Losing Lucy: 9 Months Later

A look back at our time since the loss, and learnings from our retreat

It feels like numerous milestones and shifts are occurring in our life all at once. Today marks 9 months since Lucy passed away. Over the course of the last month we also passed over the time period where we have now spent more time without Lucy than we had with her during the pregnancy and her life. That was an unexpected and surreal realization and hit us pretty hard. Finally, we’re going through a definitive change in seasons once again, indicating that the world keeps spinning despite your desperate attempts to slow it down while you process and progress through a very difficult situation.

Yet there has been healing and growth that has happened as well. Over the past few weeks, Alyssa and I had quality time with family and the opportunity to attend an infant child loss retreat at Faith’s Lodge in Northern Wisconsin. The time with family and long weekend alone to check in with ourselves was much needed.

The lessons that Lucy taught us in her life have grown in strength over these past nine months. In taking these past weeks to deeply reflect on our journey and to check in on how we are progressing, a few other key ideas and lessons have become clear to us as well that are worth sharing. Some of them are particular to us, but some have wider applications.

Nothing we endure in life buys us impunity from any other suffering that life may have in store for us.

There is no moment in life where you get a “dues paid” notification sent to you from God. Regardless of what we have suffered through and what burdens we have carried up to this point, there is always more that could be piled on. This realization could easily make us overwhelmed and paranoid. Instead we are trying to face this fact by asking this simple question:

“Are we ready?”

Yes, we have a certain level of exhaustion and we would be incredibly grateful for a few months to settle ourselves into our lives. However, those aspects of life are out of our control. Instead, we can only do those things in life that permit us to heal and prepare for whatever life might have in store for us.

In the past, I would have seen this as debilitatingly exhausting. I would have given up. The version of me that went to alcohol would have said, “Fuck it” and drank. But instead, I find beauty and honor in this fact of life that there is no relief of suffering and burden.

I had a transformational lesson during rehab. I had someone encourage me to turn the phrase, “God doesn’t give you problems that you can’t handle” into “God doesn’t give you problems that God can’t handle”. It is a perspective shift that changed everything for me.

Yes, there will be further challenges and more suffering. That is inevitable. But if we continue to trust that God will see us through those challenges, we can simply focus on doing what we can in the moment and rest easy at night.

We are grateful for Grant and what we have in life.

Grant has forced Alyssa and I in incredibly unexpected ways to process and heal from the loss of Lucy. He has given us a sense of purpose and has made it so that we are not dealing with an identity crisis in our title as parents. We are so lucky to have him in our lives and to not have to question if we are still parents or not after the loss of a child.

I was blind to this situation and experience prior to attending the grief retreat. For any of you readers who may have suffered a loss of a first child, I hope that this question of identity is one you can address and talk about. It’s easy for others to say, “Well you’ll always be their parent” but to live your life not taking the action that you want to as a parent is gut wrenching.

I received an ever so small flavor of this in the weeks after we lost Lucy. Grant went through an rough sleep regression once Alyssa and I got home from the hospital, and so we were up tending to him nearly every night. During those late night periods I would have thoughts that I should be getting up to help with an infant during these wee hours of the morning anyway. It made me realize there was activity and responsibility that I was yearning for in my life that I was unable to fulfill.

In addition to continuing to be a parent to Grant, watching a three year old come to understand and process death is a humbling experience. Our household talks about Lucy all the time, as if she is here with us. We exclaim when we miss her, we sing loudly so that she can hear us, we address why Mom or Dad might be crying at the dinner table and we talk about what it means to die. Grant has shown incredible resilience, tenderness and understanding through this entire situation and he motivates Alyssa and I to do the same.

The fear that Lucy will be forgotten has waned.

I no longer care if other people remember Lucy, especially in the way in which Alyssa and I will keep her in our hearts. Her memory lives on through the manner in which Alyssa and I live our lives. Once I realized that I stopped worrying about how her name will inevitably escape some of our family, friends and acquaintances in the near future.

It still hurts and is shocking at times.

“Time heals all wounds”. I have a love/hate relationship with this classic statement. It’s one of those phrases that I feel like I could always add a “Yes, but…” to every time I think it or hear it. Sure, time gives us the space to progress with our healing, to figure out our new normal, but that does guarantee things get “easier”.

Both Alyssa and I have moments where we snap back to a realization that we indeed went through everything that happened in 2023. There are moments where there’s a dream-like aspect to the entire story and it is a difficult re-entry to reality when your mind reconnects with the fact that everything your remembering was a real event that we went through.

Tears and sorrow continue to hit at random times. I cried harder and longer than I have ever experienced in my entire life alone in the mountains two weeks ago. There was a mix of sadness, exhaustion and gratitude that just overcame me. I felt that I had cleansed my system and cleared everything out after that. But then I just choked up typing that last section out about Grant and wishing I was getting up during the night to take care of an infant.

Grief and loss is confusing and non-linear.

People continue to show up in very surprising ways

For those navigating, or who have navigated periods of grief, you will know this learning well. There are two sides to this coin: those you expect to show up that don’t, and those that show up in incredible ways that you never anticipated.

Here’s my addition to this lesson. You select which side of the coin that you dwell on and focus your energy. Yes, it’s a shock when there’s silence or a flat out stupid comment made by those that you thought were close to you prior to your entry into intense grief. Yet, there’s incredible beauty in the relationships that deepen that you never anticipated to be there during this time period as well.

We have been very deliberate about focusing on how there are key relationships in our lives that have deepened through this experience and we work hard to minimize how much we dwell on those that seemingly haven’t shown up well in our lives since our loss.

Our faith and trust in a plan has minimized how much we question ‘Why?’

This is one aspect of the grief journey where I don’t connect with the vast majority of individuals that are in similar situations as us. There have been intense situations where people are expressing their frustration, anger and confusion about why God or life would do this to themselves and their family. I have largely focused on listening to the other person and trying to give them space to process and think. I’ll be there for them as best as I can, but I have largely been able to stay out of that thought pattern myself with our own situation.

I resoundingly believe and trust that there’s a plan. Some people frame it as, “everything happens for a reason” and while I get that sentiment, I feel it largely cheapens the way we have connected with this lesson. The issue I take with this statement is it often leaves individuals obsessively searching or wondering when they will stumble upon that reason. I have found incredible comfort and understanding that we may never have an “ah-ha” moment that clarifies everything for us. That’s just the way life goes sometimes.

There’s a plan. Lucy was part of it. Alyssa and I did exactly what we could have and needed to do as a part of that plan. And now we are doing the best in the aftermath of Lucy’s life. I trust that. We trust that. Accepting that does not make the road easy, but it does allow us to bypass this agonizing question of “why”.

We don’t know why, we may never know why, but we’re just going to focus on doing the next best thing and living our life to honor Lucy, Grant and each other.

That’s all I’ve got for this week. Love to you all, thank you for

Kyle