One year later

I felt woefully unprepared for February 20, 2022.

My life is so drastically different than a year ago, and yet not.

Last February, we were recovering from the ice storm, planning out where to park our RV at OHSU, and preparing our kids for all the different possible outcomes for 37-week-old baby sister. It was impossible. I was buried under the thought of choosing an induction date. There were giant fans and floor to ceiling plastic sheets in my house pumping air into giant holes cut in our ceiling after a pipe broke upstairs. Our house was physically torn apart, and we’d been riding a slow wave of grief since the 20-week ultrasound shattered our reality 4 months ago. We were tired.

I still feel tired.

I still feel stuck.

I still am missing a part of me.

There are so many things that I am thankful for, but reality is also pain.

We were covered in prayers and cards and meals and gifts over the past year; all amazing displays of Jesus’ love for us, but it’s still not ok.

Death is not ok.

Death is a ripping apart of God’s design for this world.

It is separation.

It is wrong.

That’s why I feel this way, because it’s not how it’s supposed to be.

So as I continue on living in a world where death meets us EVERYWHERE, I’m trying to figure out how to be the mother of a dead child. How often am I supposed to visit her grave? Why haven’t I managed to scrapbook her life yet? Why is her garden unfinished? How do I honor her on her first birthday? Her 16th birthday? I don’t know all the answers.

So I cling to what I do know.

I know God is good.

I look at the seven rings on my finger and look at my three healthy children who have survived the unthinkable. No one knows why they are the survivors, no one knows why four of their siblings are now in heaven, and no one knows how they made it through this past year and a half of unanswered questions and pain no child should ever face.

But they have made it through.

Cayden will turn 11 on Sunday, knee-deep in her first real musical production at the Majestic Theater. Every weeknight, she spends 3.5 hours with no-longer-strangers, learning her singing parts for her role as “Amanda” in Matilda the Musical. She is bored some of the time, but making some friends and learning SO much about theater life and is still excited, even though the slog is real right now. 

When she is home, she has gone back to Legoing upstairs in her room (taking a break from the past year of sewing) and has loved snuggling up with me on the couch watching the Winter Olympics every night after Piper and Judah go to bed. 

She is pouring through books about Christian missionaries and is currently reading Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales. She bides her time in a crazy classroom at school, waiting for a little more structure that (hopefully) middle school will bring next year. She still can’t spell to save her life, but she’s started writing long stories in class, which impress her teacher and I’m eager to read whenever they do come home.

Piper the 8-and-a-half Queen of the Cul-de-sac. 

There are 12 kids (not counting mine!) on our cul-de-sac and if Piper dares to come inside at any point after arriving home on the bus at 3pm, I know there will be constant knocking on the door for her to come back out and play. 

Our garage has become a jumble of makeshift desks and teaching paraphernalia from their “preschool phase,” our yard is constantly littered with balls and nets and field goals from their “baseball phase” (ok, this was Judah’s doing too), there are currently rollerblades in the downstairs bathroom from that phase and now everyone is in a “trampoline phase.” 

The neighbors are always bringing our dog Macie back from wandering around because our fence gates are always hanging open from the little people’s adventures. For the girl I pegged as an introvert, Piper has come alive with the need for social interaction. Everywhere she goes, I get good reports of her playing nicely, and especially taking care of the neighborhood babies. After those stints, she does often come home happy, but a little sad that she had to leave that baby and couldn’t take it home. Piper still has trouble playing with the friends when her siblings enter the mix, so most of the time, there are a couple of groups playing, or the other two come inside to do their own thing. 

Tale as old as time: it’s so much harder to be civil with your siblings. 

I have noticed however, that Piper does miss Cayden when she is gone at play practice, and when she is feeling bored, she will seek Judah out for a good “tackle” or “floor is lava” game. Piper’s emotions still swing low and high, but she’s now able to cope better and usually only lets the bear out when she’s tired or hungry. She’s very excited to see the new Pixar movie “Seeing Red” about a girl who turns into a Red Panda every time she has extreme emotions. I’m curious to see how she relates to the movie. Piper continues to surprise. Valentine’s Day was an endeavor for her because she made a long list of all the people she wanted to make Valentines for. While she didn’t get to quite all of them, she tackled the school ones first, even making a sweet card for Mr. Alex the janitor. She loves cards and giving gifts and lately she has been organizing her old school projects by grade and putting them in a binder in plastic sheets so she can flip through and look at them. Most nights, I can hear her in her room, reading excerpts from her Kindergarten poetry notebook. She still treasures her teachers and all the little notes they’ve sent her. She made valentines for each of her old teachers, along with helper teacher and other school staff. She’s excited about reading, and loves to snuggle up with me and read a book together before bed on the nights it’s not too late. She is forever my snuggle buddy and there’s never enough mom for her.

Judah is 5 and a half and learning learning learning. I am learning learning learning so much too. He is learning how to laugh at himself, communicate is “strong words” and learning how it’s ok to lose sometimes and win sometimes. 

He has yet to master any of these things, as he’s very all or nothing. He’s either super fast around the basepaths or SUPER SLOW putting on his shoes. He’s either complaining to me about how he’s “the most horrible boy” or bragging about how he beat Cayden at P-I-G. He’s the ultimate optimist in every game, until the final buzzer rings and the scoreboard says he lost. 

He almost died when his team (TB Buccaneers) lost in the Division Playoffs and THEN when Tom Brady retired, it was all over. Often, Judah will come home with multiple “Kindness Cards” given by his classmates at school and he will usually have one for me that says, “Mom, you are good, love Judah.” I learned this week that he’s also been hiding similar cards for his teacher (the beloved Mrs. Schultz Phillips) around her desk, informing her of her “goodness” too. As I’ve had the opportunity to volunteer in Judah’s class this month, I’ve heard from many of his classmates how much they like Judah and have also learned that he is very sweet to even the toughest kids in his class. 

When I am in his class, sometimes he ignores me and does his work dutifully, but then he will sneak up and surprise me with a full body hug, head rested against my shoulder as I’m squatting down to help one of his classmates. Judah’s hugs linger, and I take them in, rubbing his back and showing him and his classmates that I too need hugs. Many other kids have come and gotten hugs from me too, which is probably faux pas in this Covid era, but I don’t care. Judah treasures his snuggle nights, loves reading books together, and falls asleep so fast when nestled in my arm. He’s afraid of coyotes (because I saw one in our cul-de-sac) and wolves, so we talk a lot about how wolves don’t have hands so they can’t open doors and come into our house.

I tell you these things because it’s my way of record-keeping…and to let you see how my kids are doing after losing their little sister. I am proud of them. They are imperfect but they are mine to keep holding for as long as God lets me, so I write of them.

We spent Hallelujah’s first birthday (Feb. 20^th) doing what we did on the day she died.

Maybe that’s strange, I don’t know, but now it’s tradition.

Hallelujah died early in the morning on Feb. 24, 2021.

That day, the sun rose as a man from the funeral home drove away with my baby in a Moses basket in his font seat. There had been a lot of rain over the past 5 days, but Feb. 24 was beautiful. On that day, we sat around on the couch, holding crying kids and trying to comprehend what had just happened and what still lay before us. My parents and in-laws were still at our house, and they started cooking a real breakfast – potatoes, French toast and bacon. 

That afternoon, Judah really wanted to go out and play baseball in the sun so we filled up our wagon with baseball equipment and trudged out to the dilapidated WWII era baseball diamond in the heart of Adair Village. And you know what happened? We laughed at my mom cheating on the basepaths. We cheered when the first baseman actually caught the ball. We laughed again when Judah ran all the bases after every dribbler because he was bound and determined to get a homerun. We sucked in the bright air and remembered we could breathe again.

So this year, to celebrate Hallelujah’s birthday, we did the same thing (with slightly bigger teams). We invited our siblings and their families to pack into our house and share a real breakfast (potatoes, French toast and bacon) for after-church brunch, and we kept peeking out the window into the rain, hoping we would see enough sun to fit a baseball game in. 

At just the right time, we got a break and headed out to the field. We threw out a few makeshift bases, laughed when my niece got knocked over by her mom scrambling for the ball and the really competitive ones cried when the game ended in a tie.

It was perfect.

We set up a table of Hallelujah’s memorabilia in the living room – stuffed animals, ultrasound pictures, hospital bracelets, footprints, insurance cards with her name on them, stacks of cards received from loved ones and even freshly minted artwork from her cousins depicting her flight up to heaven complete with “tooting” angels.

Our daughter left an imprint on so many.

I’ve had people telling me all week about how their children talk about Hallelujah and sing her songs and I’m so thankful she lives on in so many ways. It is strange grieving someone longer than you knew them. I’m not quite sure I will ever get over that. But I have learned that to grieve is to love and that even when a life is barely lived, and seems to only bring pain, if you trust in a God who is greater, he keeps giving bits of bright air that remind you to breathe again.

God be praised.