The famous maxim leads us to believe that time heals, my experience is that this isn’t true. What I am coming to learn is that I don’t want or need it to.
Our first IVF cycle progressed all the way to pregnancy. We found out we were pregnant on a Friday and immediately started passing this news onto our friends and family. We had made the decision early on to be open with people about our journey. However by the middle of the next week the unthinkable had happened and we lost the baby.
Some medical ‘professionals’ accused us of not being desperate enough to have children, as though our whole life should be aimed at this goal. They didn’t get that we are defined by something bigger. Similarly our miscarriage doesn’t define us, it is something that happened to us. Somedays I can cope without choking up every time I see a baby, other days the desire to have children chokes me as soon as I wake. The pain doesn’t define me, but not to feel it ever wouldn’t be honest or human.
What time can do is give perspective, but for me this is something that came almost immediately. In the days that followed the miscarriage I was sorely tempted to feel sorry for myself and rage at God and anyone who would listen about how unfair the hand I had been dealt was. And then I’d turn on the TV and see Japan ripped apart by disaster after disaster. And I’d realise that I am one very small part in God’s massive creation and I am not the only one going through a hard time, by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t know what you are going through, or what you have been through. But the chance to pray for people going through a more torrid time than I was allowed me to refocus my gaze less selfishly. After all if I love myself enough to pray for my own tragedies then I should do the same for others.
Matthew 22:39 ‘And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’
Time may not heal, but it certainly helps.