Sweet Water and Bitter

(Image by David Castillo Dominici, courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.com)

In 1990, I was twenty-five years old and nine months pregnant. I went to my final doctor visit on December 5th, and while there, the doctor told me that if I didn’t go into labor over the weekend, he would induce me the following week. He also accidentally revealed that the baby was a boy. I floated out the office door and went down the stairs to where my then-husband was waiting in the car. We always wore our seat belts, but this time we were so busy chattering, so excited over the news,  that we both forgot.

We never made it home.

I am very careful when I write about my son, who was born that day. He was a real person whose life was snatched away from him (not just from me). I never write in such a way as to allow what happened that day to become a “story” with my son as a mere character. So there is no need for me to delve into all the details of our accident right now, because at any rate what I really want to talk to you about is the place of tragedy in our lives.

Relatively minor things are going to happen to everybody, right? Somebody breaks into the house and steals the valuables. The “love of our life” strays away. We lose jobs, we lose our looks, maybe we lose a few of our marbles. The kids grow up and do things we don’t approve of. And in all these things, we generally grit our teeth and keep slogging on, until eventually there comes a day that we can praise the Lord that we didn’t marry that person, that we didn’t get Job A because Job B was even better, and so on. Then everything comes into focus and it’s easy to talk about how all things work together for good and how the Lord had a wonderful plan in place all the time.

It’s very different when you’re facing a tragedy so cruel and so devastating that no matter how you turn it, no matter how you analyze it and try to understand, you can’t see anything but emptiness and horror.

I remember a day, it must have been close to a year after my son’s death, that I came home from work and was just sitting in the living room alone. I can still remember the light fixture that was above my head, because that’s what I was looking at when I burst out sobbing and crying, “Why? Why?” I got up daily and went about my life, but the grief was constantly in my heart. I could never make any sense of why a precious, wanted baby would form so miraculously inside me, day after day and month after month, only to die in a senseless accident. And I would have given anything, anything, to have him back. I will never stop being sorry for him that his life ended after eleven days.

But that was many years ago, and so I’ve had time to consider what my life would be today if we had made it home safely from the doctor’s office, and everything had proceeded as expected. I think anytime an accident happens, you ask “what if” in a thousand ways. For example, I remember the doctor’s receptionist offering me an early-morning appointment, but I thought I’d rather sleep in so I took a later one. And after the appointment, my then-husband wanted to go one direction but I reminded him of an errand we’d promised to do, in the other direction. What if? The slightest variation in anything that day, and we would not have been there to collide with another vehicle at that particular moment. Over the years, I have learned to ask “What if we hadn’t?”

I am not about to sit here and think up a list of positive things that happened because my child died; that’s not what I’m getting at. But I do sometimes consider my now-husband, my soulmate of twenty years, and realize that I would never have met him if my life had stayed on the path I expected it to. I look at my beautiful daughter and my precious second son and wonder if they would have existed at all. What if I were given the chance to reverse all these years? What if the Lord said to me that he would turn back the clock, give my baby back to me, but I would never know these other three that I now call my family? I might bow my head and cry, but I would leave things as they are. And that gives me faith that I can trust God to know what he is doing after all–no matter how impossible it might be to see it at the time. He understands what we cannot even fathom.

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This week in addition to my usual linkup I am sharing with: