considering our mortality

We visited Beau's Place after Christmas.  It was the first time we went out there together since E got back from his deployment.  We fingered the pretty yellow daisies and toy fire truck left by grandparents, walked down the lane to see the goats and big dog who used to be a puppy, and galloped with O happily bouncing on Papa's shoulders to the Children's Garden.  We always visit Beau's friends

 who joined his company among the tombs at the tender ages of a day old, two baby girls.   

Another year later

Thanksgiving season 2010 was a sad one for us, missing Beau and the little toddler we can now better than ever imagine he "would have been."  It's hard to quantify and contain the dark feelings that arise in a given time, which rise and fall at a song or a memory and beg for the mind to preach the rational truth of the matter--that he is "better off where he is," that one is a better parent for losing one child to care for another, that we were fortunate to have him around for even a week.

And yet the heart begs for some reason for its soreness; surely there is something Beau is missing out on by not having grown up on earth, that life here would have made him into a little different person than he is, going so soon to his new home...that we would have been perfectly fine (and are faulty anyway) parents if we'd been given the chance to raise him to adulthood.

There aren't enough good reasons to justify the death of someone you longed to love and hold forever, because you were to die before he did.  The only overcoming of such a sorrow is something we trust, that God is good in his love towards us, and powerful to overcome the finality of death, and that the fire of the Holy Spirit is at work in us, to enliven, to purify, to make new what we would never be on our own.

Beau's new baby brother

Before Christmas, Omari arrived and showed me what we lost in our first son, the tender newborn-ness of a healthy, breathing, eating, pooping baby.  For this we are thankful, even as it's a time of deep changes of emotion from experience.

Beau's Second Thanksgiving

In heaven, that is.  He's been there for a year of earth time now, though in some ways it seems like 10 years ago, another life, really.  Last Thanksgiving I was anything but (that sentiment).  This year, my heart and mind are changed as if with a new garment and replaces the old robe of resentful unforgiveness and pained un-thankfulness with something new.  We are transformed by the valley of death's shadow, as if it were actually true that "pain is weakness leaving the body."  To take on pains and suffer sorrows is the mark of a master teacher at work in the world.  For healing from these we can give truly-felt thanks.

Happy Beau Birthday!

I can't always log into my blogsites to make a new post with my "new" old computer; thus the delay in writing recently.  I also don't have any birth-pictures in my iphoto, which is what I'd like to post here today!  One day, I'll get around to scanning some in.

Beau's birthday on the 17th came and went with the dawning of the sun in a warm day, drawing to a close in the clouds of the next front moving through.  North Carolina gets a new bucket of rain every 48 hours this season.  Hearing the forecast, this day, I headed outside to make the most of the moment, raking leaves and blowing all the layers of dust and cobwebs out of the garage.  With Eric on the other side of the ocean, I lost my left hand who would normally clean out the cars while I raked!

A beautiful, quiet day, peaceful, but not so mournful or sad, as I had feared it might be.  Oddly enough, when we are able to set aside the space of a day to let whatever feelings come as they come, we are given surprising grace to handle it in the moment.  Before Eric left, we had time to sit on the back deck, perusing our journals and pictures from this time last year, and that was a blessed hour together.  A sacred time, just like the days we sat in the hospital, watching over our beautiful child as he breathed, slept, stirred a finger or flexed a toe to our tickle.   A hallowed time it is, to wait by talking to a sleeping little person, read to him, listen to music with him.  What bits of care we could provide came in the form of easy tasks, the pleasure of massaging lotion into his stretched tummy, the holding of him and semi-feeding him with a swab of milk.  Those days with him we remember with true thankfulness.

We visited Beau's place in the crisp autumn air of late October. For the first time, we saw his new head stone, admired the pearly grey granite and sturdy wood-like border, "so appropriate" we say for a little man child. The metal plaque felt firm and final to the touch, yet warm in the gentle afternoon sun. We soaked in the beauty of the golden-glowing hills circling the cemetery and listened to the warbling cackle of guinea fowl and deep, protective bark of the big sheep dog who was a puppy when we left last year.

time to pray

In these days, we can actually experience the pleasure of having a child laid up in heaven to meet later, we are saddened by the losses of others. Like the people of the book of Hebrews, who suffered as martyrs, loss of loved ones right and left, the terrible effects of sin in the world haunt us to this day. Our hope, our freedom, is in the fact of God, that he works in mysterious ways, in that he suffered all the torments of death and destruction so that our very sorrows and pains are redeemed, mean something, after all. The sufferings we experience are not wasteful tragedy, random vengeance of distant gods, or mere consequences of our own "evil deeds." We cannot be punished any more when Christ has already paid the debt of our sin; he bore the full measure of all the gods' and God's wrath on our behalf. No devil can mercilessly torment us without end. Our end in suffering is the gift of sharing in Christ's sufferings to the ultimate glory of his name, and the completed pleasure of our own selves which are perfected in him.