The Secret of Rebecca
Tara Jernigan on the Blessing of Burying the Stillborn Child
"I think her name was Rebecca.” Though my father’s older sister had never been a secret, I had never heard him speak of his interest in her. She died before he was born, but for some reason, when I took a slight interest in genealogy, he decided that he would like to find some hint of information about his sister, some proof that she ever existed. A birth certificate, death certificate, perhaps a burial site.
But as her birth date and place were unknown to us—we were not even sure of her name—and there was no social security number or other vital records for her, no information was ever found. All we ever knew of my father’s sister was from my grandmother’s memory.
My grandmother had always wanted a baby girl with a head full of dark hair. When, several years after the birth of her first child, a son, she again conceived, she tried every way she could think of to divine the baby’s sex, which in the days before ultrasound involved more folklore than medicine. She became certain that this child was her longed-for daughter.
After she delivered the baby, the nurses told her that the child was a girl, with a head full of black hair, but she never saw the child. She never even knew for certain that it was a daughter, that the nurses were not just telling her what she wanted to hear. She could only wonder, until at last she met her child in the presence of God.
Had Rebecca lived, my father would never have been born. My father was clearly the so-called replacement baby, and a disappointment for being a redheaded boy. But for decades he retained a quiet curiosity about the sister that no one knew, the daughter his mother had never held.
Unfinished Business
In 1940 most mothers never saw their stillborn babies. As a child, I heard my grandmother’s story about Rebecca as another family story, always told the same way, frozen in time. Now I look on it with an adult’s eyes, and I see a very different story, not at all frozen in time, but carried as an unrelieved burden, unfinished business in my grandmother’s heart, until her own life came to a close nearly five decades later.
Today, mothers are often given their stillborn babies to hold. Perhaps, over the decades, we have begun to be able to face the reality of the stillborn child and mourn with dignity and solemnity the child who lives after birth but a few moments. We have begun to realize that love does not take years of life to form, that a child of eight seconds (really, of nine months and eight seconds) is as valuable as the child of eight years. We understand what the parents feel when they lose a child.
And yet, at the same time, we have failed to recognize the child we think too young to be mourned, too small to bury with dignity. We treat the miscarried child as the culture of abortion would have him be, simply the product of conception, cast-off tissue.
Our theology says one thing, that the fetus is a baby, a life with an immortal soul, to be loved and, if lost, to be grieved. Our practice says quite another, for we allow these little ones to slip away with no memorial, no thanksgiving for a life lived, however briefly. What have we done? What do our actions really teach our faithful? What pastoral care do we offer those whose arms are empty and whose hearts grieve for these tiny children?
Tara L. Jernigan is a vocational deacon in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and the director of deacon formation for the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh. She serves on the task force for Marriage, Family and the Single Life for the ACNA and as an adjunct instructor for Trinity School for Ministry. Tara and her husband have two sons at home and one in college.
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