Love Story

After we lost Faith, music was one of the things that made me the most sad. Listening to the radio, most stations play love song after love song. Even church music which talks about the faithfulness and goodness of God is a struggle sometimes. While song lyrics are definitely a challenge, the music can be just as challenging. The very nature of music is to evoke an emotional reaction. One of the strange things for me about the grieving process has been that all emotions--happy, sad, and everything in between--end in tears.

This week, after seven weeks of NPR, I've been finding myself longing for music, but I think this experience has changed my taste. Classical music, especially classical Christmas music, has become my new best friend. I've never been opposed to classical music, but I've always had other preferences over classical. The last few weeks I've found the messages of on the all-Christmas-all-the-time station to be quite trite as are the love songs on many of the other stations. They simply don't meet my needs right now. Classical music has so many layers of sound, so many deep and powerful emotions.

If you listen to the radio, you know, I'm sure, that there are many stations that play a variety of styles of love songs and only a few classical stations. I've been wondering why these stations satisfied my music needs until losing my daughter. Their messages seemed fine until now. Do they remind me of my loss? Is that why they no longer satisfy? Or, are the stories within too simplistic?

I think traditional love songs seem silly mostly because my love story is not simple or easy. M and I have been married for two years and we dated for nearly three years before we got married. Parts of our story are simple and easy, others are awkward, others are funny, others are happy and joyful. None are particularly sad or difficult. Until the last seven weeks.

I've seen the statistics on what happens to couples when they lose a child. I've watched message boards on infant loss sites and seen how many women write in that they are having problems in their marriages. I won't be one of those statistics.

M reminded me a few days ago that the loss of our daughter could have been physically devastating for me. My blood might not have clotted properly. Delivering my daughter could have caused hemorrhaging or even death. In many ways, we have a second chance for our love story. Not that we really needed a second chance. The early part of our love story wasn't wrong, we didn't mess it up. We did everything right. It's more that I've realized that our story could have ended, ended in any number of ways.

I truly can't imagine sharing the experience of loss with anyone other than M. As I said in my very first post, I expected that our life together would be one of learning to love each other through the good times and the bad, but somehow I never expected the bad to be anything like this. Looking at the statistics for marriages that face challenges like ours, I realize that the marriages that survive are probably stronger. Their love stories are deeper than before. They are like many of the classical music pieces I've heard recently, layers of love like the layers of sound.

I think this is the reason I haven't been able to listen to and appreciate much of the music I loved before. My love story is changing. M and I have both been changed as individuals by the loss of our daughter, therefore, our love story must change to accommodate those changes. We are becoming a deeply layered piece of music with fast paced, joyful movements, slow, soft, melancholy movements, strings, woodwinds, horns. Layer upon layer of beautiful sound.

They say that having a baby is one of the most stressful events in a marriage, one that can either pull two people apart or can bond two people like never before. Even without her living, breathing presence, our daughter is bringing us closer together. One more gratitude in the midst of heartache.