My second daughter will be 14 months old tomorrow. She is crawling like a champ, pulling up constantly, standing up in the middle of the room, and taking a few steps on her own. She talks like crazy, and she understands way more than she should for her age. When tested recently, her language, fine motor skills, and cognitive level are significantly above her age. She is doing amazingly well.
And I feel incredibly guilty that she is.
You see, at 10 days old, she was hospitalized with bacterial meningitis, and this brain infection along with a blood infection wreaked havoc on her tiny 8.5-pound body. She went septic, was intubated because she couldn’t breathe or eat on her own, had over a dozen seizures, and suffered brain damage as indicated on a CT scan performed early on during her hospitalization.
She could have died.
She could have gone deaf (deafness is a common complication of meningitis).
She could have cerebral palsy, hydrocephalus (fluid build up on the brain), and/or be delayed in any and every developmental area.
But God, by his grace and his power, brought my daughter out from the pit of death and healed in her in many miraculous ways.
My husband and I are both absolutely overjoyed and humbled that the Lord would heal our daughter and work in her body so powerfully. We are full of gratitude and thanksgiving for what the Lord has done.
Recently, a friend of mine who is a nurse practitioner and is the head of her hospital’s NICU, told me while looking straight in my eyes, “I need you to know that every single prediction the doctors gave you were true. I have never seen a baby do what Haven has done. It truly is only because of God that she is doing as well as she is.” She also shared with me that she shows her coworkers pictures of Haven sometimes, and they are all astonished at her development.
Absolutely amazing.
But under all of my joy (and there’s A LOT of it!), I have been feeling for some time something unexpected…
Guilt.
Guilt that my daughter survived. Guilt that her hearing is perfect. Guilt that her language, fine motor skills, and cognitive development are not only not delayed but they are advanced. Guilt that because she is now caught up in her gross motor skills, she was recently released from physical therapy and occupational therapy after almost a year of treatment.
After her initial diagnosis, I honestly thought, “Why did my baby have to get so sick and go through what she is going through?”
But the past several months, the question has changed: “Why did my baby survive, and why is she doing so well and beating all of the odds? Why her when so many other babies have lost their fight with meningitis, or if they won the fight, they struggle the rest of their lives from complications from the illness? Why not Haven?”
Survivor’s Guilt
This phenomenon, of feeling guilty because you survived something that others didn’t, is called Survivor’s Guilt.
Survivor’s guilt is when a person has feelings of guilt because they survived a life-threatening situation when others did not. It is a common reaction to traumatic events and a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” Medical News Today, “What is Survivor’s Guilt”
It’s a real thing, y’all. I honestly didn’t know that it was an actual diagnosis. I thought it was just something that people said that had no real scientific research backing it.
Let me clarify that I am not a mental health professional so I am not going to self-diagnose myself and say that I have it. I may not. Still, it was helpful for me to see that this condition is a real issue among those who have survived a traumatic event, especially when others had died.
But having a daughter survive meningitis was not the first time I’ve experienced guilt. Actually, guilt has reared its ugly head at other unexpected times over the years.
Not Guilty as Charged
Just over 3 years ago I felt my first taste of feeling guilty over something happening to me that I had no control over. In this case, it wasn’t a life or death situation.
Oddly enough, it was when I found out I was pregnant for the first time.
My husband and I had walked through four years of infertility, and within moments of seeing that plus sign for the first time ever, I felt guilty that I was finally out of the infertility club.
Seems silly, right? You would think that I was overjoyed at finally being pregnant, and hear me-I was!! It was a miracle that we had finally gotten pregnant, and I praised God then, and I still praise him now, for working so powerfully in my body to heal me of my infertility.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt that I felt knowing that so many others never left and will never leave that club.
During both my first and my second pregnancy, I would often see other women when I was out and about and think to myself, “What if she’s going through infertility and wants so desperately to get pregnant? And now she is seeing me pregnant…I know that is hard and it hurts! I wish I could tell her I walked through infertility so she would know that this journey hasn’t been easy for me either. I hope I’m not making her sad seeing my baby bump.”
For real, y’all. This was a common thought I had playing on repeat when I saw other women…which was, like, all the time.
Then several months after finding out I was pregnant, I had my second dose of guilt, and this time, it came after the loss of my first baby.
Our first daughter, Hannah, had a fatal neural tube defect called anencephaly that was diagnosed when I was 11 weeks pregnant with her. Her life expectancy, if she survived full-term and if she survived birth, was only a few minutes, hours, or maybe days.
But she lived for 31 hours and 22 minutes.
It was a miracle that she lived that long, and I do not call it a “miracle” lightly. My husband and I, along with our family and friends, are incredibly grateful for all of the time we got with our Hannah Grace. We were overjoyed to meet her, hold her, talk to her, and hear her sweet, gentle sounds. I got to nurse her, snuggle her, change her diaper, and take hundreds of pictures and videos of her. I will cherish my time with her on earth until I see her again one day on the other side of glory.
But the guilt crept up a couple of days after her death when we received a phone call from a university who was conducting a massive study on babies with anencephaly. We had donated Hannah’s cord blood to the study, and as part of it, they needed to do a phone interview to learn more about our environmental history, our genetics, and my pregnancy and delivery of Hannah. The researcher started off by asking when she was born.
Mace, my husband, replied, “April 10th, 2017.”
The researcher then asked, “And how long did she live?”
Mace answered, “31 hours and 22 minutes.”
At that the researcher exclaimed, “That is amazing that she lived that long! Wow!! I rarely hear that a baby with anencephaly has lived that long!”
In that moment, upon hearing her excitement, I felt gratitude to the Lord and pride in my baby girl…and then a wave of guilt hit me that my baby had not only been born alive but had lived for so long.
It grieves me to see in the online infant loss support communities that I’m a part of the number of stillbirths there are and how little time some mommas got with their babies after delivery. Why did my baby live for so long when others’ babies didn’t? Why did I get to experience all of the beautiful things with Hannah when others never saw their babies take a breath?
I don’t know. I am not even going to try to understand why some babies live and some babies die; why some babies develop an unexplainable and uncurable condition and some babies are perfectly healthy. I don’t know, but I rest in the fact that it’s not my job to be able to explain it all. I just have to trust in the One is sovereign over it all.
So what about you? Have you experienced trauma or survived a horrible situation? Are you suffering from survivor’s guilt or just struggling with why everything turned out okay for you but not for someone else in a similar situation?
We don’t have to know the “why,” friends. And we certainly don’t have to feel guilty over something that is beyond our control. You didn’t choose to survive whatever circumstance you faced-God as part of his perfect plan did.
We need to stop listening to the lies of the Evil One who is trying to convince us that we did something wrong to survive or that we shouldn’t have been the one to survive. Satan comes to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). He wants nothing more than to trap us into an untruthful thinking pattern that prohibits us from living our lives fully for the Lord.
In the midst of our feelings of guilt, we should be continuously turning our attention to God’s Word. His Word has the power to comfort and encourage us with Truth. One Scripture in particular that I’ve turned to many times over the years is from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament. It speaks straight to my heart, and I pray it speaks to yours as well!
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9
We must listen to the truth found in God’s Word to remind us that he is good and his ways and his plans are far greater than we could ever imagine.
If you are struggling and need prayer, it would be my joy to pray for you. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me below. And friend, if you need professional counseling to discuss with someone your feelings of survivor’s guilt (or any struggle for that matter), I pray you find the help that you need and experience freedom from any lie that you are believing. After all, Jesus came that we may we “may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10)!
Pressing on in faith, Jennifer