Experiencing Halloween After Baby Loss
Confession, I use to dislike fall. I did not fall head over heels about pumpkin lattes or hot cocoa. I highly disliked the change in the atmosphere from summer to fall. Every time this season would roll around, I would feel an unexplained heaviness in my spirit and a darkness would fall over me. I would often chuck this up to a mild case of seasonal depression. The curious thing was that it only ever happened during fall. Every other season was completely exempt from any heaviness or darkness.
This seasonal feeling only grew worse after Julian. The last and final weeks I carried Julian in my womb were in the month of October. His tiny heart stopped beating around halloween and we found out at the doctors office during the first week of November. How could I ever hope to be at peace with fall again?
This year we will be celebrating Julian's 5th angelversary at Zion National Park again. We started this tradition early on, mainly because I couldn't fathom staying home on this dreadful day. I needed to create happier memories for me and my family around Nov 6th. Years when I have felt too lazy or just not up to the trip, my husband has picked up the slack. He loves going to Zion this time of year as much as I've grown to love it. Spending that day in the peacefulness of nature has healed our hearts in a way. It has helped us create new and beautiful memories with our boys. In addition, we have also created better traditions around fall that have healed my heart personally around this season. During the month of October we celebrate biblical Sukkot or in english "The Feast of Tabernacles". This has also brought so much healing and created new and joyful memories for our little family. I can finally say that I look forward to all the beauty of fall!
However, there is one tradition that I honestly can't ever go back to after Julian. This tradition is one filled with morbid lawn displays, it is filled with darkness and it too often trivializes the severity of death. This is probably the only holiday where you can buy dead babies and decapitated baby heads at home depot or your local walmart. It is a holiday where people think it is amusing to decorate their doorstep with death or even literally place a figure of Death itself on their porch. People dress their little boys as lifeless bodies, skeletons or dead XYZ.
No amount of healing will ever help me accept death as anything but what it really is. Death is a horror story for those who have lived it and embraced it closely. It is not something I ever want on my doorstep or inside my home. As my husband and I were taking a stroller walk with baby E around our neighborhood this month, it became so apprent to me how much I abhor halloween. It is heavy with everything that I dislike about life. It is heavily dark, morbid and horrifyingly tricks us into believeing that death is trivial and amusing. Call me crazy, but nothing about that is trivial for me.
I cannot wait for the day when death is finally and rightfully defeated!
But when this corruptible body will have put on incorruptibility and this mortal body will have put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?” 1 Cor 15:54-55
How do you feel about Halloween?
