The Grief That Changed Me Forever: Losing My Son Max | The Catholic Grief Podcast (E6)

December 7th, 2014 is a date that divided my life into a clear before and after. In this deeply personal episode of The Catholic Grief Podcast, I share the story of losing my son Maximilian Isaac — a late-term pregnancy loss at 19 weeks and 3 days — and how that grief shaped my faith, my marriage, and ultimately my calling to walk with others through loss.

I talk openly about the moments most people don't share: the cold hospital room away from the mothers with living babies, the spiral of questions and guilt that followed me home, wondering if God was punishing me — and the quiet, unexpected graces that showed up anyway. The doctor God sent at just the right moment. The blue and purple clothes at his funeral. The shadowbox I created to keep him visible. And the prayer we still say as a family to this day: 'Little Max, pray for us.'

If you have experienced pregnancy loss, stillbirth, miscarriage, or the loss of a child at any stage — including if you are carrying grief and guilt over an abortion — this episode is for you. You are not forgotten here.

We also explore the witness of Saint Zélie Martin, who lost four children in infancy, and her beautiful words: 'We shall find our little ones again up above.'

In this episode:

✦ The story of losing Maximilian Isaac at 19 weeks 3 days

✦ What grief looks like when you get home from the hospital

✦ The questions and guilt that follow pregnancy loss

✦ How this loss deepened faith and drew a marriage closer to God

✦ Saint Zélie Martin and her witness to grieving mothers

✦ Creativity as a path through grief — the blog and the shadowbox

✦ A gentle invitation to honor your child and name them if you haven't yet

Resources mentioned:

✦ Letters to Maximilian blog: letterstolittlemax.wordpress.com

✦ Jenny's grief resources: jennyburba.com

✦ Saint Zélie Martin — look up her story and her words for grieving mothers

If this episode spoke to your heart, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs it. Your review helps other grieving hearts find this podcast.

Transcript

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There are experiences in life that divide everything into a clear before and after. December 7th, 2014 is one of those dates for me. Before that night, pregnancy was one of the greatest joys of my life, something I stepped into with excitement and ease. After that night, everything changed. And if you've ever loved and lost a baby, you know exactly what I mean. Welcome to the Catholic Grief Podcast. I'm Jenny Berba. After walking through profound loss, I discovered that grief and faith are not enemies. In this space, we speak openly about grieving. We bring our grief to the foot of the cross, anchor ourselves in Scripture and the sacraments, and gently rebuild with Christ at the center. If you are carrying sorrow, you are seen here. Let's walk this path together. I'm so glad you're here. Before we get into this, I want to pray because honestly, I need it just as much as you might today. Let's go to God together first. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Heavenly Father, you are the one who gives life, and you are the one who holds it. You knew Maximilian Isaac before I did. You knew every child that every parent listening has ever loved and lost. Those cried over publicly and those cried over alone, the ones named and the ones who never got a name. You see every single one of them, and you see every heart that has loved them. Lord, I ask you to meet us in this episode today. Be present with every person listening who knows this kind of loss. Bring your comfort into the places that still ache, even years later. And if someone is hearing this today who has never told another soul about a loss they've been carrying, Lord, let them feel seen and loved by you right now. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. It was the fall of 2014. We were expecting our eighth baby. Every pregnancy in our house was a genuine celebration, and this one was no different. But honestly, for me, it felt different from the start. From the very beginning of that pregnancy, there was this quiet worry running underneath everything. I wasn't feeling much movement. And I kept talking myself out of it, telling myself it was just the position of the baby or the position of the placenta, or that I was probably feeling flutterings and just not recognizing them. I told myself I was overthinking it. But deep down inside, I think I knew. I think God was preparing me in the way he sometimes does. Not with a big announcement, just a quiet, gentle knowing that I didn't want to look at directly. We chose his name on December 2nd. I remember that so clearly. Maximilian Isaac Roberts. We named him after Saint Maximilian Colby, a Franciscan priest who gave his life in Auschwitz so that another man could live. A man who surrendered everything to God completely and without reservation. I didn't fully understand then how much that name was going to mean to our family, but God did. On the morning of December 6th, I prayed to my guardian angel and to Saint Michael the Archangel. A wonderful woman from my church had reminded me of those prayers just a few days earlier, almost out of nowhere, like she was nudged to do it. And I said them that morning. And I want you to know that, because I believe with everything in me that those prayers changed what happened next. Not the outcome, but what I was able to carry inside of that outcome. Just like what I said in the last episode, that prayers don't change the outcome, but they do change us from the inside out. By that evening, things had shifted. I started feeling cramps that I didn't yet understand were contractions. I paged my doctor, I paged them again, and when my husband came home, we drove to the hospital. I prayed the whole time, still asking God for a miracle. Before we left, I made sure the kids were taken care of. I had friends of mine come over, and the older kids went to a birthday party and rock climbing that had already been scheduled. Nobody sat at home worrying because deep down I think I already knew that nothing was going to change what had already happened, and I didn't want their day ruined too. Waiting in that emergency room triage was one of the hardest things I have ever done. And then the nurse came in, did an ultrasound, and felt my abdomen during a cramp, and the look on her face said everything before she even opened her mouth. In that moment, something happened inside me that I still find hard to fully put into words. I had been praying desperately, begging for God to intervene. And then, as the reality started to settle in, my prayer shifted. Almost without me choosing it. My prayer became, God, your will be done. If this is what you have allowed, then I trust you to get us through it. And in that moment, just in that moment, while we were still in that hospital, a peace came over me. Not happiness, not relief, just peace. The kind of peace that scripture calls a peace that surpasses all understanding. It was a grace, and I recognized it even then. What I remember next is walking down a hallway, a dark hallway, away from the rest of the maternity ward, away from all the other women who were there to deliver living babies. I understood it logically, I really did, but in that moment, it felt like I was being hidden away. Like they were tucking me into a corner so my grief wouldn't disturb anyone else's joy. The room was cold and sterile, and there were no blankets. I remember that so clearly. The cold and the silence and how completely alone it felt. I had to track down a nurse and ask for blankets, and she brought me some, and I was grateful, but the image of that room, empty, cold, removed from everything, is one that has never left me. I think about it sometimes when I hear other women describe similar experiences, and I want them to know I see you. I have been in that hallway. The doctor who came to care for me that night was one I had only met once before at my OB's practice. She wasn't my regular doctor, the one who had delivered my previous four babies, the one who I knew like a friend. I had asked them to call him, and I don't think they ever did. He did reach out a few days later to check on me, which was kind, but they confirmed what I had suspected. They didn't call him. And here is what I've come to believe about that though. The doctor that did come was exactly who God intended to send me that night. She was one of nine children herself. She told me her own mother had lost pregnancies and gone on to have healthy babies afterwards. And in that cold, sterile room in the middle of the night, she gave me something I didn't even know how desperately I needed. Hope that this was not the end of my story as a mother. I will never forget her kindness as long as I live. Max was born still at 1220 a.m. in the morning on December 7th. I was 19 weeks and three days along, three days short of the 20-week mark that feels like some kind of invisible threshold of safety. We believe his heart had stopped the day after Thanksgiving, November 28th, the day I had felt so sick and kept telling myself it was nothing. I want to be really honest with you about what happened when I got home. Because I think this is the part that doesn't get talked about enough. That peace I had felt in the hospital, it did not follow me home. Once I was back in my house in my own life, I spiraled. The grief hit differently there. It was messier and heavier and a lot less holy feeling than that quiet surrender in the hospital room. The questions came fast and they came hard. What did I do wrong? How did this happen? How do I make sure it never happens again? We had asked for answers, and the test results gave us nothing concrete. Just sometimes these things happen. And I remember thinking, that is not an answer. That is not enough. I needed a reason. And then came the darker questions, the ones I am almost embarrassed to admit, but I think are important to say out loud. Because I know I am not the only one who has been there. Was God punishing me? Was this because I had gotten pregnant as a teenager? Was it because I kept my son rather than giving him up for adoption? Was this payback for the choices I had made in my life? I knew in my heart, I truly did know that God does not work that way. That He does not punish us like that. But knowing something and being able to silence the voice in your head are two very different things. And in those early weeks, that voice was so loud. I had to figure out what to do with my maternity clothes. I couldn't wear them. I couldn't even look at them. I was no longer pregnant, and every piece of clothing I owned reminded me of that. I had to think about whether to put Max's picture on the mantle with the rest of the family photos, whether to hang a stocking at Christmas, which was only a couple weeks away. These are the strange, painful, practical questions that grief drops in your lap when you're already barely standing and nobody really prepares you for them. I didn't have a roadmap for what came next. But somewhere in those early days and weeks, I found myself doing two things that I now understand were my way of making him real, of refusing to let him disappear. I started writing letters to Max, which became a blog that some of you may have already found, named Letters to Maximilian on WordPress. I also created a shadow box in his honor, a photograph of him from the hospital, some keepsakes that the nurses had given us to remember him by, including his footprints and the measuring tape that they measured him with, and put a little heart next to how long he was, a special song lyric that I learned about from a friend, and the lyrics to the hymn By Name I Have Called You by Carrie Landry, which our church choir sang at his funeral. I arranged all these items together into something I could look at and say, he was here. He was mine. He mattered. It didn't have a name for what I was doing then. I just knew I needed to create something. Looking back now, I understand that creativity was already doing what it has always done for me, giving me somewhere to put my grief. If you're watching the video version of this episode, you can see that shadow box right behind me. And somewhere in that writing, in those early raw days and weeks, I began to find my footing again. Not because the grief went away, it didn't it, not fully, not for a very long time, and I feel like I was still in a partial fog, even when my husband passed away seven years later. But putting my thoughts into written words made it something I could hold and something I could release. We had a funeral for him, and I so clearly remember breaking down and crying in the shower the day before the funeral. I was crying like I had never cried before, and my husband had no idea what to do for me. And because of that outburst of emotion, I was unable to cry at the funeral, which made me feel so incredibly guilty. But something beautiful happened that day that I've never been able to fully explain. Almost everyone who came to the funeral just happened to be wearing blue or purple clothes. Blue and purple, which were shone in my wedding colors. I have always believed Max had something to do with that. It's exactly the kind of thing that I've come to call a God whisper. Those little moments that are too specific to be coincidence where you can just feel heaven close to you. Here is something that I didn't expect. This loss, as devastating as it was, became a turning point in my faith and also in my marriage. Instead of pulling my husband and I apart, it drew us closer together and closer to God in a way that nothing else had managed to do. We started praying together at night before bed. We added little Max pray for us to the end of our family prayers and our prayer before meals. Because he was a part of our family, and we wanted him to stay there. We got more involved at our parish. We started praise and worship events at our church. I started going to daily mass as often as I could. Max's short life opened something in us that I don't think anything else could have reached. And I am so grateful for that. Even now, even knowing everything that came after, especially knowing. Everything that came after. I also want to tell you about Saint Zellie Martin, because her story has been such a companion to me in this particular grief. Zelle was the mother of Saint Therese of Lizzo. And she lost four of her children in infancy. Four. She was a woman of extraordinary faith. And she grieved those children openly and deeply. She didn't pretend her losses hadn't shattered her, but she also never stopped believing that those children were held by God, that their lives had meaning, and that her suffering was not wasted. She was canonized in 2015, the year after I lost Max. And I have always found something quietly beautiful about that timing. Her witness has meant so much to me that a few years ago, alongside two other beautiful mothers from our parish who had experienced the same kind of loss, together we started a local pregnancy and infant loss support group. With St. Zellie at the heart of it. We put together care baskets for mothers who have suffered a loss, little gifts meant to let them know that they are seen and that they are not alone. And tucked inside each one is a quote from Saint Zelly herself that has stayed with me ever since I first read it. We shall find our little ones again up above. I don't know about you, but that stops me every time. The simplicity of it, the certainty of it. She wasn't reaching for complicated theology. She was just a mother speaking the quiet truth that she held on to. And I hold on to it too. If you don't know Saint Zellie's story, she's absolutely worth looking up. She understands this particular grief in a way that feels very personal. Max is now our family's patron saint. While we were preparing for his funeral, we told our priest we had named him Maximilian Isaac. And our priest looked at us and said, with a name like that, he is destined for greatness. And after the fact, we realized this is not the kind of greatness that happens here on earth. His greatness is in heaven, and I believe that completely. Now I want to say something clearly to anyone who is listening who has lost a child at any stage in any circumstance. Even if that loss was an abortion and you have been carrying both grief and the guilt of it alone, your child's life mattered. It does not matter how brief it was, it does not matter whether the world gave that loss the weight that it deserved, or whether people around you understood what you were going through. It does not matter if you've been carrying it quietly for years and no one in your life even knows that life was real, that love is real, and God holds that child always. If you'd like to read the letters I wrote to Max in those early days, I'll link to that blog in the show notes. But you can also find a link to it on my website, jennyberba.com. They are raw and honest and written by me as a mother who was desperately trying to find God in the middle of something she did not understand. You are welcome there whenever you feel ready. I want to leave you with two pieces of scripture today, because this episode feels like it needs more than just one. The first one is from Jeremiah chapter one, verse five. Before you were born, I consecrated you. God knew Max before I did. He knows every child you have ever loved and lost. That is not a small or abstract thing. That is a promise. And the second scripture is from Revelation chapter twenty one, verse four. He will wipe away every tear from their eye, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. That is the promise I hold on to, and I hope you can hold on to it too. Before we close, I want to suggest something to you. If you've lost a child at any stage in any circumstance, I want to invite you to take a few quiet minutes and simply remember them. Not to force anything or rush yourself through it, just to sit with them for a moment. You might say their name out loud if you have one. And if you haven't given them a name yet, I want to gently encourage you to consider it. That small act of naming them, of saying this was a real person who belonged to me, can make a world of difference in your healing. You might write their name down, and you might sit quietly with a memory that feels precious to you. And then gently remind yourself this life mattered, this love is real, and you are not carrying this alone. Next week, I'm going to share my other deep loss. The one that turned my entire world upside down. The loss of my husband. It's a different kind of grief, and it came years later in a life that had already been changed by Max. Thank you so much for being here today and for trusting me with something this tender. Truly, it means everything to me that you're here. If this episode spoke to your heart, please subscribe, leave a review so other grieving hearts can find this podcast, and share it with someone who you think might need it. And if you are looking for even more support on your grief journey, I invite you to visit me at jennyberba.com. There are resources there to help you keep walking forward. I love you all so much. Until next time, remember Christ is near. You are not alone.