Who am I now?

Hi friend,

Welcome to Part 2 of our Identity After Loss series. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.

There are questions that come after loss that you never expected to ask. They don’t always show up right away. Sometimes they hit you in a random moment, and other times they come all at once. But eventually, many of us find ourselves sitting with the same question.

Who am I now?

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Who Am I Now?

Before loss, I didn’t spend much time questioning my identity. I knew who I was. I knew what my life looked like. I had a sense of direction and confidence in where things were headed. I believed, without even realizing it, that if I planned well and trusted the Lord, things would unfold the way I hoped. But loss has a way of unraveling that. After losing my baby, I became keenly aware of how little control I actually had. The moment her heart stopped beating changed everything, and the life I thought I was building was no longer the life that was in front of me, and I found myself asking questions I didn’t know how to answer.

• Who am I now if I can’t show up at playdates, baby showers, or birthday parties without breaking down, either there or on the drive home?
• Who am I now if I am a mother of two, but only one of them is seen by the world?
• Who am I now if my motherhood looks more like memory keeping and grieving than feeding and nurturing?
• Who am I now if milestones only mark what I have missed, and birthday candles only represent years that have gone by without new memories?
• Who am I now if I still believe in God’s goodness but struggle to feel it?
• Who am I now if my body carries the marks of life and loss, but no one knows or says her name?

These questions were terribly hard to sit with. They exposed places of deep pain, confusion, and longing. They revealed how much had changed and how uncertain everything felt. Maybe you’ve felt similar aches and asked similar questions. Unfortunately for me, alongside those questions, something new was growing: fear.

Before loss, I wasn’t a naturally fearful person. If my husband was late coming home, I assumed he had stopped to talk to someone in the parking lot. If my living child had a cough, I assumed it was just a cough. But after loss, everything felt so different. If my husband was late, my mind went somewhere else entirely. He must have gotten in an accident, right? If my child coughed, I wondered if it was something more. Did we need to head to the ER tonight?

Once you have been on the wrong side of a statistic, it changes how you see the world. You can’t unsee what you have seen, and that can feel really scary. And yet, God meets us here. Psalm 56:3 says, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.” It does not say if I am afraid, it says when. Fear may come, but it doesn’t have to rule us. We can bring it honestly before the Lord and learn to trust Him in it, even when our thoughts feel overwhelming, and our hearts feel unsure.

As I wrestled through these questions and fears, I also had to come face to face with something else. I was not a very good evaluator of my own worth in grief. In those early days, I saw all the ways I wasn’t who I used to be. I saw my limitations, my emotions that felt out of control, and the ways I couldn’t show up like I once did. There were moments I felt unlovable, and like I was failing in ways I couldn’t fix. But those thoughts weren’t the truth. Grief has a way of distorting how we see ourselves. It can make us believe that because we have changed, we have somehow lost our value, and that because we are struggling, we are less than we once were.

But that is not how God sees you. Isaiah 43:1 says, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” Even in the middle of your questions and your uncertainty about who you are now, you belong to Him. You may not recognize yourself in the mirror because so much has been stripped away. But your identity was never ultimately built on the parts of your life that have changed. It was always rooted in Him.

So, friend, when you can’t answer the question, Who am I now?, God can. And His answer is, you are mine.

Because He lives, I hope,
Jennie Parks
Executive Director

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Thanks for being here with me. If this encouraged you, would you share it with one friend who might need it?

Next week, we’ll close out this series as we take a look at what hasn’t changed, and where our identity is anchored.