The text came hard and fast and early, just before my world would explode into a frenzy of action, kids needing a walk to school, work needing doing. And though the noise did not falter, because my boys brushed teeth and scooted chairs and closed doors and opened them again and turned plates and zipped backpacks and asked what was for breakfast, my world grew silent on the heels of a monster. On the heels of death.
It is not so very long ago that my brother and his wife had to say goodbye to twin boys, on Father’s Day that year, and now here we are, in the smack dab middle of the holidays, in the sacred stretch of waiting in expectation, in the Advent season when a girl-child awaited a divine baby, and there is another baby lost.
Another baby lost. Another little girl we will not know this side of glory. This one a niece.
My sister-in-law wrote in those early morning hours, about a labor they couldn’t stop, about the pains she thought were just normal pains, because they were two days from the safe-er date, and to have it all go wrong now, to have a baby come and not be saved NOW would be too cruel, too awful, too hard to bear.
And yet she came, two days before her make-it date.
Callie Diane, a cousin and niece my boys and I prayed for every night since knowing of her tiny life inside my sister-in-law’s womb, praying without ceasing after that first text came flying across the miles almost seven weeks ago: “My water broke.” We had hoped and begged and cried and begged and whispered and begged. And the God who has the power to give and take away chose miracle after miracle, keeping this baby safe and healthy and alive for forty-one days in a womb with no water.
And then, when they were almost there, he chose to take away.
What kind of God?
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I got the call about my beloved grandmother one morning just after feeding my toddler. Memaw had always been special to me, the rock who took us in when my mother left my father and needed a place to climb back to her feet, a generous woman who opened the doors of her home, again, the summer I finished my freshman year of college, because she knew Houston had greater job opportunities than my hometown. And she did it again the summer I graduated college and worked for the Houston Chronicle while I waited for a wedding that would bind me to San Antonio.
She’d had a stroke, my mother said. She had fallen. Something had pierced her belly and no one knew it. No one thought to check for internal bleeding before they injected blood thinners into her body. No one checked after all that, either, and she stretched out on a hospital bed and lost every ounce of blood to a wound no one could see.
She died.
And then they brought her back to life, once they’d realized their mistake, pumping massive units of blood into her, and she woke up. She lived. Except she didn’t live. Not really. She could breathe, yes. Sort of. She could see and hear and process, mostly. We didn’t really know how much of her was left. What we did know is that we were not ready to let her go. She had only lived 74 years of life, after all, not nearly enough.
I drove all that way to the hospital where she lay, and I went into the room, by myself, to see her. She was strapped to a machine that measured the rhythmic beating of her heart and the oxygen level blown from a mask and her blood pressure, which was always the problem, but not here, when medicine was injected into veins instead of forgotten in a pillbox she never opened. I looked at the tubes coming out of her, every which way, and at the mask covering half her face, and I bent over her and took her hand, and she looked right at me, and I didn’t even have to try. The words just came pouring out, words to a God who could work miracles, a God who could heal, a God who is Jehovah Rapha.
I called his name. I prayed for half an hour. I squeezed her hand. And when I was done, I asked her a question.
“You won’t give up, will you, Memaw?” I said.
And this woman who hadn’t talked since her fall, said, “No.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re going to live,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
They didn’t think she would talk again. There was so much brain damage, so much that couldn’t be repaired with just the giving of blood. It would have to be the giving of a brain, because this one was ruined by three minutes without oxygen and three strokes counted up over a lifetime. And yet she was talking.
It wasn’t time for her death, Jehovah Rapha said. And I believed him.
I kissed her cheek, knocking the mask a little askew, and then I fixed it, and after that I said, “I’ll be back to see you soon,” because I knew she would be up and about, defying all the doctors’ predictions, before I could make the drive to this place again. Hope walked out the door with me, warming all the places fear had chilled.
She would make it. Of course she would. Because we had prayed. Because he had answered.
And then she didn’t. She got worse and worse and worse, and it wasn’t a peaceful dying, either, it was a rough, hold on kind of dying. It was traumatic and hard and undignified, and I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe that I had been stupid enough to think that Jehovah Rapha would answer this prayer, ever.
My grandmother did not live, though we had prayed and believed.
What kind of God?
///
This morning I stood in the kitchen, listening to my boys talk about their dreams last night, and I didn’t hear a single word they were saying, because all I could think about was this baby and my brother and sister-in-law and how in the world I could tell my boys that the baby we’d prayed so earnestly for had died anyway.
And then my sister-in-law texted a picture of her perfect little girl with bruises on her face where they had tried to resuscitate her. I could not look at it without crying. Because she was perfect and because she was my niece and because she should have lived.
My boys didn’t notice, too intent on eating their breakfast, so I turned to them, and I laid it all out blunt and angry, because what did it matter about dreams when there was a brother and a woman who is a sister reeling from the death of another child?
“You know the baby we prayed for, your little cousin Aunt Sarah was carrying?” I said. They all looked at me and nodded. “She was born yesterday. And she died.”
My voice broke right in the middle of it, because who ever, ever, ever wants to say those ugly, awful, heartbreaking words about a tiny little miracle? I couldn’t say more. I could only shake my head and turn away.
And the second-oldest said, “Just like our sister,” and the table got all quiet.
They did not know their sister. But they know of her. They know of the girl we prayed for and wanted and imagined in the lineup of our family because she was made to be there. They know of the girl who died.
This pack of boys, who hear the comments people make everywhere we go, “You were trying for a girl, weren’t you?” and “All boys for you? No girls?” and “It’s too bad you didn’t get a daughter in all of those boys,” they may not understand just how cruel the taking is, but they do know that there is someone missing. Someone they might have loved. Someone who might have lived, if God had said so.
There are babies who die and babies who never come and lovers shot down in the streets and friends who take their lives and cities that are bombed bloody and fathers who fall off the wagon and grandmothers who die in a way we will never, ever forget, writhing and shaking on a bed. There are prayers answered and prayers left unheard, it seems, and we are powerless to change any of it. There is only one who holds this power.
What kind of God?
///
We didn’t expect to lose a baby. No one ever does, of course, but for us, it had always come easy, the conceiving, the carrying, the bearing. And when we learned of our fourth baby, we did not consider that it would be any different. Except it was, and suddenly I was in a place I never even knew existed, a silent place of grieving for a baby we never had the opportunity to know but who lived in our home all the same.
For three years her big brother had been praying for a sister. It’s unclear why exactly he wanted a sister, just that he was tired of welcoming brother after brother after brother. He was so excited to know that we were going to add another baby to the family, because he knew this one would be his sister. And he was right.
I took him with me to my second prenatal appointment, so he could hear the heartbeat I’d heard at the first one. And there was no heartbeat.
He sat in a corner of the doctor’s office while the nurse practitioner searched and then the obstetrician came in and searched, and he was still there, waiting to hear the rhythm, when my OB said, “These things happen sometimes” and I collapsed into a messy pile of sobs.
He was there to walk me out of the doctor’s office and he was there to try to cheer me up, though there was no cheering up from a tragedy like this one. He was there to tell his daddy,” The baby lost her heartbeat” when I could not say the words. He was only 3.
It wasn’t until later that we found out she was a daughter. It wasn’t until later that I met her in my dreams. It wasn’t until later that the silent cry slid deep into my heart, to be brought out in a great wave of rage another day, another day that was four years, five months and three days after that one. Another day that was yesterday, when another little girl died.
What kind of God?
///
They did everything they could, she said. All those doctors. All those men of science. They did EVERYTHING there was to do so they could keep a baby alive, raise her heart rhythm above 50 beats per minute, but in the end, all they could really do was place my niece in her mama’s arms and let her die. And so, in the same hospital where, 18 months ago, she watched her twin boys die, she held another baby, another promised one, another prayed-for one, and watched the breath stop in a tiny mouth and watched the color fade from a tiny face and watched the life leak from a tiny body. One pound, seven ounces, 12.5 inches of miracle, a little girl who had fought so hard to stay alive, even after she came into the world too many weeks too early.
She was blue and beautiful and alive, for only moments, and then she was forever gone.
What kind of God?
They did everything they could. It was up to God.
“My rainbow. My answered prayer. Washed away so quickly,” my sister-in-law wrote later that day.
“I’m truly sorry my body failed you, couldn’t keep you safe,” she wrote to her daughter this morning.
Three perfect babies denied them. Three babies covered in prayer and longing and hope. Three babies carried halfway, moving within, holding on to heartbeats, and then, at the very moment their parents finally get to hold them, they breathe their last breath. Given and then immediately taken.
WHAT KIND OF GOD?
I am angry. So very angry. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that it comes so easily for some and so difficult for others, this thing we call life, this thing that is really, mostly, like an every-day living war. It’s not fair that some get to have so many kids and some have so few or none at all. It’s not fair that every day my sister-in-law, a neonatal nurse, sees girls twisting in labor, girls who never wanted babies, girls who will give those babies away in the end, and she will deliver them and hold them and place them in the arms of a mother who never wanted them, and she will remember the weight of her own gone ones.
It’s just not fair.
No one ever said it would be easy, but no one said it would be this hard, either. No one said it would be this torturous, this excruciating, this traumatic. No one ever said how hard it would be to hold on to hope, because God works all things for good, and God doesn’t give us more than we can handle and through God all things are possible.
Except he doesn’t. And he does. And it’s not.
At least that’s what it feels like in a place like this one.
And of course I know the truth, deep down, because I grew up on truth, but that doesn’t change the truth of moments like these, either, when it feels like the only thing that is left for us is a tiny little god who didn’t care one bit about the tender, broken hearts of his people. Who waves his cruel little hand at tragedy and doles it out flippantly like it’s something everyone should want. Who thought it would be just the right plan to play with my brother and sister-in-law for forty-one days after her water broke, give them hope that making it this far meant they’d make it all the way this time, and then take a prayed-for, desperate-for baby two days from the we-made-it point.
What kind of God is this?
I know what kind of God he feels like right now, in times like this. But I also know that hope and faith and love are mysterious things. They hold on even in the strongest of winds, even in the deepest of waters, even in the fiercest of fires. I have been down to the bottom of the world, and I have stood back up again. I have been blasted into a pile of ash, and my dry bones have found life again.
I don’t really have the answers. Sometimes there are no answers, no matter how hard we search to find them. There are no answers to why one baby survives and another doesn’t. There are no answers to why some get everything they want and some only get asphalt and hunger and shame. There are no answers to why some die and others live.
It’s not easy to see and hear and feel God in a place as ruined as this one. It doesn’t seem like we will ever see or hear or feel him again.
But I know he is still here. I know he is peering over my shoulder, watching my every word, reading the texts I send to my beautiful sister-in-law, aiming the light so it shimmers around the corner of this dark room, still. Forging the way through and out and to the other side so it opens up like a morning glory.
So it ends its twisting, jagged path right in the lap of love. Eventually.
