When death touches our lives, we often feel a deep sense of loneliness. And when suffering enters the picture, we often feel a self-preserving urge to avoid it, even at the expense of accompanying the sufferer. Our loneliness and self-preserving instincts can often stem from a recognition that in our experiences of life, we all desire true relationship and community with our neighbors, friends, and God or some other transcendent force. We long for true community, and we yearn for this community to last forever. But we lose people all the time, and it is in those moments when we need the most support—the most vulnerable parts of our lives, as we mourn endings. This need for support flies in the face of individualism, fix-it-yourself culture, and the social imperative to “be good enough” as an island.
Such societal pressures against seeking community in vulnerable moments are exacerbated when the cause of our loneliness and fear is stigmatized. Every October we recognize a particularly stigmatized form of vulnerability: miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss. Although pregnancy and infant loss is the end of one in every four pregnancies, societal norms around pregnancy, women’s bodies, and abortion make it nearly taboo to discuss. Families who experience these losses often feel they must suffer in silence, that asking those around them for support is requesting of them too great a burden that brings too much awkwardness and pain. That is why bereavement doulas exist.
We, the two authors of this piece—Br. Bobby McFadden and Dr. Abby Jorgensen—are both bereavement doulas: professionals who support families through miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss. This support is physical, emotional, advocational, informational, social, and spiritual. We both provide this support while we each live out different vocations. One of us is a wife and mother, sociology professor, and birth worker; one of us is a religious brother, theology and literature professor, and graduate student chaplain. As bereavement doulas, we both support loss families in grief by helping them in their search for community and for hope. And, as we live out this work daily, we know that such a search cannot occur without possessing hope ourselves. As Pope Benedict writes in Spe Salvi,
We see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well (§2).
Christians can imagine a hopeful future because they know and can be certain about a God who unconditionally loves them despite the trials of this present world. Pope Benedict continues,
The human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which makes him say: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39). If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then—only then—is man “redeemed,” whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances (§26).
Without this unconditional love and the certainty of a person who loves like this, it can become very difficult to help someone walk through grief while believing that something like the Cross offers true life.
Pope Benedict writes that human beings not only come to know themselves in suffering, but also that they accompany one another in it. As Benedict emphasizes, “the true measure of humanity is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer” (Spe Salvi, §38). Bereavement doulas are given the sacred privilege of walking with families who lose a child. By being present and offering care and support, a bereavement doula or another grief worker can accompany a family in their search for hope. They can become “a light of Christ’s love” and a bearer of the hope of his love, because they allow a family to know that they matter and are loved in such intense suffering. When a bereavement doula accompanies a family that has experienced loss in this manner, they carry the family’s suffering and thereby share in that suffering in a certain sense. Because the burden of suffering is shared by another, a family experiencing loss knows the power of hope, because they know that their doula bestows compassion upon them in moments where all they may see is pain and cannot make sense of the world. The pain is not lessened. The suffering is not wiped away. Yet, the burden is shared.
Are we capable of the hope that allows us to walk with others? Especially in situations of so much pain and suffering, when one beholds the desperation of a mother or father who is grieving, we cannot help but ask, “Can I truly find hope here? Can I truly walk with this family?” Benedict seems to anticipate this very question when he writes in Spe Salvi, “Yet once again the question arises: are we capable of this [suffering with another]? . . . Is the promise of love so great that it justifies the gift of myself?” (§39). Although we may be tempted to close ourselves off from the suffering of another due to the immense burden, the alternative of not walking with Christ’s love seems to be a high price to pay. After all, if we fail to love, we seem to create our own hell.
All human beings have this capacity to love. When a mother and father experience the love of their child, they cannot help but give their heart away. Loving means worrying about your child sometimes; feeling sadness when they are hurt; experiencing sorrow when they choose what is not good for them. Opening ourselves to love means opening ourselves to vulnerability. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves, “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal” (121). Avoiding suffering means avoiding true love and the vulnerability that accompanies those possibilities of great suffering and pain, which make us human.
If a person really wishes to close themselves off from pain, they must refuse what makes them human, and in the process, admit that their heart cannot be broken, but become “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable” (ibid.). Yet in the pain of our condition, death and suffering will come even when we try to avoid all entanglements. We can work to enact a temporary sense of self-preservation through the avoidance of love and yet still experience suffering. Because of this catch-22, the Catholic caregiver must continue to refine his or her sense of hope so that they do not give into despair. They must seek to believe in this unconditional love so that they can offer a full and healthy presence to those who are grieving.
Such a provision follows in Christ’s example. Pope Benedict writes, “Man is worth so much to God that he himself became man in order to suffer with man in an utterly real way—in flesh and blood—as is revealed to us in the account of Jesus's Passion.” Since Jesus demonstrates his unconditional love for all of humanity on the Cross, he affirms that his love is present in all suffering, and “the star of hope” rises because the beauty of unconditional love can be found in the dark (Spe Salvi §39). God suffers with us by entering into our lived experiences. He does not shirk away from our sufferings. Rather, he embraces them and transfigures them with the hope of his unconditional love. We work to accompany Jesus in his passion through our support for loss families. But we are not Christ; we are only his disciples. Although we cannot completely embody Christ’s love due to our humanity, we have beautiful examples from Christ’s passion that show how we can be stars of hope for families.
Simon of Cyrene and Veronica are two such examples of how we might enter into someone’s suffering. Both are faced with a situation in which they cannot actually make anything better. Neither can stop the torture of the man they help. Simon does not even help voluntarily; he is pressed into service as allowed by Roman law. And, while Veronica does help voluntarily, there is precious little she can actually do—just wipe away the blood streaming down the man’s face. What a futile effort, when blood continues being spilled. The momentary comfort of a veil clearing the eyes is just that—momentary.
The gift provided by Veronica and Simon is not the physical effect of their temporary actions—a lightening of the load or a cleaning of the brow. Rather, their true gift is given in entering into the pain of another. This is particularly noticeable in the Passion narrative because the Other into whose suffering they enter has been abandoned, even by his friends, because of the confusion and stigma surrounding his situation.
An analogous kind of abandonment can occur in perinatal loss. There can be confusion about where a body is, whether a soul was indeed imbued, or why this loss occurred. There can also be stigma surrounding the loss of a little one—that one should not grieve something that was “merely the product of conception,” or on the other hand, that one has failed as a human by not living up to the promise that human bodies were designed to do pregnancy and childbirth “well.”
Despite the confusion the griever might feel or the stigma their society might place upon them, and despite the apparent futility of their temporary efforts, Veronicas and Simons step into the suffering anyway. Veronicas and Simons give the gift of presence, which outlasts futile and temporary efforts. The gift of presence is actually a testament to one of our most fundamental realities: it is not good for man to be alone. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote,
Indeed, to accept the “other” who suffers, means that I take up his suffering in such a way that it becomes mine also. Because it has now become a shared suffering, though, in which another person is present, this suffering is penetrated by the light of love. The Latin word con-solatio, “consolation,” expresses this beautifully. It suggests being with the other in his solitude, so that it ceases to be solitude (Spe Salvi §38).
Our companioning, our willingness to suffer alongside another, is a gift of self that Pope Benedict also calls a promise of love. Even when such a gift does not resolve a situation, change the course of events, alleviate pain, or bring back a child, it does witness to hope.
Yet it does so at a significant cost to the person who gives herself. Veronica and Simon transform through their actions to be more like Christ. Indeed, every grief worker, whether they willingly take on the role or not, is invited into the nature of grief work as exhausting, demanding, and transformative. These three characteristics are intertwined, given the weight of the burden of another’s cross. As Abigail puts it in A Catholic Guide to Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss:
Grief work is transformational. Losing someone changes you; also, the act of stepping into another’s pain changes you. If you support someone through a loss, you may and should never be the same again. This may sound intimidating, but I find it to be incredibly comforting. Every moment in which I interact with someone who is suffering is a moment when I am invited to become more deeply attuned to the suffering image of God in the other person and the keen, fundamentally human experience of longing that comes with any sense of loss. Every moment of grief work is a prayer, a connection, and an opportunity to make a full gift of myself.
As bereavement doulas, we are called to follow Christ along with Simon and Veronica as Christ’s disciples, in supporting families through a particular kind of loss. In your own vocations, professions, and community, you will also be called to walk into the suffering of others and you are also called to follow Christ's example of love. We are all called to be like Christ.
We can, like Veronica and Simon, enter into the suffering of others despite the confusion and despite the stigma. We may willingly take this on (perhaps by choosing to do bereavement work) or we may be forced into it (perhaps by virtue of friendship to a parent who suddenly becomes a parent experiencing loss). But either way, we can enter into the pain of another and, through our relationality and constancy, serve as witnesses to hope.
