Sometimes love feels fierce as hate-
mingling down in howling tears.
It's hard to tell the difference
Am I crying for my kid?
Am I crying for myself?
Which makes me wonder
What your mother felt the day she cradled
your dead body?
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People tell me from time to time that I’m just like my father. And there was a time when I didn’t like to hear that. But now I’m proud to say that in many ways, I am like my father.
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You need good friends when you walk with people through their most tender and hard places. Trey, Dick, and I became good friends, brothers really.
Then they died.
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Our classes would gather in the school’s main hallway each morning, lining ourselves against glass windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. The teachers stood in their jackets and drank coffee, bracing themselves against the cold breeze that flowed through the ever-opening doors. We shrank back from the cold ourselves, tucking our arms and legs and chins inside our coats. One morning, Ms. Reed marched along our line and stood in front of me. “Stand up, Backous,” she said, her loud voice booming over my head. “Unzip your coat.”
I felt my face twist up as I pulled down the zipper. Ms. Reed sipped her coffee. “You are not appropriately dressed. You cannot wear T-shirts with what we talked about. Go call your mother.”
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Because I know the end of the story,
I have a hard time seeing grief.
It's too easy to skip that day
and say Sunday's coming!
I need to hear middles of stories.
So I can see. Maybe not hear or
see, but feel.
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In God’s mysterious and inexplicable ways he has taken mine and your mother’s broken DNA and woven in an extra copy of the 23rd chromosome into you. The grief that that news brought us has been gradually replaced with expectation of blessing. The stories that surround different boys, girls, men, and women with Down Syndrome that have come our way since your diagnosis have been consistently stories of childlike and irreplaceable joy.
Life has its costs and its benefits and the thing about believing in God is that we look with faith for surpassing blessing. Life is not a zero sum game for those who love God.
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I have Bipolar Disorder. This is not news. I always think it’s news. I always think it’s going to be so scandalous to announce. I think that telling anyone I am sick will be disappointing, will discredit any ounce of wisdom and wellness I may ever have, and undo any bit of the good I’ve done. As if this is a disease tamed by diligence and strong moral character. It does not matter how perfectly I eat, how long I sleep, how meticulously I curate my media consumption, sometimes,
I just get sick. Really sick.
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Many of you were and some still are people we've never met - yet you have become family to us. You have loved us. You have personified what Jesus said in Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
I grew up poor, but I have never known such need as this past year: emotional, spiritual, physical. And Jesus used many of you to meet many of those needs.
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When Max died, we suffered for something. Our suffering was redemption because we did it with our hope in Christ. God redeemed the very act of suffering not by negating it, but by bringing meaning and purpose to it, making it more whole than it was, more complete and holy. When we lost our plans for a future missionary life, I didn't have the faith to believe there was purpose or meaning. In this way, the pain and anguish from this loss quickly overtook my pain for our son. It became the less bearable of the two, and the one I avoided.
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A eulogy to an ex-friend:
I've given up hope for now, but let's put a pin in it
-- until the One holding that first breath of
once-dead for all the coming-alive-again in His
unbloodied mouth
breathes hot life on us in the new city,
the new garden where we get to try again.
Forever.
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The doctor surely thought I was just an overwrought patient in denial. He checked his smartphone and looked back at me. I was not going along with a cut and dry visit schedule. I was being a little too blunt about my lack of appreciation for the options. I blubbered on.
“It is the suffering, because of ‘treatment’, that I dread. Not death. By the way – again, no disrespect intended – you doctors don’t go through your own treatment.”
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With my leg stretched out in front of me, I watched the stain of red seeping through the fat wad of gauze around my toe. The aching pain moved up my leg, and I sobbed. I had no mother; I had no father. I felt so very alone, in a house on the edge of town, with no pictures on the walls and no curtains at the window.
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Actually, I was furious with God. I would have told Him, but I was too afraid to say how I felt out loud. Why would a God who called Himself good leave a little boy all by himself? When a friend finally gave me permission to say it out loud, I fell to the ground under the weight of my sadness. Through tears and clenched teeth, I yelled, “Why God, why did you leave me? Where were you?”
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What happens when you find yourself squaring off with an angry toddler trying to cash a massive emotional check from an account with far too few deposits in its balance history? These moments have been peppered throughout Zeke's time in our family, and they have been moments of deep grief for me as a parent. Grief for all that my son lost before he came to us. Grief that my gut reactions to his angry behavior are often selfish and lacking compassion. Grief, and even shame, that I should have to work so hard on something that I feel should come naturally (namely, motherly love and affection). And grief that even after two years in our family, my son is still waiting for the other shoe to drop, still keeping a lookout for the next upheaval, still guarding his heart.
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