Ever since our son was born in August 2021, the future of our family has been uncertain, due to postpartum complications. After two and a half years and a lot of doctors’ appointments, we fell pregnant. And then, after twelve weeks of happy pregnant life, we learned that the baby likely wouldn’t make it to term. We started checking her heartbeat at the doctor every Thursday. The weeks were long between scans. I began to fear suffering. How long would she hold out? Would I be asked to deliver a corpse at eight months? How did Mary watch Jesus die without wishing that it was just over?

Thank God for the embrace of our community. Because of their proposal – or challenge – to stay in front of reality, I struggled but ultimately won the fight against self-preservation. I surrendered her life and my own inclination to distance myself from her. I decided that I wanted her heart to beat as long as possible, no matter what emotional baggage that left me to handle. But most of all, I begged Fr. Giussani to intercede for her, and to give us a miracle: a healthy baby. An ultrasound that would make the doctor call in all her colleagues to take a closer look. Where is the cystic hygroma? Where are the fetal hydrops? This baby is perfect.

What pains me at this moment is that I don’t think I ever really believed there would be a miracle. But I know I begged. I just wonder if I lacked faith — “faith the size of a mustard seed.” My faith didn’t move any mountains. All our family and friends prayed with us, and I was never as happy as when I could send out the texts that said, “Another strong heartbeat,” and receive the outpouring of love and promises of prayers.

On Easter Thursday we saw on the ultrasound that Samantha had passed away and we were instructed to return to the hospital to deliver her on the following day. Those two days in the hospital were healing, full of mercy and full of hope. I saw everything clearly. Our baby is eternal. I would do it again, the exact same way, for her sake. She has everything she needs, and she’s anxious to meet me. And the circumstances felt very ordained, because a lot of miscarriages come as a complete surprise, but we were given time — weeks and weeks to pray for her and cherish her. That was a gift, I’m sure of it.

I proposed Cry of the Heart by Msgr. Albacete because of what happened next. The gestures of the faith began to feel pointless. The vibrant colors of my happiness dulled. Even my vision of my two children, Elizabeth and Danny, paled and shrank. It was terrifying. We are reading The Religious Sense, which has been very fruitful, and Giussani described the gnawing doubt that I’ve now encountered. He said, it’s like when you wake up and you know you have to get out of bed. But nothing in you wants to get up. Stay in bed, go back to sleep, your brain says. Like an instinct. This is my faith now, or lack of it: a chiding voice in my head that says, Yeah, right. Faith has never felt like a conscious choice before this, but now the unlikelihood of God, his existence and the resurrection especially — these beliefs of ours require a choice from me like never before. Thank God, because he’s given me the habit of faith. I’ll never leave, but confidence is gone, and consolation is gone. I fluctuate between feeling like a child with amnesia, having to learn all over again that my Father loves me, and a woman stuck in a loveless marriage: I’ll never get divorced because out there, there’s even more nothingness than there is here. But my husband doesn’t love me. I’m not even sure he’s alive.

Observing the way I was living, I proposed Cry of the Heart to my community for two reasons: first, I want to learn to suffer well, and second, The Religious Sense warns against anything besides total engagement with the drama of the I. I hoped to encounter my friends’ witness to “a presence who embraces us, who embraces all our confused and restless humanity, who leans down over us and our wounds and asks us, ‘What do you want Me to do for you?’”

After our first meeting, I was surprised that the miracle of that evening was not the end of suffering. We talked about co-suffering, how to do it well: it’s about presence, not words. We long to rework a person’s circumstances, so that they see their suffering from just the right angle, and reframe their ordeal to fit into our own narrative. This narrative always ends with a pretty bow, or a silver lining, because without a happy ending, we can’t face it. We can’t face the sufferer. “We cannot love what shocks us,” says Flannery O’Connor, whom Msgr. Albacete references many times throughout the book. Suffering is shocking. So we rewrite, reframe, begging the sufferer to “look on the bright side.” This is an anesthetic for us. We want to help, but no, Msgr. Albacete says. Any attempt to soothe in this way is inadequate.

Reading his description of co-suffering made me grateful for the nurse who looked after us the night we delivered Samantha Hope. I was so moved by her, because while my sobs rocked my whole body and my husband’s too while he held me, there also was April, crying silently while she tended to us. I didn’t recognize it in the moment, but her empathy was truly helpful to me. It was validating and comforting, and I thank God for her.

On the night of our discussion, my friends offered themselves, and now I am more free. I realize now that I was desperate for a prescription, the right words that would unlock the secret to relief. Instead, I received a provocation to stay in front of reality again. Instead of answering my questions, I was invited to discover “the answer has a face and a voice.” I am more free now because instead of searching for an escape which doesn’t exist in any form except a denial of my I, I can stay in this pit and seek His face here.

Kathryn, Omaha, NE