M
Marie Grace, PhD
Guest
When the crib goes quiet and theology falls silent
Photo by Valeriia Miller on Unsplash
She didnβt cry.
Not the way they expected.
No gentle tears, no collapsed grace.
Just the kind of silence
that shatters porcelain.
Her steps
Dragged.
Dragged like chains behind her ribs.
Time didnβt hold her.
It passed over her
like headlights on a deer
already gone.
They said, Godβs will.
She wanted to believe.
But no will of God
should ever sound like
a crib gone quiet.
She stopped praying.
Not out of rebellion
But because the words choked
in a throat already full
of unspoken screams.
She sat in rooms
that once held lullabies.
Now they held
the absence of breath.
And still
people offered verses
like gauze for a wound
theyβd never seen.
But she remembered everything.
The sound.
The shift.
The nothing.
The knowing that came too late.
She didnβt collapse.
She calcified.
Became stone
with a pulse.
A mother with empty arms
and a fire no theology could put out.
They said healing would come.
It did.
Not with peace.
But with fists unclenched
and a spine that learned
How to carry
What canβt be fixed?
Authorβs Note: This piece explores a motherβs internal experience after the death of her infant, unfolding not through loud grief, but through spiritual silence, psychological shock, and embodied memory. It is not a case study. It is her story, still unfolding, and still sacred.
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A Grief That Made No Sound was originally published in Long. Sweet. Valuable. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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