Couple Shares Journey of Faith, Hope, and Commitment Through 3 Miscarriages

Courtesy of Tim and Leah Shirey

The loss of a child through miscarriage is one of the most painful events that parents can go through. Unfortunately, while so many parents experience pregnancy loss, most do so silently and don’t have anyone guiding them through the grief that follows.

Virginia-based couple Leah and Tim Shirey, after having lost three children tragically to miscarriage, shared with The Epoch Times how they were able to grow stronger together, lean on God, and find hope to move forward despite the tremendous grief they suffered and the loneliness they often felt along the way.

Tragic Loss

Four years ago, the Shireys, like most married couples, were elated on finding out that they were pregnant. As they were surrounded by friends and colleagues who were having babies, they were excited at the thought of growing their own family.

“Our journey started as a decision that we were ready to grow our family, and we were under the assumption that this would be a normal one,” Leah, a family nurse practitioner, said. “With our first pregnancy, we had a lot of hope. I tried to make an announcement for my husband because it was something I always wanted to remember.”

The couple was elated and Leah, 37, took every measure she knew to care for herself and for the baby.

Tim and Leah Shirey at their wedding day. Courtesy of Tim and Leah Shirey

However, just a few weeks into the pregnancy, the Shireys experienced the tragic and unexpected news that Leah had miscarried.

“I worked long hours. It was during the winter and we were in the thick of it with the flu season. I had treated a patient with a heart attack, and I hadn’t felt well. I just started bleeding. I knew something was wrong,” Leah said.

She immediately reached out to her doctor.

“It was even difficult to get in to talk to my practitioner,“ Leah said. ”[However] I was able to finally get an appointment that same day. They told me that this was probably a miscarriage, considered a ‘chemical pregnancy,’ and that I would pass it on my own. I was told to just take a pregnancy test and let the provider know it was negative.”

At this point, Leah was unsure of how to process the information. “I took a week off of work to grieve the loss of a child … and then I went back to work to take care of patients,” she said.

For Leah, going back to work after the loss of her child was hard enough, but it was compounded by knowing that she’d need to look past her own sorrow and be able to treat other moms who were expecting.

For Tim, a 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran and beekeeper, the devastating news was a shock too.

“We waited a little bit to have kids,” he said. “We wanted to make sure our marriage was solid, and that we talked about how we were going to parent together. There wasn’t any thought like, ‘What happens if we have problems?’ We just assumed that when we decided that we were ready, it would just happen.”

The loss hit them hard and catapulted them into what they refer to as the “fertility space,” a place where doctors specialize in in-vitro fertilization and more complex pregnancies.

Tim explained that he sat down with Leah and wondered if someone would talk to them about what to do next. He shared the umpteen questions that filled his mind for which there were no answers and realized that no one was seeking to “close the gaps on where we were and our expectation of easily bringing a child into the world.”

Trying Again

Still, it wasn’t long before the couple wanted to try to get pregnant again. They were sent to an infertility specialist, where Leah underwent a number of tests.

“We both went in with the expectation of information,” Leah said. “Tim and I were placed on a rollercoaster and weren’t given the opportunity to fasten our seatbelts. We weren’t given a timeline with any expectations.”

Eventually, Leah went through a hysterosalpingogram to look for fallopian tube dysfunction.

“I watched facial expressions change and people started to diagnose me with something without telling me what it was,“ she said. ”There was a lot of talk about tests. I heard a lot of ‘maybe it is or maybe it isn’t conversations after the test, followed by ultrasounds.”

Doctors wanted Leah to get an MRI, but she became pregnant again a year later, before she could have the procedure.

For both Leah and Tim, the second pregnancy brought in some hope. However, when Leah went in for her ultrasound early on, she was told that there was another issue. This time, due to what doctors were seeing, she was told that she could possibly lose the baby and that it was difficult to decipher on imaging. Leah was advised to get an ultrasound every week for seven weeks to monitor the situation.

At one point, Leah said that she heard the doctor say that there wasn’t any reason to continue and that she was losing the pregnancy.

“It was life-altering for me,” she said. “It is one thing to lose a child and for your body to say ‘there is something wrong here,' and to take care of it naturally. It is a completely different emotion when you’re instructed at the direction of a physician to say you have to insert a medicine and pass the tissue or have surgery to forcibly remove the child from your body.”

Leah didn’t sleep for 36 hours because of the pain.

“I couldn’t shower because I was so anemic from blood loss,” Leah said. “To think that I did that at my own hand not because I wanted to, but because it’s what I was told to do…because that was a better option than surgery. I didn’t want anyone else to take my child and make my child medical waste. It was my child.”

Leah described her feelings of isolation and feeling that no one understood what they’d been through.

“No one who I worked with called me to say I know you’ve been through a really hard time and you’ve lost something. So I went in to try to do my job and I just couldn’t,“ she said. ”I was told to take the rest of the week and come back the following week to do what I needed to. So, in two instances of losing children, I was told that one week should be enough to grieve the loss.”

The Shireys came out from this second miscarriage grief-stricken once more but determined to try again with the help of specialists. Four months later, they entered into a third pregnancy, describing that this time, “we were very guarded.”

This pregnancy progressed further than the prior two.

“We got further along than we ever had because we had cardiac activity. Seeing that was a huge milestone,” Tim said. The couple started to pick out baby names. There was “so much hope and so much expectation that it was finally going to happen.”

During this time Covid hit, and Leah was going in for ultrasounds on her own.

Tim recalled one day, he was waiting outside while Leah was with the doctors for imaging. He got a call from the clinic telling him that she'd lost the baby.

Through tears, Tim said, “What made that so much worse was I couldn’t even be there, I couldn’t even come in the front door. I had to go around back, because of protocols they put into place because of Covid.”

He added: “I’m bringing my incredibly distraught wife out of the back of the building to the car, and I’m bringing her home and what do we do? There was nothing.”

‘Something in Her Broke’

Leah ended up requiring surgery because she couldn’t pass the fetal tissue. This was something she hadn’t experienced with the two prior miscarriages.

Tim was unable to be with her for the procedure and felt helpless.

“I could go to the waiting room, but I couldn’t be with her in pre or post-op. Leah struggles with her things going away, so they made a deal with her to take the fetal tissue and send it to a genetics lab,“ he said. ”The agreement was in exchange for us gaining genetic information. Two days later, she knocked on my office door and literally melted down. They (the clinic) called to say the nurse inadvertently sent the fetal tissue to pathology, and that the fetus was in formalin, so the genetics lab couldn’t do anything because of the formalin.

“I didn’t know what to do, there was something in her that broke.”

Leah curled up in the fetal position right outside Tim’s office.

“I had never seen that level of grief. For twelve weeks, it was hard for her to focus,” Tim said. “She went to the grocery store one time, and it was like the cars were moving way too fast. We had pushed her past her limit with the news coming out of that surgical procedure. She was in pain, and now there was this huge mental anguish that was thrust upon us.”

Navigating Grief Together

Leah saw her therapist, someone she credits with bringing her through much of the pain she was feeling. She felt that well-meaning friends didn’t know what to say.

“It was challenging,” Tim said. “She just didn’t have the energy to have a conversation. But you could sit there and be there was better than nobody being there. Daily activities of getting up and making dinner were just so unbelievably taxing. It took everything in her to do the basic things. It took everything out of her after she did them.”

During this time, Leah depended on Tim even for the basics of self-care.

“I knew Tim when I first met him,” she said, ”but you don’t know the attributes of someone until you are faced with hardship. Losing a child is a different kind of grief—it is a very silent grief. I kept my pajamas in a box after my second miscarriage along with some other things, and sometimes I pull out the things in that box because they are all I have.”

During this period, Tim cared for Leah in ways that she hadn’t anticipated. He attended to needs that she didn’t know she had.

“It was being able to be in and around and enveloped by somebody else’s grief because it is not the same,” Tim said. “I was just committed to being there. I spiritually, knew that my grief wasn’t anything like what she was experiencing.”

Finding Faith

The Shireys had many months of grieving ahead of them and were unsure of their next steps. They moved from Crozet to Scottsville and this change was something that they needed.

Many months after all they’d been through, the pain of loss was still very fresh.

“The Lord was giving me time,” Leah said.

She happened to join a Bible study that she said solidified her faith.

“I’ve been saved since I was five. I knew that if anybody loved me so much to die for me, that it was somebody who deserved my life,” Leah said. “People withdrew from me after I had the miscarriages, and they couldn’t sit with the kind of pain that I had. I wasn’t the same person that they’d known, and I had changed.”

Courtesy of Tim and Leah Shirey

Leah noticed that instead of people leaning in to support her, they left. However, during that time, she found out that Jesus was by her side.

“I wasn’t looking in the wrong direction. I wasn’t running. I was kind of stagnant, and He was beside me,” she said. “And when I was ready to approach Him and see Him for who He is, He very much met me with the constant love that He has.”

Leah described that she felt her grief was like a wilderness, a desert of sorts.

“I felt like the devil picked me up and threw me in the desert and isolated me from everybody, and that maybe I was being punished for something I didn’t understand,” Leah said.

However, she soon realized she wasn’t being punished but that God had something to say to her and He needed her attention—and that this is why she was in that “wilderness.”

“It wasn’t an uncomfortable place anymore,” Leah said. “It was a place of peace. It was a place of divinity, that Jesus would have something so important that He would bring me away from people so that I could hear Him clearly and not have any miscommunication.”

She shared that God made clear to her, “There is beauty from ashes, and there is victory, and that there is nothing at His hand that is not glorious. He wouldn’t ask me to do something if He knew it was going to harm me, rather only to make me better.”

Not Losing Hope

Leah and Tim have now found a close community at a local church. Although they still grieve and don’t know their next steps as yet, they have taken a lot of time to process what they’ve been through.

Through her experience, Leah said that she has learned, “Grief is fluid. It comes and it goes. Sometimes, it is expected, and sometimes it isn’t. It is necessary to sit with it and process it because, in that grief, you are not the same person.”

Tim and Leah Shirey run a company called Hive and Honeybee. Courtesy of Tim and Leah Shirey

Tim shares that through his experience he has learned: “There is nothing you can do as a husband to fix it. You are not in the driver’s seat. You don’t have any control over what that looks like. But your commitment means that you are there. You are just there.”

“Marriage is a communion,” the Shireys said. For them, their covenant and their faith in God have sustained them and provided hope for the future.

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