Normal?

This is neither an incredibly deep nor an incredibly edifying post.  Just a little bit about how I'm doing.  God has been so good.  I was very afraid that I'd be incapacitated by grief, but I'm not.  It comes and goes, usually catching me off guard, but it has never overwhelmed me.  Well, maybe once.  What has consistently overwhelmed me is God's love.  When I'm hurting the very most, I know, on a deeply experiential and emotional level, how much He loves me, because my hurt is the hurt of a parent who has lost a child, a hurt He knew for me.

Please understand that as I write this, I am not crying out for sympathy.  I really am ok.  But I don't want to make it seem that I'm some super-person with no emotions, and I know people care to know how I'm truly doing, so here goes for some over-sharing.  My greatest emotional struggle right now is a simultaneous battle for and against normalcy.

After a couple weeks of waiting with excitement and dread to go into labor, a week of meeting and saying goodbye to my son and planning services for him, and a week of sitting around on the couch because I was so exhausted from the previous week, we all needed some normal.  Especially the toddler in our house.  No one wants to live in exhausted grief and domestic chaos for terribly long.  Forging my way back into life is probably an important part of healing.

But right now I'm mad at normal because it's so...normal.  Like, if you had visited my house in May and then again yesterday, you would have never known that my son ever existed.  We have a few more houseplants now, thanks to sweet friends who sent them to us in the week after Arthur was born.  I have a few more pounds hanging around my midsection.  There's a box of Arthur's things in our bedroom and a picture of us on the wall.  For anything else, you'd have to look into my heart.  Or maybe my eyes when I check out from reality every so often and my mind instantly goes to a hospital room where I spent about one day of my life.

It's hard to find a balance between hanging on to everything (like, I didn't unpack the hospital bag for a week and a half.  I just today threw out the last of the flowers from the memorial service) and boxing it all away (both figuratively and literally) like nothing ever happened.

Thank you to my sweet friends who invite me into their normal - coffee, the park, church events, family dinners.  It's been helpful and healing.  Thank you also to my sweet friends who want to dwell with me in the last few weeks, ask me about that day in the hospital, cry with me.  While it can hurt to remember, it means so much to me that you want to remember with me.  Both of you are helping me find that balance.

I've gradually learned over the last couple of months that grief is a very personal thing.  That's why I'm splashing mine all over the internet... ha ha!

Seriously, though, about 6 weeks ago, a good friend told me that she, years ago, had lost her infant son.  I didn't know this about her.  And I began to realize that everyone carries around wounds and griefs that very few people know about or think about as time distances us from whatever caused that pain.  Or maybe it's such a private grief that no one ever knew in the first place!  We don't go around introducing ourselves "Hi, I'm Sarah.  My son died."  And that's right and good.  My grief isn't the defining characteristic of my life (usually...).  My husband and I decided early on we did not want to look back at this time in our life as a time ruled by hurt - that's not the legacy we want our son to have.

And yet I want to remember.  I don't want to forget.  And remembering means remembering the pain too.  It's hard to find that balance. (Is that the third time I've said that phrase??)  I want a good, sweet, normal life where, years from now, my new friends will never know what happened this year until I tell them.  And yet I don't want that, because it seems like denying that I had a son and lost him.

It makes me wonder what secret burdens others are carrying.  And makes me thankful that God knows each heart and each pain and tells us to cast them all on Him, because He cares.

Death Sucks, part 2

While I never would have chosen to experience the death of my son, my newfound awareness of just how much death sucks has given me a greater appreciation for what may be the central truth of the Bible.

God used death to create the object lesson that permeates Scripture.  One we don't really care to talk about or emphasize.  One that probably didn't make it onto your Sunday School coloring sheets.  This object lesson is quite politically incorrect.  And yet it is the object lesson that is a flashing neon arrow directing you to the one truth you MUST know to be a Christian.

Sacrifice.  From the moment when God slaughtered those animals to provide clothing for Adam and Eve, He ordained a system in which His people were required to routinely, systematically, frequently kill animals.  Drain the blood from their bodies, hack them apart, and burn them up.  A large chunk of the first five books of the Bible are devoted to telling God's people exactly how, when, and where they were to perform sacrifices. 

I can only imagine what living around so much death must have been like.  Surely those Old Testament people knew just how much death sucks.  They couldn't get away from it!  It was an all-pervasive part of their worship of God.

Why?  Why would God want to constantly parade the hideous ugliness of death before the eyes of His people?  Put very simply, because He wanted them to know how hideous and ugly their sin was.  And how much it was going to cost Him to deal with their sin once and for all.

God's people slaughtered animals, hundreds of thousands of them, year after year, whenever they needed to confess that they had failed to meet God's perfect standard of holiness.  The ugly death of those animals was to remind them of what their sin looked like to God, and what the true consequence of their sin was - not the violent death of a sheep or a cow, but their own eternal death in hell, separated from God.

But the bloody death of all those animals could never make a sinful person perfect in the eyes of a holy God.  It was just a picture.  A picture of the ugliness of sin, yes.  But also a picture of the most amazing love.

"Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins."  How often have you heard (or said!) those words? I've found that in the last few weeks, I can't hear them or say them without crying.  Because death sucks.  When I hear the word, I can't help but think of my lifeless little baby in my arms.  Kissing his cold forehead.  Seeing his tiny little coffin.

My son died in the arms of his family, who love him so much.  He died peacefully.  God's Son was made into a public spectacle, killed in an ugly, violent, painful way.  There were no whispers in His ear and kisses on His cheek.  No tears falling from smiling faces onto His gently swaddled body.  Just  shame, pain, hate, darkness, and loneliness.  Even His Father forsook Him.

Jesus was the perfect sacrifice.  The sacrifice to end all sacrifices.  He and His Father planned that ugly death so that I could live.  So that a perfect God could declare my ugly sins forgiven, paid for by the Perfect Sacrifice.

I'm glad I know now how much death sucks.  It reminds me of the eternal death I deserve and helps me understand how much my salvation cost Jesus.

And I'm even more glad that Jesus isn't a lifeless body buried somewhere in the Middle East.  He is alive, and coming back to allow me to enjoy the eternal life He purchased for me (and my son!).  The chapter in the Bible that teaches Christ as the Perfect Sacrifice ends with these words:

so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him. ~ Hebrews 9:28

Death Sucks, part 1

I know.  Such a profound title for a blog post.

In our nice, 21st century first-world existence, we try really hard to distance ourselves from death.  Other people kill the animals we eat so we don't have to.  Some municipal worker cleans the roadkill off the road for us.  Modern weapons make death very "efficient"...no more gruesome hand-to-hand combat.  We wonder if lethal injection is cruel and unusual.  Even fake death on TV tends to happen right as the camera moves away or changes from a close-up to a long shot.  When a person dies, we either preserve the body to make it look nice or don't show it at all. 

If you want to keep distancing yourself from death, you might want to stop reading now.

As a nice suburban girl whose work experience includes janitorial duties and teaching, I've encountered plenty of dirt and ignorance in my lifetime, but not much death.  Until two weeks ago. 

Obviously, death sucks emotionally.  The grief of losing a loved one is a deep wound.  No matter how our society tries to distance itself from the physical realities of death, we all must grapple with its emotional effects.  We feel the pain of death, even though we try really hard to never actually see death.

But now that I've seen death, I can tell you that death is an awful, ugly thing in a physical sense as well.  On October 13, so very quickly it became apparent that my son was dead.  Even though his life was short, fragile, tenuous; within hours it was obvious that that life was over.  Holding his cold, still, little body, I couldn't pretend that he was still with me.

One of the prayers that my deepest heart prayed, that I could never say aloud to anyone, was that death would come peacefully for my son.  God answered that prayer.  Arthur's passage from this life to eternal life was so calm I couldn't tell you at what moment it happened.  I praise God often for hearing that cry of my heart.  Even so, death still sucks.

Over the last two weeks, as I thought about death and my first close encounter with it, I thought of Adam and Eve.  At least I have a little context for death.  I've seen roadkill, war movies, rotting fruit, wilted flowers, a funeral.  I had something of an idea of what to expect.  But after Adam and Eve disobeyed God and sin entered the world, they must have been shocked and horrified.  First God killed animals to make clothes for Adam and Eve.  Can you imagine watching the animals who had lived peacefully and happily in the garden of Eden with you die a violent death when you'd never seen anything like that before in your life?  When something like that had never happened before in human history? 

Then some of the plants might have died.  Fruit and vegetables spoiled, and no trash truck appeared to take them away.  Other animals died, and no one was around to dispose of their bodies.  Adam and Eve's bodies started to age.  One of their sons murdered another one of their sons.  Who had to bury Abel?  What horror they must have felt, over and over again.  They had known a beautiful, perfect world, and now this ugliness called death had taken over.  They had no way to shield themselves from it.


Today, thousands of years later, death is still everywhere; but we have succeeded in saving our sensibilities from its awful, ugly realities.  Until a terrorist murders a journalist on camera.  Until we read vivid descriptions of what it means to die of Ebola or in a civil war.  Until I held my dead son in my arms.

As I've pondered death, I've come to the conclusion that distancing ourselves from the ugliness of death has done us a disservice.  It has left us unable to fully grasp the most referred-to object lesson contained in Scripture.

To be continued...

Should

Today I went to the mom-baby floor of the hospital where my daughter was born to drop off some of the milk I am donating.  All around me were images reminding me how things should have been.  The harried first-time dad fetching the carseat from the parking lot.  The joyful visitors peeking their heads in a room to see if mom and baby were awake.  The lab where I took my daughter for her heel prick when she was exactly as old as Arthur would be today.  The nurse wheeling a new family toward the elevators, chatting happily with the mom about her little boy's stats.  I wasn't prepared for how hard it would be to see all of this.

Ever since we found out that our child's life would not be "normal", I've tried not to dwell on the "shoulds".

In the last week, though, I've given in.  It's impossible to ignore how things should have been.  When I sit on the couch in the middle of the night, I can't help but think of how I should be nursing my son.  When I wake up in the early morning light, I look over by my dresser where the bassinet should be.  When I physically have to sit down and rest, I think of how I should have a baby napping on my chest.  When all my family is gathered together, I imagine them proudly fighting over who gets to hold Arthur next.  When we get out of the car, there's only one carseat to unbuckle, not two.

Certainly these things should have been.  Certainly I can grieve all these normal moments that I'll never have with Arthur.

But that's only one aspect of the word "should".  God has allowed me to grieve these little losses without overwhelming bitterness because I know there's more to "should".

Theologians explain the two sides of "should" as God's preceptive and decretive will.  There's the "should" of a perfect world where everyone and everything obeys God's commands, where there is no sin, no rebellion, no heartache.  This is the "should" of God's preceptive will.  This is the "should" that I am mourning.  In a perfect world, everything would be as it should be, and my son would be thriving and growing in my arms.

Then there's the "should" of reality.  God isn't stymied or surprised by the sin that mars our world.  He wasn't somehow put on the defensive when all creation fell.  The happenstances of my life are not His plan B.  They are a part of God's decretive will.  Despite the fact that His preceptive will is not being followed, He is in perfect, sovereign control of every event.  Nothing happens that "shouldn't" happen according to His decretive will.

I've always had an interesting relationship with the concept of God's will.  Probably because it doesn't always line up with my will or because there isn't a flashing sign at every fork in the road of my life telling me which way to go...  This idea that something can be both against God's will and a part of God's will is rather confusing.

The best explanation of the two sides of God's will I ever received came from my father.  He told me to think about when Jesus died.  Jesus shouldn't have been hated by the very people He came to save.  He shouldn't have been condemned to death by a man who knew He was innocent.  He shouldn't have had to suffer and die.  Everything about those hours in Jesus' life should have been different.  Of all the unjust, unfair, wrong, sad, events in human history, this was the worst. 

And yet of all the moments in human history, this was the moment at the center of God's plan to redeem mankind.  Jesus' death was the most planned and anticipated event in time.  The Bible even says that God was pleased at Christ's sacrifice (Isaiah 53:10).

I am glad I serve a God who is so powerful that He can make even the most awful, ugly events bring about the greatest good. 

I can weep for what should have been.  God's preceptive will was broken when my son died.  It isn't right.

But I don't have to despair.  God purposed from before the world began to put Arthur in our family and to take him away.  My God, who planned from eternity past to allow His own Son to die unjustly in order to save me.  My God, who can make bests out of wrongs. 

Thank You!

Bouquet of Flowers, Cezanne

Thank you for listening...whether here in cyberspace, in person, or on the phone.  It's been so helpful to be able to express what is on our hearts.

Thank you for speaking...in your cards, calls, texts, emails, messages and comments.  Your kind words have lifted our spirits time and time again.

Thank you for praying.  We are humbled that so many people have gone boldly to the throne of grace on our behalf. 

Thank you for providing...food, flowers, financial support, errand-running, babysitting, and so much more.

Thank you for attending Arthur's memorial service.  On the way to church last Saturday, I thought "How silly to ask people to come to a memorial service for my little boy who they never even got to meet."  We were touched by how many people came to celebrate and to mourn with us. Seeing your tears on our behalf and feeling your arms around us let us know that our grief is not misplaced and that we are not alone.

Thank you for telling us that our son was beautiful.  

Thank you for affirming God's gift of life...even if that life is so very short.

Thank you for not growing weary of coming alongside us as we go through this trial.

Thank you for longing with us for the day when Jesus will reign forever and ever and we will be reunited with Arthur. 

From the Service

Here is what we wrote to be read at Arthur's service yesterday:

Arthur Isaac Ramos was born on October 13, 2014 at 5:34 pm.  He was 6 pounds, 3 ounces and 19.5 inches.  He had his daddy’s mouth, Uncle Andrew’s nose, Aletheia’s cheekbones, and Uncle Tyler’s long fingers and toes.  He enjoyed snuggling on his mommy’s chest.  When his daddy picked him up and spoke to him, he turned his head toward his daddy’s voice.  He spent the minutes of his life on this earth in the arms of his family who love him so much.  He is now in the arms of his Heavenly Father.

The months leading up to Arthur’s arrival were difficult because we found out mid-way through the pregnancy that his heart and lungs were not growing properly due to a diaphragmatic hernia.  As the doctors ran more tests, the news seemed to get worse and worse.  Arthur would not be able to live long in this world and only God could heal him – there was nothing the doctors could do.

Every night we prayed that God would heal Arthur.  When she heard Evan pray for Arthur, Aletheia would lean over and snuggle against Sarah’s womb where Arthur was growing.  She would rub her blanket on Sarah’s tummy and give “Arshur” a kiss.  In true brotherly fashion, Arthur would kick at Aletheia.

God chose not to heal Arthur on this earth.  The time we had with our son was far too short.  It was bitter, knowing how soon our time together would be over.  It was hard to say hello and instantly begin to say goodbye.   But our time together was also sweet.  We got to hold Arthur, talk to him, put a diaper on him, and place a little newsboy hat on his head.  We got to watch his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and big sister meet him.  We treasure every moment we had.

Tuesday night when we got home from the hospital, Evan prayed and thanked God for perfectly healing Arthur.  Aletheia turned to Sarah and wanted to kiss her brother as she had so many nights before.  Through tears, we tried to explain to her that he was no longer growing inside of Sarah but he also wasn’t in our arms anymore.  

We may never know in this life why God chose to say no to our prayers, but our experiences with Arthur have challenged and strengthened our faith. We understand now even more than we did before how much God loves us.  

We are so thankful for our family, our church, our friends, coworkers, and students who have been at our sides through this time.  Thank you for your prayers on our behalf and on Arthur’s.  Thank you for the words of encouragement and for the gifts of time, food, babysitting, and many other types of support.  Thank you for crying with us and for trusting God with us.  You also have helped us know even more than we did before how much God loves us.

Memorial Service Information

Thank you all for sharing the last months, weeks, and days of joy and sorrow with us.  We would like to invite you to share with us in celebrating God's goodness to us and to Arthur and to grieve with us for the loss of our son.