When I saw the priest swipe the Ash Wednesday cross on my baby’s forehead, I cried.
“Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return,” the priest said, and I looked at my round-cheeked, bobble-headed, newly-born gift, and I was terrified. He will die one day, I thought, and the simple truth of the human condition quickened inside me.
I spent one January in the hospital with that child when he was gravely ill, and, for a time, the doctors didn’t know how to diagnose him. If you’ve ever lingered in a children’s hospital, you know it is a hallowed place.
It rends your heart to see young bodies worn thin with illness and bloated with medication, to watch toddlers toting IV poles, and to find children who should be running and jumping and laughing, instead bedridden.
There’s an instant respect and gratitude for the nurses and doctors and workers who battle death every day and long through the night.There’s a strange kinship that comes with intuitively recognizing the fear and powerlessness on fellow parents’ faces stretched tight with worry.
My husband and I find etymology fascinating, and this child’s name carries a sense of “belonging to the Lord.” I’ve always believed it, but facing the reality that our son didn’t in fact belong to us, that we couldn’t heal him or sustain him or hold on to him—it was a hard place.
It’s also a place where dysfunctional coping mechanisms come in handy. The ability to emotionally disconnect, to push past the pain and fear and instead smile at my weak and feverish child was a strange gift that made the days endurable.
The breath-stealing moments came at night.
When the room was quiet and my boy slept, I curled in to the hard plastic couch & cried a soundless prayer, the kind where no words come & your body prays for you – the kind I last prayed when we miscarried a baby, the kind that comes from the gut.
© Renjishino1, Wikimedia.
One afternoon I was able to slip down to the prayer chapel, where the thick doors shut out the muffled sound of the hospital. It was late December, so the nativity still sat at the front of a room framed by four stained glass images. Next to that was a kneeler facing Mecca. Opposite, a spreading wood-carved tree twined up the wall, & beyond it, a glass cabinet, filled with more religious symbols than I could identify.
This was a place where no one could escape the truth of mortality, where a parent’s deepest fears confronted them face-to-face — a place where everyone reaches for God.
I had the chapel to myself, which was good, because emotion is loud and desperation bottles up inside, and all I could think was: NOT MY CHILD.
The previous four years had wrung us dry as a family. Circumstances had squeezed tight from every possible angle, and relational dysfunction and sin had nearly choked the life out of us, and as the new year dawned I couldn’t face this gauntlet.
“Please, God,” I begged. “Not that. Not my son.” I refused to bookend this with a rote request for God’s will to be done. I was afraid of God’s will.
I know well the stories of Job’s wife and her inexplicable loss and Abraham climbing the mountain with his boy and the woman who dared to believe Elisha’s promise of a son only to lose him. I wanted life and health for my child.
If something else came, well, the thought of it was, and is, intolerable. I confessed this to a friend who gently reminded me that “No, please God, no,” must be a permissible prayer, because there was Another who prayed the cup of suffering be taken from Him.
And I held tight to that when the diagnosis finally came, when it turned out my child’s rare disease was treatable but had long term consequences. I am deeply thankful for that outcome. I know it could have been much worse and that for many children it is.
© Jerzy Hulewicz, Wikimedia.
Writing medical updates for friends and family reminded me of this. I couldn’t make myself form the expected vocabulary. “Praise God,” seemed like what I ought to say to preface every good report. But it rang false in my mouth, because it felt myopic and premature. I’m unspeakably grateful, yes, but I’d have much rather passed on the whole experience. And what of the other children? The ones who have only bad news to report?
Easter is far off and while the hope of God’s victory frames all of life, we live in the shadowlands where children’s hospitals are still packed full. I can’t stop thinking about the families who don’t get the “Praise God” report.
Many days I find myself back in the hospital chapel, panicked in the face of suffering children, and shouting: NO, PLEASE GOD, NO. Because disease and death? I hate them.
In the front of the chapel, there was a large book filled with written prayers. Pleading prayers and resigned prayers and prayers for strength and messages of love to dead children. Because children die. Parents sit in that room and plead and cry and God doesn’t take the cup from their boy’s lips.
They are left bereft and empty-armed, and I can hardly breathe when I think of that played out. I can make no sense of the “why?” questions, and while my head does fine with accepting the sound theological parsing of suffering, my heart can’t swallow it.
On this side of mortality, there is no answer to the reality of that kind of suffering.
There is only Jesus.
A wounded Savior, I’m desperate for him. It’s moments like those where I need the crucifix. I need to see God himself coming to enter into suffering and death. I need to see him draw near to us in the face of our doubt and grief and show us the wounds in his hands and his side.
© Michael Saludo, Wikimedia.
When friends’ stories of loss brush close: the woman whose five-year-old was suddenly given a few months to live, the dying mother who stores up letters for her children to read after she’s gone, the missionary who came home on furlough to find a terminal cancer diagnosis, the dear suddenly-widowed friend and her bereft children, the Code Blues ringing through the hospital halls —it is too much for me.
Death, our great enemy, steals in, and how can we endure it?
I don’t know. There are no theological answers that make the pain bearable. Death is part of our world — a strange, holy, and terrible thing about being human.
Lent gives me space to receive this, it brings me into the wilderness with Christ, who took on a body destined for dust. The ashes on all of our foreheads become a quiet chorus that whispers: death comes to us all.
Though we must accept death, there is no way to normalize it. I think of this as I wonder how one bears the unbearable, how one carries the suffering and untimely death of a child up a mountain of grief. Or of anyone, because can death ever be timely when we were made for life?
I’m having trouble ending this post, wrapping it up with some sort of tidy conclusion, but I think that’s perhaps appropriate.
There is no conclusion for the Lenten moments – no tidy answer for my empty-armed friends, for the mothers still pacing emergency room floors, for the hollowed-eyed fathers in the hospital coffee line, for all of us who cry wordless prayers of pain.
Together, we wait with the suffering, gasping, beautiful world, believing hard that Easter is coming.
Oratio Contemplativa 