No meal was planned for after the funeral so that folks could stay and mingle, and they couldn’t have anyway because they needed to go about their Monday-morning business. After we said good-bye to those who came to support us, I had a sense of What now?
Our family went back to the house, which was strangely quiet since the oxygen concentrator had stopped its rhythmic humming and pulsing. Emmalynn’s recliner was in the living room on the floor. Her oxygen tubing was strewn about, her medical paraphernalia shouting to all who looked that our baby had certainly existed, lived, and breathed but now was gone. I couldn’t do anything with her things. I could not clean them up or throw them away.
I did make one phone call to a couple from church, Jesse and Taylor. They are like younger siblings to me. I asked them to please wash Emmalynn’s car seat and the stroller so I could put them away clean. Emmalynn had spit up, and her formula had leaked out onto the fabric. I had no mental reserve left to remove and wash and reinstall the coverings.
Taylor came over and picked up the car seat and stroller combo. He stood in our entryway and couldn’t stop the tears. He asked Emily, “Are you okay? I don’t know how you did this.”
Emily looked up at him and said, “We helped her to have a life before she died. It was a good thing, and I’m glad we could do it for her.” This simple statement made the big man cry all the harder.
One of my girlfriends had given me a gift card for my birthday, which was the day after Emmalynn died. I had spent my birthday going over funeral details with Pastor John, so I hadn’t really done any celebrating. I wasn’t in any mood to do it anyway.
Now that the funeral was over, I made the decision to take the gift card to one of my favorite restaurants and go have some lunch by myself. Field to Fork was emptying out because it was nearly 1:00 in the afternoon. I had brought a book to read, asked for a table in the corner, and tucked myself as far away from people as possible. I don’t even remember what book it was and didn’t accomplish much reading. I sat and contemplated all that had taken place and watched those milling around me. Forks were clanking against plates, glasses clinking in the sink where the kitchen help was washing them, voices calling loudly, “Your order’s up!” General hustle and bustle filled the restaurant, and no one in the room had a clue my baby was being carried to the cemetery and being buried as they sat in their seats, normal lives appearing to go on without a hiccup. No thought given to the mother in the corner grieving the death of her child while others fussed about their food being too hot or too cold or their child not winning his basketball game. The fact the world did not stop spinning for even a second for anyone else, not even me, left me feeling incredulous. How many people do I see in a day who have just had a major loss in their lives and I walk past and don’t see them at all and don’t recognize they are in pain?
After lunch I drove to the cemetery. I had been told Emmalynn would be placed in the infant section, and I knew where that was. I slowly came around the circle to the left and was momentarily confused. I didn’t see a mound of earth to mark her grave. On closer inspection, I realized a small rectangle of sod had been placed over the grave that held Emmalynn’s casket, and two wilted roses were lying on top. We hadn’t even had the presence of mind to order flowers for the funeral, and though one other family, friends of Jonathan’s, had thought of sending a bouquet, a mix-up at the flower shop kept the flowers from being delivered. The two limp roses, almost colorless against the dried, matted, faded green grass could easily have been missed had I not been searching for evidence they were there. This cut me to the core.
No stone. No large display of flowers, just a chunk of dirt and grass removed and placed back almost as though the grave didn’t exist.
But it did exist. There was a grave.
A new one.
A baby was in that tiny white casket.
My baby was in that grave.
For a few seconds, I fought waves of nausea. I panicked, thinking, I can’t leave her here. It’s dark. She’s alone. She’ll be cold. Oh God, I groaned, this is too much to bear. I can’t. I can’t!
For the first time ever, I understood the scene in Gone with the Wind when Rhett Butler refused to allow his daughter, Bonnie, to be buried.
The intensity of my grief shredded any semblance of control I might have exercised earlier in the day. I understood from a practical standpoint that even if I did dig up the dirt again and move it aside, I could not and should not bring her casket out of there and home. But I still had to work through my thoughts in my usual way.
“If you got out of the car and dug up the casket, then what?” You can’t change that she died.
“So now what?” You cannot change that this is the way it goes. Bodies are buried or cremated or lost on earth in some other fashion. That’s the reality, woman, smack-you-in-the-face reality, but you’re going to have to deal with your helplessness here.
I felt as though I could not breathe, the sorrow and loss were so overwhelming. Just my Jesus and me, working it through. And faithful as always, He answered my prayer in a completely unexpected but absolutely appropriate and soul-touching way. He was touched by my grief and He was weeping with me, but not because He was helpless to do anything for me.
I was still sitting in the car, with the engine running, on the paved driveway that was only a few feet from the infant section and Emmalynn’s grave.
At that precise moment a song by Gungor came on the radio, “You make beautiful things out of the dust…” From dust we came and to dust we will return. Emmalynn was not in the grave, but her little body was being cradled in God’s creation of earth. Her body would eventually be resurrected—beautifully whole and well.
I remembered a scene from the book Faith Like Potatoes. It tells the story of a four-year-old boy named Alistair who is run over by a tractor driven by his uncle Angus. The grief tears Angus apart, and he explains:
I was racked by guilt, and couldn’t eat or sleep. The nights were the worst…. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the jolt of the tractor…[and] saw Alistair’s little body lying limply in my arms.
The devil was quick to accuse me. The thoughts went round in my head day and night: “You killed your brother’s son! It was your negligence that killed him. You should have been more careful. You’re not worthy to be a witness for Jesus.”1
In a dream Alistair’s father, Fergus, sees his son running toward him through emerald-green fields. Fergus catches the boy up in his strong arms and swings him around in the air while they laugh together. Fergus asks his son if he wants to come back, and Alistair answers, “No, Dad, I’m waiting for you.”
Even though it’s the middle of the night, Fergus calls Angus and shares the vision he had with his brother, helping to assuage the guilt and the grief Angus had been experiencing. Angus writes:
“I know that eternity is real. When I reach the pearly gates through the grace of God, there is going to be a little boy named Alistair waiting for me, and we will recognise each other…. As I grew in Jesus through this experience, I came to realise that life is nothing but a vapor, a puff of smoke that soon blows away. Our real eternal life is safe in the hands of God.”2
If I could call to Emmalynn and ask if she wanted to come back, she would say, “No, Mommy, I’m waiting for you in heaven, and I can’t wait to show it to you!”
Logically, all this agonizing pain and grief could have been completely avoided. We did have that choice. But we had also received so much joy because of her little life, which we would never have known had we shielded ourselves from the hurt.
My feelings became less desperate and out of control. God promises a peace that passes understanding, and thankfully He quieted my soul. The cemetery situation was not without any tangible ways to make it more bearable, and I was gifted with the ability to sort through the troubles in my head and also think, What can you change?
The pathetic flowers on Emmalynn’s grave made me sad. I opened the car door, stepped over the curb onto
the grass, and stooped down. I picked up the wilted stems, walked back across the road, and threw them in the trash can. Getting back in the car, I promised Emmalynn, “I’ll be right back, baby.”
I then went to see my sweet friend Maggie at the monument store. I told her, “I need something to mark Emmalynn’s grave until her headstone is finished. Please help me.”
Maggie took me over to where there was a grave marker with the face of an angel and the words “In the arms of the angels far away from here” written on it. It was perfect to mark the spot until her own stone could be crafted. I took the grave marker to the cemetery and gently placed it on the small patch of sod.
One of the verses I had chosen for HALO was Matthew 18:10: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven” (NIV). I had shared this comforting verse with many of the families I helped during my time as a bereavement specialist. Our babies were not lost, wandering about or ceasing to exist entirely. They could no longer be in our arms, but they were in someone’s arms; their own angels in heaven held them for the time being. I was living what I had been sharing with others for years and finding it enough in the throes of bearing my own grief.
5
FLAWS REVEALED AND HEALED
Grace, grace, God’s grace,
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within;
Grace, grace, God’s grace,
Grace that is greater than all our sin!
—JULIA H. JOHNSTON,
“GRACE GREATER THAN OUR SIN”
This line by Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham to his butler has recently made it into our cultural lexicon: “My dear fellow, we all have chapters we would rather keep unpublished.”1 Well, these next two are a couple of mine.
I have heard, “I love you so much!” time and time again from people who have read what my family and I do in caring for terminally ill kiddos. I appreciate it, really I do!
But it’s also superficial.
It’s abundantly more meaningful to me when folks know me well—flaws highlighted—and they still stick around.
Tim Keller profoundly sums up my feeling:
“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”2
While Emmalynn was living with us, Mark and I began the licensing paperwork to become medical-treatment foster parents because that was the best way to be in a position to receive a Safe Haven baby. We especially wanted those who were born with a lethal anomaly or a terminal diagnosis whose parents could not deal with it and had safely relinquished the child to authorities. This child would not have dozens of people lining up to take him or her home but rather would need a family like ours ready to do hospice care. After Emmalynn’s funeral, our family was most assuredly still grieving, but our sorrow over her passing had not incapacitated us. The social worker in charge of the process had left us alone to grieve for a few weeks. One day I summoned the mental energy to call and ask her what was next. She informed me that a social worker from the foster care agency would visit our home. I knew she was to meet with and interview each of my children privately, and I didn’t have a clue what she would ask or how they would respond.
After the social worker met with Andrew, she pulled me aside and said, “I asked Andrew if he wanted to take in another baby who was going to die. He said, ‘I don’t want to do it. It was too scary.’” She said she had not promised Andrew it wouldn’t happen again and suggested that I talk to him about it.
I took this advice to heart because I was not purposely trying to traumatize any of my children. Before discussing the conversation with Andrew, I spent time praying. One morning on the way to school, I casually asked him, “You told the social worker having Emmalynn was too scary. Can you tell me what bothered you?”
He sighed. “I never knew when she was going to die,” he said. “And I was afraid when I went to school that she would die and I wouldn’t know. I might come home and find she was gone. I don’t want to do that.”
I asked hesitantly, “So you weren’t scared she was going to die; you were afraid because you weren’t going to be there?”
He nodded. “Yes, I want to be there if I can. I don’t want them to be gone and not be able to see them again.”
Feeling my way tentatively, trying not to assume or put words in his mouth, I asked, “If we get another baby who is terminal, if and when that might ever happen, when they die, if I promise to come and get you wherever you might be at the time and bring you home and let you see the baby and say good-bye, are you good with that?”
“Yeah, totally.” Then, in his typical middle school fashion, he said, “Hey, Mom! I’ve been thinking about teleportation. Like I could make a car that you could just get in it and think about where you wanted to go and it would go. You wouldn’t even have to drive it yourself! Wouldn’t that be cool?”
“Uh, yes,” I answered. “Sure, that’d be cool.”
Apparently the subject of having more hospice kiddos had been resolved and we had moved on to the next thing.
I dropped Andrew off at school, and I pulled over at the cemetery on the way back home. I gave myself a moment to weep with gratefulness for the outcome of our conversation. I’d had no idea my boy was struggling with the possibility he might not be there when Emmalynn died.
The decision to keep Emmalynn with us through the night—though I was in the dark about Andrew’s fears and his desire for closure—was an affirmation from God to him and me.
In late October 2012, we completed our medical treatment foster parent education requirements, but more in-depth background checks would take weeks to complete. Over Thanksgiving I sent an email message to the social worker asking whether everything in the licensing process had been wrapped up.
In reply I received a cryptic email saying there were some glitches that we would have to address. I swallowed a lump in my throat and wondered what they could be. The second week of December, Mark and I sat in our living room as the social worker told us we had some serious issues to deal with. Both Mark and I took deep breaths, or maybe held them, thinking, Good grief, what’s up now?
The social worker asked about a 1999 incident when the police had pulled Mark over. He had been riding a motorcycle along with four-year-old Charity, who was on the front of the bike. The helmet on her head was so heavy her neck couldn’t hold the weight, so she was riding with her head tilted onto Mark’s forearm as they cruised slowly around the block.
The policeman warned Mark that it wasn’t safe for her to be in the front and that she should be riding behind him. The officer didn’t issue a ticket, and Mark never told me about the incident, so I was surprised upon hearing about it now. Mark was irritated that something like that would even be considered a concern. The news was a little disconcerting to say the least.
But the social worker wasn’t done.
She looked down at the papers in her hand and then up at me. She hesitated, shrugging her shoulders, as if to say that this had to be addressed whether it was comfortable or not. “Cori,” she said, “your record shows a chapter 51 in 2010 that you didn’t tell me about.” She was not harsh with me and said sympathetically, “It looks like you were trying to hide it, and not disclosing it is worse than telling me about it in the first place.”
I felt as though all the air had been sucked out of the room.
I had no idea that my brief stay in a psych ward was on my record, because I had been told it had never been made an official incident in my health history. I had never gone to court for it. The foster care application had not asked a direct question about it. I had no intention of hiding anything; I honestly hadn’t known the “almost” chapter 51 filing was a problem. The
filing applies if a physician determines the patient is “dangerous” and “evidences a substantial probability of physical harm to himself or herself as manifested by evidence of recent threats of or attempts at suicide or serious bodily harm.”3
A huge wave of shame washed over me. My heart was racing, my gut rolling, my palms sweating. All the reasons in the world why I was the biggest loser on the planet careened around in my head. Who was I to think I should be a foster parent? The past is not supposed to define your present, but sometimes it does. When you put a nail in a wall, you leave a hole. Our actions have consequences that can be forgiven but not necessarily forgotten.
I stammered through a difficult explanation about a period of depression, wondering if “Me thinks thou doth protest too much” was the way the social worker perceived my ramblings. Our culture isn’t friendly to people who fail. At the end of a football game, I might comment on the losing players, “Oh, those poor guys. They really tried hard.” My compassion for the unsuccessful team is not necessarily shared by my friends and family members. My sentiments are usually met with a harsher viewpoint: “They lost, Cori. They lost. It doesn’t matter if they tried.”
I wasn’t sure if my explanation was going to be adequate or whether a desperate choice in my past would define my life and limit my ability to do what I desired.
The social service worker said the chapter 51 would not necessarily disqualify me, but I would have to undergo a psych evaluation.
After the social worker stood, gathered her papers, and left our home, I told Mark, “We don’t have to do this. They need all our financial information. They want to talk to all of our kids without us in the room. They want personal history from our childhoods. This is incredibly intrusive to have people we don’t know combing through our lives and making decisions about our worthiness to foster. We do not have to do this.”
I Will Love You Forever Page 8
