A Crisis of Faith

Holding on to my faith over the past 2 years has been a constant battle for me. When Vivienne died, it forced me to re-evaluate the belief system that I’d been raised with. I had to find a way not to be angry with God. I had to find a way to still believe. I have to believe that I will see my daughter again someday. Some days, that’s the only thought that gets me out of bed and keeps me going.

And then we lost 3 more children. And I fought again to keep my belief that God is good, and I needed to believe.

And then we lost any ability to conceive a child naturally, followed by losing the ability for me to carry a child all together. And I fought again to not blame God. To focus on the idea that eventually, the randomness of the universe would have to turn in our favor. It has been a hard fought battle to keep my faith through all that we’ve been through. And I’m starting to lose the battle.

Over the past 5 months, I have changed jobs (a transition that has been more difficult than I expected), we bought a new house (with issues and expenses that were not disclosed or uncovered during inspection, costing us more money than we anticipated), we still own our previous house (that despite many showings, overwhelmingly positive feedback and a price reduction that is basically giving it away, defies all convention and will not sell), and we continue to pursue surrogacy, despite a failed attempt on our first try (a difficult, time consuming, terrifying and very expensive proposition).

Earlier last week, I hit my breaking point. I was completely overwhelmed by all that we have on our plate. I did not know what to do or where to turn. And so I did something I have not done in a long time. I prayed. As I decided to do this, I heard the sayings people have often said to me. Let go and let God. Give it over to God. And so I did, and I prayed. It was a simple prayer, but delivered in the most desperate tone.

God, I have more than I can handle, and I need Your help.

I let go, and I asked God to have mercy on us. I said this prayer for several days, and yesterday something happened.

My beloved cat, Oliver, who comforted me at the lowest points of my life died. It was completely out of nowhere – he was not sick, showed no signs of being in any pain, and was his normal self when I left for work. Yesterday afternoon, Gordon called me to tell me that he died. We don’t know what happened (our theory is either a stroke, he choked, or some combination of the 2), but it all happened in about 5 minutes. He was gone, and I am shattered.

I told God that I had more than I could handle, and I needed help. And instead, I got more pain. I hadn’t prayed for anything specific – just to have some stress taken off my plate. And instead, I got more. It’s like I can hear Him laughing “you thought you had more than you could handle? Well, how about this.”

At every bad news that we got, I fought against the idea that God was doing this to me, that I was being punished. I told myself that the universe is random, and sometimes, people have to play a bad hand. I told myself that eventually, the randomness of the universe would turn in our favor. But now, I have to admit, that I’m not so sure about that. I’m not so sure anymore that God is kind and loving. I asked for help, and I got the rug pulled out from under me yet again.

People often say to me that God will never give you more than you can handle. What complete and total BS. Do not mistake the fact that I am still surviving what we have been handed over the past 2 years as me handling anything. I feel broken on more days than not. God has given me more than I can handle over and over again. And when I cried uncle and said I could take no more, I got more anyway.

I don’t know how to reconcile this latest loss. I’m losing the will to fight for my faith anymore. I can’t quite figure out what I’m fighting for. In the end. I think all I’m really fighting for is the idea that I’ll see my children in heaven. And that’s what keeps me hanging on to faith. And wrestling with the idea that maybe God is doing all of this to us after all makes me feel like my ultimate punishment will be that I will not get to spend eternity with them. Wouldn’t that be quite the last laugh at my expense? 

This thought of never getting to see my children again cuts me to the core of my soul. It’s the thought that keeps me hanging on, but it’s also the thing that can make me curl up into a ball and cry so hard I can’t breath. The idea that I’ll never see my children again makes me wonder what the point is of anything.

And what am I supposed to do with that thought? Let Go and let God? I’ve seen where that gets me.

Thank God

I’ve written in this blog before about coming to terms with God and my faith through the loss of my daughter. My therapist tells me that this is my time to decide what my faith is for me, not what I’ve been taught by my parents and church. Every time I feel like I’m making progress with it, another question comes up to set me back.

I have tried harder than I can tell you to come up with an explanation of my daughter’s death that doesn’t have me blaming God. So when people tell me there’s a reason for everything or losing her is part of a greater plan that I don’t understand, I get angry. Those are explanations that force me to lay my daughter’s dead body at the feet of God and ask why He did this. That is not how I want to define my faith.

After some reading, much thought and introspection, I arrived at the conclusion that God doesn’t control everything. This isn’t an idea I was raised with, but it makes sense to me. A loving God (which is what I believe) would never put His children through this to make a point, to teach a lesson, or to get them from point A to point B. You can’t watch the news for more than 5 minutes before you have to accept that there is evil in this world. If God controlled everything, there would be logic and reason, and people would get what they deserve, good or bad. That is certainly not the world we live in.

So my latest aggravation in this area is hearing people give credit to God for their blessings and living children. I know that sounds harsh, but hear me out. I am certainly not against people being thankful for their blessings – honestly, I believe that more people take them for granted than appreciate them. And I’m not against people being thankful to God. But, let me tell you what I hear when this happens.

When someone says “the baby is healthy, thank God!” I start to ask “you gave them a healthy baby, why not me?”

 When someone says “God answers prayers!” I wonder why God could answer their prayers, but not mine. (on occasion, people make me feel like I didn’t pray hard enough for my daughter – I’m sure you can imagine how that makes me feel without having me explain it)

When someone says “I put my faith in God, and He gave me what I needed” I think about how I put my faith in God and got the worst heartbreak I can imagine.

When a child many thought wouldn’t survive pulls through, people say “believe in miracles!” All I can think is that God thought enough to get involved and save that child, but not mine. My child wasn’t worthy of miraculous intervention.

It’s hard not to feel like a heathen for questioning why we thank God. In hindsight, it was so much easier for me to get to a place where I could accept that bad things happen and they aren’t God’s fault. Turns out, it’s harder to accept that good things happen that aren’t God’s fault either. I had faith, prayed, and believed in miracles. My daughter still died, and I don’t believe it’s God’s fault. So if someone has faith, prays, and believes in miracles, and their daughter lives, is it to God’s credit? I just don’t know how to reconcile not blaming God for the bad stuff and still giving Him credit and thanks for the good stuff. 

The New Normal . . . So Far

It’s been a year. I’ve been writing for 9 months about this “new normal” of mine, and trying to figure out what it is. The short answer is that I don’t know yet. I’m still very much a work in progress. I’ve learned a lot over the past year, but I know that I’m still nowhere near level ground. It will likely take a lifetime to figure out my new normal, but here is what I can say it is so far.

My new normal is:

Being able to cry, hard, in a split second. It doesn’t take much to take me there, and I’ve learned that I can cry freely in front of anyone (friends, coworkers, strangers, even my boss).

Spending large amounts of time focusing on just breathing. Breathing is often a very conscious act for me.

Extreme introversion. I’ve never been terribly social or out-going, and I’ve only gotten more introverted over the last year. Part of it is that I recognize who really matters, and part of it is self-protection.

Recognizing that there are 4 types of people in my life:

·                            People that truly understand

·                            People that genuinely try to understand and actually empathize

·                            People that pretend to try to understand, but judge instead

·                            People who just don’t care

I’m learning to emphasize the first 2 and get rid of the latter 2.

Getting advice from anyone and everyone. Everyone has an opinion about how to manage my grief, how to cope with infertility, and what I need to do now. In the end, only my opinion counts for me.

Coping with changed friendships. I’ve had many close friendships change over the past year – some got stronger, some just changed, and some went away. There is more loss that comes with loss than most people recognize.

Living broken, but living. (Sarah, that one’s for you!)

A stronger, but changed faith. I've had my bouts of serious anger and questioning with God over the past year, and I know I'm not done. But today, I can say that my faith is stronger, but different in many ways from the faith I had before.

Experiencing multiple contrasting moods in a 5 second span – happy changes to guilt which changes to sadness which changes to bitterness in seconds flat.

Knowing what it’s like to miss someone so much that it physically hurts to the very core of your soul.

Feeling such bitterness and jealousy when I see or hear of someone who is pregnant or a small baby. I hate this ugly side of grief, but I can’t deny that it’s part of my normal now.

A stab in the heart every time someone asks “do you have any children?” And the moment where my heart stops as I know what will come next when I answer the question openly.

Balancing between not wanting people to forget my daughter, but not being defined solely by my loss. It is an impossible tightrope to walk.

Being able to count on 1 hand the people I really need in life and knowing they’ll be there in a hot second if I needed them.

Knowing that when life gets bad, there’s only 1 person I want to see, and fortunately, I married him.

Getting What You Deserve

Over the past few months, as we experience loss after loss, we’ve had many people say to us “you deserve for something good to happen.” There’s certainly an element of feeling that we’ve paid our dues. At the same time, I have a hard time feeling like that entitles us to something good. We didn’t deserve the bad things that happened to us, so how does that make us deserving of good?

I've spent many, many days since losing Vivienne and the 3 babies after her asking “why us?” Lately, I’ve started asking “why not us?” I don’t think any one of us has done anything to deserve such horrible things, but I also don’t think we’ve done anything that makes us immune from tragedy. It would seem that bad things have to happen, and they can happen to any of us, and none of us would deserve them.

We’ve been through a lot that we don’t deserve. Holding our much loved, and much wanted daughter while she died. Three consequent pregnancies that brought much fear and worry, with only sadness in the end. And with our latest pregnancy requiring surgery, I’d say that’s a pretty full load of bad things we don’t deserve. But does it mean that now we've earned some good?

I’ve struggled a lot with the randomness of the universe that I believe to be behind all of our losses. I’ve seen some amazing women and families be put through hell, while seeing many people who we could call “not deserving” get everything they wish for and more.  I can only chalk that up to the universe being completely random. If good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, how else can I see it?

There are many aspects of religion that teach us that God has complete control – we are living out a plan that we don’t understand and God is giving us everything we need, whether we know it or not. I’ve written before about how I don’t believe this anymore, and with each blow we take, I become more resistant at putting this all at God’s feet. I don’t blame Him, because I don’t think He’s responsible. I think God is giving me strength that I never even imagined I had (otherwise, I don’t know how I’m surviving this), but I don’t think He is DOING this to my family. The randomness in the universe has given us some very unlucky hands, and God is helping us to survive them.

I’ve had a very hard time coming to terms with this. In a sense, it feels sacriligeous because it violates some tenants of religion that are seared into my brain. Accepting that it doesn’t work the way I was taught as a child has been very hard to overcome. It’s also been hard to accept that life is, in many ways, random. You can do good things and live a good life and still draw the worst hand. So, what’s the incentive to do good?

I’ve come to accept that the reward for a well-lived life comes in the afterlife. While we may be punished on this earth for doing nothing wrong, I believe that the reward and justice comes when we get to heaven. I have to believe that this is where God does have complete control and the good people receive their just reward. Honestly, this is what gets me through the day most of the time. I’ve learned the hard way that this life isn’t fair. I have to believe that there is good coming to us down the line – it just might be farther down the line than I’d like.

A Baptism

Yesterday, we went to the baptism of a friend’s new son. Normally, I steer clear of anything baby related (generally, they are celebrations, and my sobbing doesn’t provide a celebratory tone), but this was a friend from a support group we attended, and I’m happy to help her celebrate her rainbow baby. As I expected, it brought me back to Vivienne’s baptism. It’s one of the few baby rituals we got to have, despite the attending clergy.

After Vivienne died, our amazing nurse Sue asked if we wanted a visit from the clergy. In no way were either of us in our right minds, but instinct took over. I said yes because we needed to have our baby baptized. It was late on a Friday night, and it never even occurred to us to call our own pastor, so they sent up the priest who was on call.

I’m sure that when he arrived, he said something about being sorry for our loss. I honestly can’t remember because what he said next stunned me so much. “I understand you want her baptized,” he said, “but we don’t do that. We don’t baptize them after they’re gone. It doesn’t matter.” He then asked to pray with us, which we let him do, and we sent him away.

I don’t think I’ll ever forgive that priest for what he did. Our own pastor (who was furious about what this priest did) told us that when he said “it doesn’t matter” he meant that it didn’t affect her going to heaven, but he agreed it was an incredibly poor choice of words. In the end, though, that priest had an opportunity to comfort grieving parents. He had the chance to reinforce our faith and that our daughter was safely with God. Instead, he chose to stand on his dogma and do the exact opposite of what I believe God would want. Did he think that God would strike him down for baptizing a dead baby? I do hope that somehow he knows that he had an opportunity to provide some peace, and instead chose to add to the pain.

There are many things that bothered me about what this priest did. I think what got to me most of all was that he would be the first of many people who would treat our daughter as less of a person because she only lived for 8 minutes. It gives the message that she was somehow less worthy of this ritual that every Christian gets. It wasn’t about whether it got her into heaven or not, it was about recognizing the meaning of her life and that she mattered.

After the priest left, our amazing nurse Sue came to my bedside and said “that’s not true. We baptize babies all of the time. I’ll get the holy water.” And a few minutes later, Vivienne was baptized by amazing nurse Sue, her Dad, and me. She mattered to us, and we wanted to do right by her.

Vivienne was baptized, and that’s what is most important. But, this experience taught me an important lesson very early on in my journey as Vivienne’s mother. It’s up to me and her Dad to make her life matter and to make sure she’s recognized as the real person she was. Just like the priest, if there are people who want to minimize her life, they’ll be sent away. And like amazing nurse Sue, the people who see how much she matters become heroes to me, and practically like family.

Heaven

I’ve told the story here before about the prayer I said as I laid in my hospital bed the night Vivienne died. I told God that I would never understand why this happened, but I needed to know that my daughter would be safe. So, I prayed that He would welcome her into heaven, love her, and keep her safe until I get to see her again.

I’ve never doubted for one second that Vivienne is in heaven. I like to think that she’s there with my Dad, and he’s taking care of her until I get there (it’s a thought that makes me cry and gives me comfort at the same time). I can’t decide whether she’s a baby or a little girl in heaven—I’ve pictured her both ways.  Either way, I know that she’s safe and surrounded by loved ones.

A couple of months after Vivienne died, I read the book Heaven Is For Real. It’s the true story of a little boy, who during surgery goes to heaven, and comes back to tell his parents the story. He knew so many things from this trip that he couldn’t have known otherwise—it’s hard to read and not feel reassured that Heaven is waiting for us. I’ve never questioned whether there is a heaven, but these days, I look for any and all reassurances I can find.

In the book, there is a chapter called Two Sisters that really touched me (I hope I’m not spoiling this for anyone who hasn’t read it). The little boy, Colton, tells his mother that he has 2 sisters. Colton has 1 living sister and no idea that his mother lost a baby years earlier. He tells his mother that he met his other sister in heaven. Even though she died as a baby, she was a little girl in heaven, but she didn’t have a name because their parents never gave her one (the mother miscarried before she knew she was having a girl). It gave me comfort that I knew our little girl was up there, and that she had her name.

In one of the early support groups I went to (we both still go every month), one of the Moms talked about how she’s no longer afraid to die. When she dies, she gets to be reunited with her son—that’s a happy thing, not something to be afraid of. I think of that sentiment often. Losing Vivienne has changed my perspective on death. Don’t worry—I’m not trying to expedite the process or anything. If I’m still here, then I still have something to do, and there is purpose to my life. But when it happens, I get to be with Vivienne again. That thought not only makes me not afraid to die, it makes me kind of excited. I actually daydream about when I’ll get to go to heaven. I’m sure that sounds strange, but it is what keeps me moving and trying to be better.

So, when it’s my time, I’ll be pushing people aside to get to the pearly gates. And when I do—one of 2 things will happen. I will see my Dad holding my baby girl, and he will hand her to me. Or a little girl will run up to me and call me Mommy. Who wouldn’t be excited about that?

The Great Plan

Seems like everyone believes there is some plan for my life. Either that God has a plan for me or that they hold this belief that things will “work out.” I don’t know what to believe right now, but I do know this—if this is all part of some great plan, I hate this plan.

It feels a bit sacrilegious to say that I hate God’s plan for me. Maybe someday, I’ll be able to see things more clearly, but right now, I can’t. It’s hard for me to believe that God’s plan for me involves so much pain. I know that part of having faith is believing in a greater plan—that while things might not work out the way we want them to, God is wiser and knows what we need more than we do. I just can’t understand how what I’m going through represents any “God knows best” knowledge. How can this pain represent something that I don’t know that I need?

Then there are the “it will work out” comments. I know that they come from a good place—people want to make me feel better and feel like they are helping. But, we really don’t know that things will work out, do we? No one knows what the future holds. And if there are any people out there who can see the future, and can tell me with confidence that things will work out, I really wish you’d warned me about what was going to happen with Vivienne.

It’s becoming harder and harder for me to respond to the “it will work out comments.” Sometimes, I wonder what that even means. Most of the time, it means that people are trying to tell me that I’ll have another baby. I usually respond with “we’ll see,” which is not the optimistic and hopeful response that people want. But the harsh fact is that I don’t know if I’ll have another baby. I actually have very little control over that outcome.

I need to be honest about why these comments are so hard for me. Very few people know about this, but if I’m going to share on this blog, then I have to be honest. We’ve been pregnant since we lost Vivienne, and miscarried. Twice. Both losses were early and devastating. Each loss makes the hope a little harder to find. And when people keep telling me that things will work out, and I’ll have another baby, the forced smile gets harder and harder to plaster on.

I try to be hopeful and believe that there is a purpose to everything that is happening to us, but with each blow, that gets harder and harder to do. I do hope that someday, I can look back at this time and realize these horrible moments got me to the place I am supposed to be. But, I also recognize that there is nothing that can happen in my life that will make losing Vivienne an acceptable sacrifice. While hindsight might give me the gift of some perspective about everything, I’d still rather have my daughter alive and with me. And I don’t think that will ever change.

The Power of Prayer?

I’m thinking a lot about prayer—what we pray for, how prayers get answered, and how to pray. Before Vivienne, I would pray a lot. They weren’t always the traditional prayers that I think of in church. A lot of the time, they were more conversations that I had with God—talking about things I needed help with or things I hoped for. Since her death, it’s been hard for me to pray. Oftentimes, I wonder if anyone is really listening and what the point is.

When I was pregnant with Vivienne, I prayed harder than I ever have in my life. Just about every day, I got on my knees (which was not the norm for me) and prayed for her to be healthy. I was always scared that something would happen to her, and so I prayed. The prayer generally went the same “nothing else matters if she isn’t healthy.” When I had other things to pray about, I would even prioritize them for God—the others are nice to have, but a healthy baby was always the most important.

I have to admit that I feel kind of foolish about those prayers. I’ve even had the feeling that maybe I wasn’t specific enough for God—I prayed for a healthy baby, but I didn’t pray for a healthy LIVING baby. How ridiculous is it to feel that God caught me in a technicality?

The last prayer I said for quite some time came on the night Vivienne died. After all of the medical trauma was done, and Gordon went home to get us fresh clothes and toothbrushes (we hadn’t planned on being there for the night), I laid in my hospital bed and had my chat with God. I told Him that I could not pretend to understand why this was happening, but I needed my daughter to be safe. So I asked Him to welcome her into Heaven and to take good care of her until I could see her again.

After that, it would be a while before I attempted to pray again. I had lots of conversations with God, but they were more in anger and frustration than in prayer. I yelled and I screamed, but I didn’t pray. Every time I would think of something to pray about, the first thought in my mind was always the same—what’s the point?

Recently, there was a bunch of news around Gisele Bundchen and her requests for prayers for the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl. It’s what made me cheer for the Giants, because if I thought for even a second that God answered prayers like that and not my prayers for a healthy baby, I really wasn’t sure how I would react. I have to wonder how God chooses which prayers to grant, and which get the “sorry, it’s just not your day” response. I know He can’t grant them all, but healthy baby vs. dead baby feels like one that should get attention.

I’m trying really hard to pray these days, but I pray very differently than I used to. I no longer ask God for things, because I can’t believe that He has complete control over everything anymore. I pray for strength most of the time—asking God to help me be strong to survive the loss of Vivienne. But I don’t pray for another baby, for God to save someone who is sick, or for God to grant me any blessings. Maybe it’s wrong to think that God can’t control it all. But I can’t come up with any other explanation for why my prayers for a healthy baby went unanswered.

I tell a lot of people that I pray for them, and I do. But I can’t always pray for what they ask me to pray for. Most of my prayers now are that God be with the people suffering and give them strength. I now believe that this is what God can do for us—give us what we need to get through the situation we are faced with, because He can’t always fix it.

Why?

I’m not sure there is a question that causes more anguish for a loss parent than “why?” Why my child? Why me? Those are questions with answers that don’t come easy and ones that heavily affect what you believe in.

First, there’s the physical “why?” Why did this happen? I’ve met several parents who don’t get an answer to this question—there is no physical reason why their baby’s heart stopped beating or why labor started so early. Many get a reason, but with no medical guidance on how to prevent it next time—it’s a rare occurrence, and you just take your chances. We were lucky—at least we got answers on the physical “why?”

We had an autopsy done on Vivienne (doesn’t that sound like a fun decision for a parent to make?), which showed she was perfectly healthy—well developed for her gestational age, with no signs of any genetic or physical abnormalities. She had a collapsed lung and a blood clot on her liver, but the doctors felt that was due to the trauma of the delivery (she wasn’t ready to be born yet). Days after her death, we would learn that my placenta showed an infection (chorioamnionitis), which is what caused labor to start. The doctors would eventually tell me that I have an incompetent cervix (oh how the medical community loves women with terms like that), which means that my cervix opens easily, and as Vivienne grew, it opened and allowed an infection to get in. The solution to this in future pregnancies is to get a cerclage, which basically means they will stitch my cervix shut and likely put me on bedrest for part of the pregnancy. As I’ve told my husband several times, if they tell me that I need to stand on my head for 40 weeks to insure a healthy baby, I’ll do it.

So that’s the physical “why?” Now there’s the spiritual why, which is the impossible question to answer. I’ve heard all of the clichés: it’s your body’s way of taking care of something that would have been a problem (not true—Vivienne was perfectly healthy, my body pushed her out before she was ready); God needed another angel (obviously, we didn’t need her enough, so God had to take her); God is testing you (let me tell you that nothing can push you into depression quite like being given the worst test imaginable, then feeling like you are failing it); God never gives you more than you can handle, so you must be really strong (if only I were weaker, then I could still have my child). I know that they are all said in an attempt to help, but when you’ve lost a child, you see how it’s your fault in everything.

I should probably point out that I do believe in God.  I was raised Lutheran by a minister father. God is part of who I am, and I’ve really never thought that He doesn’t exist. I know there a lot of people who believe differently, which I understand. I think no matter your belief system, every parent I’ve met has still struggled with the spiritual and universal why of what’s happened. Mine just happens to be grounded in God.

I started doing some reading on this topic, because it’s something I’m really struggling with and will for some time. My first book is “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Rabbi Harold Kushner. His basic premise is that you have to let go of one of 3 things: that God is all powerful, that God is loving and just, or that I’m a good person who deserves good things. Either God isn’t in complete control, He doesn’t deal a fair hand, or I had it coming. What a choice to make.

Rabbi Kushner believes you let go of the first one—that God is not causing bad things to happen, it is the randomness in the universe. Rather than asking God why He’s done this to me, I should ask God to help me through it. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot. I think my fundamental problem with this is that I’m supposed to thank God for all of my blessings and give Him credit for all of the good things, but the bad things don’t fall on Him—those are just random and there’s no one to blame.  Trust me—this is the one of the 3 options that I want to let go. I just haven’t figured out how yet.

The second option is still hard to take. But somehow, it feels the most right. You hear all of the time that life isn’t fair, right? You see people abuse their children, kill them, and abandon them, but here we are waiting with open and loving arms for a child we can’t have. Teenagers get pregnant so often that MTV has multiple shows about it. They don’t know how to care for themselves during pregnancy, let alone for a baby when they have one, but they get problem free pregnancies and healthy babies. It’s certainly the easiest explanation that God isn’t fair and just, but I have a hard time believing that God just rolls the dice on our lives every day, and we get what we get. How do I get up everyday and go about my day thinking it’s controlled by a God who doesn’t believe in fairness and justice?

After losing Vivienne, I spent a good bit of time angry with God. Angry at Him for taking away the person I’d give my life for, angry for having to experience this profound sadness, angry for having to carry this for the rest of my life. My pastor tells me it’s OK to be angry with God, that He can take it. But, the anger leads to fear. The other emotion I’ve felt most strongly with God is the feeling that I’m being punished. I’ve done something terrible and brought on Vivienne’s death. I’m not learning the lesson I’m supposed to see in this, and so the punishments of additional complications layer on. If I can’t blame God, then it must be me. And while I can’t think of anything I could have done that warranted the death of my daughter, it’s a hard one to get around.

So after all of that, I’m still searching for my answer to why. I don’t want to believe in a random universe, I don’t want to blame God, and I don’t want to blame myself. I can only hope that with time, the answers become more clear, or I learn to let go of the question.