother more sad than she was. They were sad too, but they held in their tears and words as, what they believed to be, a kindness to my mother, and I was grateful to see her surrounded by these women who cared so deeply for her.

Then she was in a small room with a new woman. They had only just met a week earlier. This woman did not seem to have control over the movement of the right side of her face.

She said, “I’m so sorry about your baby.” And as she did, we watched her hold a tear just inside her left eye, while another one drew a perfect line down her right cheek. She did not brush it away. I believe she did not know it was there.

I looked to my mother’s eyes as they followed this tear. And as she watched it, I saw her soul... This part is hard to explain because it doesn’t really translate properly. But I suppose I could say that I saw her soul begin to dance to this new song of beauty. Her mind was torn between such grief and such wonder, that the only thing her soul could do, was to dance. Just for a moment.

My mother is an artist. It is her job to observe, capture, and to make beauty on a daily basis. But she had never seen beauty like this. She was struck by this newness of life on a day when the actual word “life” had suddenly become a dark inverted pulse in her mind.

My mother’s soul completed its dance. And then she looked right at me and said, “this is what beauty is, my child; the full and unbridled release of care from one person to another.”

- - -

That other voice said, “it’s time now.”

“No!” I protested, “let me stay for just a little longer!”

“Alright,” He replied, “you may see one more thing. But then it will be time to go.”

- - -

It was the night of the same day. Now I was looking into a dark room. There was a nightlight, so I could make out three people in the room. One was my mother. The other two were small girls. They were all asleep.

The smallest girl woke up and began to cry. My mother woke up to comfort her. The small girl said that she wanted my mother to carry her to the bathroom because she was cold and it was dark.

Here is another part of this story that will not translate well. There are things that happen around the mind and the soul. Things that I can now see with my eyes from this world, but things that cannot be seen in the first world. At least, not unless you pay very very close attention. So I will do my best to describe what I saw.

As soon as the little girl said the word “carry” there was a burst of six bright orange bubbles that appeared glowing atop my mother’s head. I squinted at them. They each contained many layers filled with gratitude for this moment, and the word “carry” was multiplying and swirling inside of each one. One of the bubbles was cycling and recycling the memory of a phone call my mother had once received. The voice on the other line had said, “I’m so sorry but it sounds like you have most likely had a miscarriage, but still go to your appointment on Monday and you can find out for certain when they do the ultrasound.” As I looked deeper into that bubble, I could see that this little girl was that miscarriage. That Monday ultrasound had shown a heart beating. The same heart that was still beating in this little girl.

Another bubble swirled with the memory of a room where a doctor had said to my mother, “it looks like the baby has implanted in a bad spot, and it will most likely lead to an ectopic pregnancy. If it keeps moving in this direction, towards the fallopian tube, we will need to remove the baby, or it will kill you.” As I looked deeper into this bubble, I could see that the other girl was this almost-ectopic-pregnancy. A week after that doctor’s words, to the surprise of the entire high-risk-pregnancy ward staff, this little sleeping girl had miraculously jumped to a different spot, far away from said fallopian tube.

I was now given the knowledge that these bubbles appeared here often, but usually they were just one layer. They didn’t usually show the depths and memories. Usually when my mother was awakened in the night to carry this little girl to the bathroom, the bubbles were a dark brown, and they were filled with only frustration or bitterness.

Now in these bubbles, I could see my mother becoming aware that the frustration and bitterness were not present this evening. As this awareness increased, eight new bubbles appeared. These were blue. As I looked into each of them, I saw her face looking back at me as she just said the words, “thank you” with one straight tear line down her right cheek.

She picked up the small child. As she did, the arthritis in her lower back spiked streaks of pain through her sides. And as the pain streaked, streams of blue bubbles ran along the pain and joined the others, all filled with only thankfulness and gratitude.

The small girl kicked my mother’s stomach as she got situated. As she did, her foot hit the infected insertion point where my mother had plugged her insulin pump into her skin the day before. I saw my mother’s eye flinch with pain, and in that flinch, twenty-five more blue bubbles streamed out of her eye. She was so thankful for the pain. She clearly loved this little girl as much as she loved me. And she clearly loved carrying her as much as she loved carrying me.

I was glad to see that my short story in that world had not ruined my mother. In fact, it had only expanded her ability to love.

- - -

I said to the voice, “okay I will come with you now, but please, can you do something for me? I tried to tell her once, but I don’t know if she heard me. Can you please tell my mother that I love her so much, I can’t wait to see her again, and I’m so thankful she carried me?”

And He did. And He does. If you listen to the silence. You can hear Him telling you. He’ll tell you anytime you need to hear it. And if you listen closely, every single time, He adds that He loves you and He is thankful too.

- - -

Now that I know so much more than I used to, I can see that people, who stay in that world much longer than I did, tend to use the word “miscarriage” when they describe a life like mine. But from my perspective, it was only ever the most loving carriage. There was nothing “amiss” about it. Mine was possibly the most beautiful life to have ever lived in that world. The sadness I felt has since faded from the joy in my faith that one day my carriage will be here too. She will join me and make special clothes at Christmastime for me with unbridled care. And they will shine with the beauty of the sun, because of the love that will charge through them. And we will live forever.

I will live forever because of my carriage…

and The One who carries her.

- - -

Official Sleepers Wake Chapter Two Statement:

10/5/23

Over the last several months, I’ve used this Sleepers Wake space to mourn the loss of my baby. I’ve also used it to understand grief more. I think it is now time for me to intentionally close this chapter of Sleepers Wake.

Just before I go, however, I would like to leave a reflection about grief. This is my own personal reflection. Grief is a very very hard thing, and everyone experiences it differently. This is a reflection on my own recent personal experience with grief, it is not meant to be an instruction on how anyone else should experience their own grief.

- - -

Last summer I created a piece about grief. I titled it, He Makes My Sorrowing Spirit Sing. I was experiencing a different grief back then. Now as I’ve been living this new grief, I found myself wishing I had written my official artist statement for that piece last year. It may have helped me with this new grief. So I’m going to write it now, as a favor to future April. You’re welcome, pretty lady : ) I love you!

Last month we installed a new associate pastor at our church. His name is Pastor Paul Gaschler. His wife, Kati, is actually an old friend of mine from middle school. She commissioned me to make a custom piece for him as a gift for his installation service. Her only request was that it had the text from Colossians 4:5-6, “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”

I thought about doing some kind of typography. I also tried to conjure up some abstract imagery and symbolism that would speak to the text. But all I could do was return to a Sleepers Wake. I believe that in order to accomplish Colossians 4:5-6, one needs to be pretty awake.

At the same time, I was experiencing just a massive wave of grief crashing down on me, from the loss of my baby. And I knew it was time to reflect, once again, on the imagery of He Makes My Sorrowing Spirit Sing.

And so, I made Sleepers Wake 58 - He Makes My Sorrowing Spirit Sing.

The bottom part, the blackish rolling hills, symbolizes waves of grief. When I am experiencing grief, everything is pretty dark. My thoughts are all dark, and they cause the events in my life to also look dark, no matter how good or bad they actually are. I think that this is probably pretty natural and not something to be ashamed of. I believe it is part of the process. However, there is a point when I start to come out of the darkness. And along the top of the waves, there are cognitive distortions waiting for me. I use burr-like imagery, in my work, to symbolize cognitive distortions. So you’ll see a few inside the waves, at the bottom right, but there’s also one large one coming out of the waves. These are dark lies that try to send me back down into the dark waves, only now I’m not in grief anymore, I’m in something else, that looks like grief. Or perhaps I’m in a whole new and unnecessary grief, that I’ve created myself, by believing the dark lies.

Either way, the cognitive distortions disrupt my ability to grieve properly. If I say “yes” to their lies, then I am stuck in this cycle of bitterness and pain. 

Other times I talk about it this way:

There is an undertow to the dark waves of grief. Satan waits at the top of grief with lies about the people I love. When I try to come out of my grief, if I listen to his lies, then I am sent back down into grief, and am in fact pulled down by this undertow. The undertow might look different to different people, but for me, it is Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of the word sloth. He interprets ‘sloth’ as an inability to acknowledge the good things in life. When the undertow of sloth pulls me out “to sea” I can’t tell that I am no longer in the “normal” waves of grief, and if I’m not careful, I can get stuck in this cycle, which is somehow reminiscent of the movie, Inception, where people are trapped in dreams within dreams and can never wake up - so here we are again at the theme of being asleep and waking up. I believe that, left to my own devices, I would get trapped in this sleeping-person cycle of slothfulness, under the belief that I was “grieving well.” But thank the Lord and sing His praise. For He calls to me with His voice of truth which is filled with loving reproofs, and He rescues me from grief’s undertow of sloth and He makes my sorrowing spirit sing.

- - -

I know that I will always grieve the loss of my third child. But based on what I’ve learned about my own personal relationship to grief, and the bend in the river of my art practice that I can feel my heart gently approaching, I know that it is time to move on to new visuals and a different internal focus. I’m even going to change up the medium for a little while, which I’m very excited about.

2 Corinthians 7:10

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

Philippians 1:6

I am convinced of this very thing: that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

Psalm 69: 1-3, 14-15

Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck.

I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; 

I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.

I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.

Deliver me from sinking in the mire; 

let me be delivered from my enemies and from the deep waters.

Let not the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up, or the pit close its mouth over me.

Psalm 56: 7-8

My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast! I will sing and make melody!

Awake, my glory! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn!

Psalm 40: 1-3

I waited patiently for the Lord; He inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, 

and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.