The first week of May is always a bit of an emotional roller coaster for our family. It’s a week to honor both my twin daughters. We celebrate our daughter Becca May’s life while at the same time we honor Hope Marie’s memory—and try to live in the inevitable uncomfortable tension between those two tasks.
The
writer of Ecclesiastes says: For everything there is a season. Paul
tells the Romans to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who
mourn. Most of the time life allows for a separation between those
"seasons". Babies are born
healthy and we rejoice over a new life; people die after living a long life and
we mourn their loss. But every now and
again, the neat divisions break down, such as they did for me on May 2, 2008.
Suddenly,
joy and sorrow exploded into my life simultaneously.
I
had identical twin daughters born that day; one was perfectly healthy, the
other clearly was not. She never cried and
was surrounded by medical staff who struggled to keep her alive. She was
quickly taken from the delivery room to the NICU at Franklin Square, and later
that day she was transferred to Johns Hopkins.
Hope
looked perfect on the outside, an identical match to Becca in every way
physically, but it soon became clear her body was just a shell.
The
medical diagnosis was grim. As I lived through
that long surreal 48 hours, the neat boundaries I thought existed between joy
and sorrow came crashing down around me.
It
was emotional whiplash. I struggle to
handle one emotion at once—much less the torrent of feelings that came with
these events that changed my life.
I
remember, more than once, asking God to breathe for my daughter because
clearly she was struggling to do it on her own.
She
never did breathe on her own, though.
In
fact, she barely survived the transfer from one hospital to the other. When we
came to Hopkins the day we let her go, machines were the only thing making her
lungs move. We knew what we had
to do… We felt what I can only describe as peace in the midst of the
pain.
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We
mark the occasion a little differently each year, but we always try hard to focus
on celebrating Rebecca on her birthday.
This
year for example we surprised her; her mom and I picked her up early from
school. We took her to the American
Girl store at Tysons Corner and had lunch, and then she bought a new doll—Gabriella.
I
had to take some time off work to do it, but the hug she gave me when she got
in the car and realized dad was coming too made it all worthwhile.
It
was a true God-moment I could not have planned.
She
felt the joy of a happy surprise; and I felt the joy of a daughter's love for
her dad. I know it won’t be that many more
years before she won’t be as interested in being with mom and dad on her
birthday, so we need to take advantage of these moments together while we can.
May
3 is the day in between the celebration and the remembrance—it almost has a
Holy Saturday quality to it for us.
This
year I spent it working. My wife attended a
clergy meeting. The kids went to
school. Brady had a baseball game in the
evening. It was, in many ways, a “normal” day for our famiy, and the weather
was beautiful too. But we were also well
aware of what tomorrow would bring.
Our
family refers to May 4 as Hope Day.
As
we do every year on that day, we visited the cemetery where our daughter is
buried. A line from Lauren Daigle’s song,
O
Lord, says: “I will
stand my ground where Hope can be found.” While Hope’s
earthly remains are buried in a tiny casket on the edge of Miranda Cemetery in Huntingtown,
MD, we believe that her spirit soared beyond the limits of her weak mortal
shell the moment she passed from life support to life eternal.
Wherever
Hope dwells now, she is not confined to a rusting box in the ground.
We
do not have to be in a specific geographic location to commune with Hope.
Nevertheless, there is something significant about occasionally and intentionally making a pilgrimage to a specific plot of ground in Calvert County (right now, a 45-minute drive from where we live). There, we “stand our ground where Hope can be found” and honor her memory. (I might add that this is where my wife and I will some day be laid to rest, “reunited” with the dust of the earth—and with our daughter’s physical remains.) My wife and I have done this pilgrimage to Huntingtown every year on May 4, sometimes alone and sometimes with our children. We stand before the marble monument representing our daughter and take a moment or two as a family to acknowledge that, though Hope’s life was all too short and ended tragically, her story is forever part of our story. She was real and she mattered deeply to us. Others may have mostly forgotten her but we most certainly have not. Our family portrait will always be missing someone.
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The Lent after
Hope died I recall that I appreciated the song When I Survey the Wondrous
Cross, as I never did before. I was particularly
drawn to the lines that say, "Sorrow and love flowed mingled down. Did
'ere such love and sorrow meet? Or thorns compose so rich a crown." I
think I appreciated it, because, for about nine months, I felt I had been living
it.
I’ve been living
in a place where love and sorrow met for nine years now. You may wonder: Have I
reconciled things? Not really. I don’t think you ever really
reconcile the gap between sorrow and love, rejoicing and suffering. I think rather you learn live within the
tension between those conflicting emotions. After all, when you think
about it, our world is a place where love and sorrow mingle quite frequently. So we get lots of practice in this earthly
life.
When people ask
how we got through the loss of a child, the first answer I give is: God. I unequivocally believe we could not have
done it if God were not with us every step of the way. But, I also believe
that God works with us—not for us. We
had a role to play in our healing too. Specifically, when Hope died, my
wife and I had a choice to make. Would
we become better or bitter because of what happened? I know I have
had moments over the past nine years where bitterness
got the better of me (my guess is Laurie would tell you likewise), but I
hope and pray the overall arc of our lives has pointed toward betterness. We’ve done our best
to focus on living these past nine years. From early on, we determined to
keep on getting up every day and moving forward as best we could—and as much as
we might have felt like staying in bed some days. In a way, our other
children made our choice easier. After all, we had an infant daughter depending
on us, not to mention a toddler son. We often reflect that our children
were our salvation in those difficult days immediately after Hope
died—and their life energy keeps us moving forward still today. I often say my daughter Becca carries “the
spirit of two” within her. Watching my children
“live life to the full” brings me joy.
As time went on,
I have become increasingly comfortable living a both–and existence. I
learned to make both the joy of Becca May and the sorrow of Hope Marie part of
my story. The passage of time has helped to scab over the wounds of our
painful experience in May 2008, but, to this day, they still can easily be
reopened. We are especially prone to reentering our wounds in the weeks
leading up to the girls’ birthday. It happened to me just the other day
at Target, when there just happened to be, not one—but two—sets of
healthy identical twin girls in Target shopping with their parents.
One of the sets had to have been close in age to Becca. What is this God:
sarcasm?! I think seeing twins make me think of what I missed out
on—being a father to twins. I watch them being "normal kids"
and want to stop and ask them what their life is like.
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