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On How to Grieve With Hope

For the month of September, any donations made to our GoFundMe will be matched up to $5000. These matching donations will be made in honor and memory of my cousin Kira who passed away in May 2013. Although four years have passed since Kira left us, we still very much grieve the loss of her presence in our lives.

The last blog post ended with the idea of grieving with hope and not in desperation.

To be honest, it seems odd to be writing posts on grief when our blog is about how excited we are about our upcoming adoption. But in order to move forward with building our family, Alex and I had to fully come to terms with our past. We have known grief- painful, heartbreaking grief. The trials of multiple miscarriages bring about dashed dreams and physically painful heartbreak. You start to lose hope that there is a reason for this.

Miscarriages aren't the only thing we have had to grieve.

The second infertility doctor we went to looked at our test scores, put us through a whole bunch more tests, and called us with the confirmation that we have the smallest chance (in the very low single digits) that we would be able to conceive on our own. If we wanted to do IVF, we would need to move on that now, and even then, the chances of a viable pregnancy were slim.

Our story became something more than grieving three babies who we will meet in heaven. This diagnosis evolved the story into one that had us grieving any possibility of ever having children who are biologically our own. Naming what we were grieving became a big part of this. We will never be able to do a cute pregnancy announcement, gender reveal party, compare pregnancy aches and pains with my sisters or friends, feel a baby kick, see the baby on a doctor's screen at appointments, etc.

And it was truly something to grieve over.

Despite all of our grief, we still have hope. We have hope that God will, most importantly, use our story to point others to Him and find that they are not alone in this journey, that they too may have hope. We also have a hope that this is not the end of our story- that God will use our heart for fostering and adoption to expand our family.

My aunt and uncle went through the incredibly devastating experience of losing a child. Their sadness in losing Kira has not ended and it never will. But in their grief, they have hope. They know their story did not end with Kira's death. Instead, their story evolved into one that gives hope to others who have a sick child or are in the process of losing their child. They are on hospital committees and reaching out to coworkers. They are able to continue to have hope in their own grief by giving hope to others.

Sometimes it's still hard to be hopeful and be at peace about our situation. In fact, there are days where I want to be angry about it and say "It's not fair". Despite those days, I know that my faith and trust in God the Father will bring me back to a place of hope in Him.

Whatever your struggle or trial is, remember that you can have hope and peace and be hope and peace to others through Jesus.

*Romans 5:5*

And Hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.