Laying To Rest The Tiniest Among Us 

By Elizabeth McClung

While it seems as though fall has graced the rest of the world with its presence, summer is still beating down upon us in Houston. Or, maybe the intensity of the 100-degree heat last weekend was simply because we were out in a cemetery. Cemeteries always feel particularly hotter than everywhere else.

Yet last weekend was unlike any other graveside service I’ve attended in my life. After the span of 14 months between 2021 and 2022 when I had eight loved ones pass away, I thought surely my time of crying at cemeteries had come to an end. All the work I did to move through grief towards hope surely meant there were no tears left to cry the next time death came.

How wrong I was.

You see, I never met the little boy…or girl…who was being buried last weekend. “Uh, what?” you must be thinking after reading that. Jesse is the name my brother-in-law and sister-in-law picked specifically because it fits both boys and girls. Jesse is the 9th of their children, and now he or she is laid to rest next to Jordan, another baby of theirs who died while in utero.

There was no rosary and visitation, no funeral Mass. There was just a large portion of the family clan with a young priest and a few friends at the cemetery with our own tents, our own shovels, our own post hole digger, our own homemade casket, because….well…even now I struggle to answer why. Why does the church not have anything more formal for these beautiful baby boys and baby girls whose heartbeat clearly on the inside but whose eyes were never opened on the outside?

My brother-in-law’s effervescent and extroverted self was nowhere to be seen this day. Today, another part of his character shines through his actions. He dug and dug, and dug, and dug. Any other time one of the faithful loses a family member, their grief is given the grace of not having to dig the actual grave. I suppose God willed it that in digging his own child’s grave, my brother-in-law too would receive graces. Untold graces probably, but graces nonetheless. The manual labor required to dig even a 28-inch baby’s grave, while not the same size as an adult grave, is no easy work. He was dripping in sweat, slamming the post-hole digger repeatedly into the ground with a force I’d never expected from this happy-go-lucky brother-in-law of mine. The brute strength and raw determination was a sight to behold. This man was digging his child’s grave. The rest of us looked on, trying our best to wrap our heads around what was unfolding in front of us.

The 11-year-old girl so tenderly took from her hands a swatch of fabric upon which she cross-stitched a cross with “Jesse” across it and flowers on the sides, and placed it inside her sibling’s doll-sized casket. The high-energy 5-year-old girl unfolded a crayon-filled paper with a black-haired Jesse being carried up to heaven by two angels and that too was placed in with Jesse’s body for burial.

My sister-in-law and brother-in-law are one of the most optimistic pairs of human beings I’ve ever had the joy of knowing. In the moment of her husband standing next to her (now changed into a full suit out of respect for their baby) and their seven living children, while Father blessed the ground and prayed over their baby’s body, what I saw on her face, grabbed a hold of my heart and did not let go. Not only did she have to carry her baby within her for weeks after he passed away, an agony I can only try to understand, but now she was laying him to rest. In the midst of her own pain, she still didn’t miss a beat to pass a water bottle to her toddler, or to provide a hand to hold for her husband. Her ever-present smile was replaced by what seemed to be silent sobs and tears behind her classic sunglasses.

This woman, whose life from the outside looking in is the very definition of living for another, was burying another of her nine children. This woman whose inner strength is matched by her beauty was given another opportunity to walk a path of suffering.

She cried. My own heart broke for her in that moment. And I sobbed. The death I have known cannot compare to the death she has now known, twice. Cells from Jordan and Jesse both live within her and yet their bodies are buried in the back corner of a country cemetery.

Why does the church, it was a Catholic cemetery after all, not allow these tiniest among us to be buried alongside others created from the moment of conception in God’s image? Don’t misunderstand me, I know full well the wisdom of the church’s teaching on the necessity of baptism for salvation. I also know the church’s teaching about the dignity of every human life knit together in his or her mother’s womb by our Creator.

Even the statue in the back corner of this cemetery professed that truth we read so clearly in Sacred Scripture.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you a prophet to the nations I appointed you (Jeremiah 1:5).

Nursing my own babe on a steaming hot concrete bench next to this statue as I choked back tears for my sister-in-law, the truth of God’s creation of human life made my heart cry out “Why?!” Why do we as a church banish these unbaptized children who died in the womb to the back corners of cemeteries? Why can we not do differently for them, differently for the families left behind?

When Job finally asked God “why,” God responded not with an expected “why” answer. Rather he said, in many many more words than this: “I am the Creator.”

While the pain of their miscarriage was evident to even the most unfeeling observer, this grieving mother and father were gifted with peace. It is a peace that has come directly from the Holy Spirit because Lord knows they couldn’t create such a calm on their own. They had a good priest walking alongside them in this experience. They had the presence of loved ones, serving as a reminder of the realness of the Mystical Body of Christ. They had once strangers now friends from church building a small casket for the tiniest member of their family.

Not every family is afforded these same gifts. This is the first miscarriage I’ve encountered in my life like this.

My heart longs for the death and burials of babies in the womb to be an opportunity for priests to better shepherd their flock, like this young faithful priest did out at the cemetery last weekend, by *doing* more for those in the time of the death of their babies. Surely God will continue to answer our “whys” with “I am the Creator” in the tragedy of miscarriages. Hopefully, He will also call more priests and those in positions of leadership in the church to reevaluate what being pro-life truly means in the context of miscarriage.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.