During the search the staff at the training school had been attempting to reach my parents by phone with no result because the number they had listed was for our home in Colorado. The social worker had our new one, but it was not on her chart at the home. We felt it was a grace given to us that they didn’t have the right number. To search all night for Amie and then to have seen her lifeless body would have been horrifying. Just hearing the news she had drowned was devastating enough.
I heard the news and immediately left to go to the “back house,” as we called it, which was a tiny apartment for missionaries who might be visiting our church. It doubled as a printing room. Pastor J, one of our family’s nearest and dearest friends, was working back there printing bulletins for Sunday service. I was crying and trying to tell him Amie had died. He asked me to slow down, to stop blubbering a minute, and to speak more clearly. When I choked out the news in a way he could understand, he pulled me in close for a hug I desperately needed at that time.
The rest of that afternoon is a hazy memory of sad-faced family and friends reaching out to us to express their sympathies and offer comfort. The phone rang and rang, my parents relating the tragic story multiple times. In between visits and phone calls, my parents began to make funeral plans. My mother made sure my brothers and I were included in the planning process. She didn’t want it to be an event where we came as spectators. My mom laid out the possibility of having an open-casket funeral. We unanimously rejected that awful idea, saying that displaying a picture on the casket would be better, leaving us to imagine her as we last saw her.
I had great fear of seeing Amie lying there not moving or making a sound. I shuddered and trembled just contemplating it, because up to that point my experience with death had been with elderly relatives.
In my estimation Amie’s death was wrong on so many levels. I wasn’t alone. I overheard some adults who visited tossing around words such as negligence and lawsuit and compensation. I don’t remember my dad saying much of anything. He’s not really the talker in our family anyway, but my mom fairly quickly shut down all of that mean-spirited conversation. She told our visitors that the people at American Fork Training School had cared wonderfully for my sister. Yes, the doors should have been locked, but Amie’s caretaker was not at fault for her wandering off. A number of “should’ves” could have been discussed, but no amount of talking would bring back Amie. Nothing could have changed the outcome, and my mom avoided expending a great deal of energy dwelling on what could have been different. I wasn’t worried about placing blame, but I had a lot of unanswered questions.
I crawled into my bed with family photo albums after the initial hubbub of people had left our home. I spent hours flipping through the pages of the album, crying until I had no more tears. Where were You, God? I asked over and over. I felt such deep hurt over this injustice. I was scrambling in my head to make sense. Why was she left alone? Why was the door left unlocked? Why hadn’t anyone seen her? Why didn’t she wander in a direction that would have been safer until she was discovered? Why? Why? Why? The unanswered questions tortured me.
There were no answers—not viable, good, satisfactory ones, answers that could calm my soul and bring healing for the hurt. And my pain was unlike anything I had ever experienced up until that point. I knew God was able to save my sister. Why hadn’t He done so? I had wanted more time with her. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, so I couldn’t go see her without an outing arranged with an adult. She lived about thirty miles away, so riding my bike wouldn’t cut it. I felt as though I had done so little, and now it was too late to do things differently. A heavy, crushing load of guilt descended on my weak shoulders, guilt that wasn’t mine to carry as a fifteen-year-old.
My grandpa Vance came over to visit. He always wore a baseball cap and had more than a day’s worth of gray stubble on his chin. He smoked like a fiend, so the smell always clung to his clothes. He would grab me about the waist, pulling me close to him, and chew on the top of my ears and give me whisker burns on my neck and cheeks. For years he told me not to swallow watermelon seeds or one would grow out of my belly button. After every evening spent on his porch eating the fruit, I would go home and check for signs of one sprouting out of my navel.
Grandpa Vance was still a favorite of mine, so his visit and words carried importance and weight with me. He sat down in a chair next to the front door in our living room, and I sat on the floor to his left so he could play with my hair, twirling it absentmindedly through his fingers. My mom was across the room on the couch. He began to talk about drowning victims, about how they were black and bloated. My mother shut him down immediately. “That’s not true, Vance!” she said. The discussion ended abruptly.
I carried his comments with me for the longest time. I wondered why he had said it if it wasn’t true. I didn’t find out the reality until I was a nurse with a year’s work experience, sitting in a hospice orientation class at Grand View Hospital in Pennsylvania. Our instructor mentioned her husband was on a diving team that recovered drowning victims. I asked her if she knew what happened to the bodies of people who died and spent hours in water. She explained that bodies left in water become bloated and the skin can darken, even become black.
I later questioned my mother about Amie’s body, and she told me Amie’s social worker had no idea she was missing, and ironically, he was the golfer who came across her body in the lake. When he called to tell my mother Amie had drowned, he could hardly get the words out he was sobbing so hard. He had been able to identify Amie only by her long, curly brown hair. The rest of her body was unrecognizable. Mom explained she had shut down the discussion with Grandpa Vance to protect me. She knew I was already having nightmares about Amie. Every night I dreamed my sister was struggling and crying, with nobody coming to help her. Adding the gruesome details to my imagery would have unnecessarily added grief.
I was grateful that I found out the corporeal realities of drowning at a time when I was more emotionally and mentally capable of grappling with them. I was not any less wounded, but I was an adult. I do believe God sometimes keeps things hidden until we’re in a place where they won’t harm us. In holding some information back, my mom gave me a gift, and I’m grateful.
Images of Amie’s death plagued me for years before I could finally assimilate that she was no longer wildly fighting for her life, wondering why there was no one to help.
Being a pastor’s child, I knew well the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the tomb: Lazarus fell ill and died, and his family prepared his body and placed it in a cave. Days later Jesus arrived and called forth Lazarus from the tomb, grave linens and all.
I knew the basic facts of the Bible miracle, and yet I didn’t fully appreciate the nuances of the account until I resonated with the grief of Lazarus’s sisters. John 11 says that Mary and Martha each went to Jesus separately and said to Him, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died” (vv. 21, 32 NIV).
Those words break my heart because I understand dashed expectations. God is fully capable of stepping in and healing and preventing any illness or injury from happening in the first place. But sometimes He doesn’t step in when we want Him to. The grief I read in the sisters’ response is palpable. I feel the depth of their pain and disillusionment. The women were disappointed because they knew if Jesus had been there in time, He would have healed Lazarus as He had done for so many others.
Martha and Mary knew and believed Jesus cared, because their urgent message to Jesus was “The one you love is sick” (v. 3 NIV). They hoped in the fact that Jesus loved Lazarus, and they thought their brother would receive special attention from the Son of God. Surely Jesus would put effort into saving the life of His beloved friend since He had already touched the lives of countless others. Surely Lazarus’s life meant more to Jesus than a stranger’s. But Lazarus died despite the urgent message the women sent to Jesus. No special attention came, and Martha and Mary wailed in their despair.
But when Jesus did
arrive, He wept with them.
Jesus was and is fully God, and therefore He knew the future—He knew He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead. The Bible calls Jesus a “man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief” (Isaiah 53:3 NLT), so He also was able to identify with Mary and Martha’s pain. It’s a gift to us that He is also fully human, and in the depths of His heart He can feel the pain and suffering we deal with in this life.
I have said this to God: “If you had been there, my sister would not have died.”
But she did die.
In John 11 Jesus said to Martha and Mary, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (vv. 25–26 NIV). They received their miracle within days of asking for it.
But I’m still waiting for mine. And I wait with hopeful anticipation in the promises I have today.
In 2008 I heard a beautiful song that helped me take a few more steps in the healing process. The song is “Unredeemed,” performed by the group Selah, and the message is this: when something in your life is shattered, and you place it before God, He will redeem it.
For years I felt as though I could wave my sister’s death in God’s face and challenge His faithfulness. But just like my fears over being abandoned if I should prove too unworthy of love, I didn’t necessarily voice my challenge out loud. It was a guarded area of hurt, deep and unhealed. I knew it was not acceptable to tell God I knew Him better than He knew Himself, that in some way I could find Him guilty. My perception, not unlike Job’s, was skewed. Job was innocent, so he concluded that his multitude of painful trials were a result of God being unfair. God challenged this thinking in the last couple of chapters in the book of Job, and I cannot read them without the hair on my neck standing up. God is incapable of being unfair or unjust. I, like Job, will not understand everything God ordains this side of heaven, and I had best be leaving the discrepancies to Him.
I became worn out from my bitterness and wounding, and I fully believe God moved in my heart to finally ask Him to redeem the stinkin’ mess. I wanted to let go of the past and stop letting it have sway over my present and my future. There is grief that pierces our souls deeply. None of the hypothetical bandages I slapped on it stuck. The healing process, if it’s going to be good and lasting, cannot necessarily be sped up to meet a nanosecond tolerance for inconvenience and pain.
Finding healing has been a work in progress for me. The redemption in my life has been occurring at a snail’s pace for more than thirty-five years, and it isn’t done yet. But, amen and hallelujah, I can see a healthy scar forming over the festering wound that had stopped me from truly trusting God. I now know that God never fails, though it certainly seemed that He did. In a way I’m waiting for heaven, and in a way I’m living in the now. I want as much healing as is possible this side of heaven. I want to lay down all that grief or, in my case, vomit the messes in my life at the foot of the cross. I cannot even say I lay my burdens down at the foot of the cross, for the word lay doesn’t convey the depth of the purging and healing taking place in my soul. This process gives me strength, and I cling to the knowledge that God is able to work all things together for my good (Romans 8:28). I also know that earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal. I will not be perfectly whole and well and unwounded until heaven. When God wipes away every tear from our eyes, there will be no more unanswered “whys” from this life. I can wait until then and leave my unanswered questions in God’s very capable hands.
3
FIFTY DAYS
I’m so glad I learned to trust Thee,
Precious Jesus, Savior, Friend;
And I know that Thou art with me,
Wilt be with me to the end.
—LOUISA M. R. STEAD,
“’TIS SO SWEET TO TRUST IN JESUS”
At dawn I sneaked into the living room toward Emmalynn’s infant chair, which was positioned on the floor near the couch. We had tried to have her lie flat in a crib, but it was difficult for her to breathe that way. The seat, which was covered in yellow-flowered fabric, allowed her to recline at a forty-five-degree angle. She looked like a princess sleeping on her throne.
It had been Mary Elisabeth’s turn to keep nighttime vigil over her baby sister, and the fourteen-year-old was stretched out on the couch, sleeping within arm’s reach of the recliner.
After having Emmalynn in our home for five weeks, I was now used to her paraphernalia being strewn about: diaper wipes, blankets, hats, and her oxygen mask with the penguin on the front. For a child who couldn’t really move unless we moved her, and she only went where she was carried, having her stuff all over the house was certainly not her fault! An oxygen condenser had been wheeled into the corner of the living room, and its steady hum was almost hypnotic. Stepping past the machine, I kneeled next to Emmalynn and checked to see that the nasal cannula was positioned correctly. I noticed her mouth was dry from the added air support, so I used an oral swab to moisten her mouth. She scrunched up her face with a hilarious but endearing grimace, and I barely kept myself from laughing out loud. So much for being a “veggie,” I thought. You’re quite opinionated about things for not having much of a brain to work with.
Emmalynn’s color was pink and she looked fine, which filled me with relief. The day before, she had seemed off, though I couldn’t put my finger on any specific reason why. I leaned over and kissed her smooth cheek, and after straightening her pink cap, I left both girls sleeping peacefully and went into the kitchen.
Mark worked second shift, which meant he didn’t have to be at work until the afternoon. He was preparing his “world-famous” oatmeal for our family, which was his normal morning routine. The four school-aged kids would be up soon to eat breakfast and get their backpacks and lunches ready.
I pulled my old, comfortable hoodie over my head and slipped on my athletic shoes. I headed out the front door, jamming my cell phone into my jeans pocket. This was the only time of day I was ever gone from Emmalynn, but I still needed to be available in case something happened that Mark couldn’t handle.
The air was chilly and the wind brisk. I snuggled my hands deep into the hoodie pocket to keep warm. The chill reminded me that summer was over and autumn had taken up residence, boldly decorating the region with purple, red, and yellow leaves.
As I strolled along the blue waters of Lake Michigan, the waves flirted with the shoreline, inching up the sand and then playfully pulling back. It was during these brief moments that I could think more clearly. That morning I made simple but ambitious plans to clean the house. Or maybe not. Maybe I would sit with Emmalynn and enjoy her company while the rest of the gang was gone.
When I arrived home, Mark had just finished washing the breakfast bowls. The kids gathered their school stuff together and headed out the door. A few minutes later, Johanna left to go to work. Mark went off to prepare for his day and take advantage of the few productive hours he had before leaving for work.
Suddenly I found myself with an age-old dilemma. The house needed a lot of attention since no magic fairy was going to come clean it for me, and supper should probably be prepped, too. Caring for a baby—any baby—creates a daily tension. Should you spend time nurturing the child, or should you attend to other practical duties and put the child in a safe place until your work is done?
Caring for a terminally ill baby heightens that tension, and since Emmalynn had such limited mobility, it was easy to keep her in her chair and get “important” things accomplished. Other than her fairly consistent hiccupping, she wouldn’t make a peep unless her diaper needed changing.
Oh, what to do, what to do? The task list was endless, but I made my choice. I recalled a stanza from a poem that reflected what was on my heart that morning:
Oh, cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,
But children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust, go to sleep.
I’m rocking my ba
by. Babies don’t keep.1
I tossed the to-do list out of my head to focus on the baby girl right in front of me. We had places to go a little later, so for now we were going to sit on the front porch steps and soak up the sunshine warming up that side of the house. I picked Emmalynn up from her little seat and carried her outside in my arms.
The next few hours passed by at a leisurely pace. I sat with Emmalynn propped on my thighs, her head leaning against my knees, her feet resting on my belly. I felt a little desperate to memorize what it felt like to hold her—the weight of her bottom resting in my lap, the softness of her cheek. I nuzzled the skin next to her earlobe, inhaling her new-baby smell that couldn’t be replicated on my own arm no matter how much Baby Magic lotion I applied.
Emmalynn had a seizure, and her little arms and hands raised in the air and waved briefly. The medications didn’t stop the episodes; they only lessened the intensity. Hiccuping sessions almost always followed her seizing. I leaned back and looked down at her, marveling at her little hands, arms now lying limply at her side. Her tiny hands and fingers were curled up a bit and not entirely splayed. I took one of her hands and wrapped all her fingers around one of mine. Then I gently stroked across the dimpled area of her knuckles.
I Will Love You Forever Page 5
