A Greater Tragedy Than A Broken Dream

The call came to my wife’s cell phone on Christmas Eve, 2010.

That Christmas was shaping up to be a Christmas like no other. Just a few days prior we had been given some news that we never thought we would receive. After ten years spent trying almost every means possible to start a family—including special diets and courses of fertility-boosting supplements, numerous rounds of costly IVF treatment, an agonizing two-year wait on the Australian adoption list, followed by even more rounds of IVF—we had been told that we were pregnant.

Pregnant! We could hardly believe it.

‘Hi Merryn,’ the voice on the phone said, ‘it’s Emily, from the clinic.’

Merryn was expecting Emily’s call, with the results of the latest blood test.

‘I’m afraid,’ Emily said, ‘your pregnancy hormone levels have dropped significantly.’

‘But, you said we were preg…’

‘I am so sorry.’

An ultrasound a few days later revealed there had never been a baby inside Merryn. A gestational sac had been responsible for the pregnancy-like symptoms. Even the doctors had been fooled.

And with that cruel twist, our ten year dream of having a child came to an end.

Some weeks before all this, I had interviewed the British author Adrian Plass on my radio show. Our conversation continued off-air where, somehow, I had shared a little about our wilderness of infertility and how we hoped 2011 would be better. Adrian listened carefully to our story, then said: ‘After what you’ve been through, I think a Resurrection Year is what you need.’

A Resurrection Year—a year of new life after the death of a dream.

The phrase immediately struck a chord with us.

A little while later Merryn and I sat on the balcony of our Sydney flat, wondering what a Resurrection Year might look like. It had to be fun, restful and adventurous, we decided. It had to give us time to resurrect our frayed emotions and our strained relationship with God.

We didn’t know it then but within a few months, Merryn and I would be strapping ourselves into a plane, taxiing down a runway, and setting off for an adventure we’d never have contemplated had our original dream come true. Soon we would be walking the streets of Rome, visiting the Basilicas of Paris, wandering the Alps of Switzerland and settling into a new home in the United Kingdom, where Merryn would start a dream job at the University of Oxford and I would get a contract to write a book about our experience.

None of this was what we had planned for our lives.

Out of our broken dream came a new beginning.

Nothing can fill the void of not having a child. We still have the occasional day smattered with tears. But our experience has led me to believe this:

That a greater tragedy than a broken dream is a life forever defined by one.