Life After Death
Where childhood sibling death and parenting collide
While I can’t say this with 100% certainty, my guess is, we’ve all experienced an event now considered “before.” These events can be positive or negative, maybe even neutral, but they’re a way we mark time…a way to say “before” life was one way and “after” it is another. Before I graduated, before I married, before I became a Christian, before I had kids, before I had grandkids, before he left, before she died, before the storm, before the war. Life is full of befores and afters. In a nutshell, that’s what this series is about, and today’s post is interesting because it contains a before and after within a before and after…
Sept. 27, 2010.
My husband and I, along with our two girls, caught a pre-dawn elevator to the surgical unit at KU Medical Center. We’d traveled to Kansas City the day before and stayed in a nearby hotel, but we weren’t there for vacation. We were there to mark a before and after.
Our daughter had been born with a blood disease called hereditary spherocytosis, and though we still don’t know of any family history (some 10% of cases have unknown origins), her case was severe. To relieve symptoms of the disease, our hematologist recommended a splenectomy. While the preference is usually to wait until at least age five when the immune system is fully developed, with the severity of our daughter’s HS, it was recommended to do so immediately. So it was that our 2-year-old took an elevator ride to lose her spleen.
But, right before riding that elevator, my husband and I had signed forms saying we wouldn’t sue the hospital if our child died. And this is the web of a before and after within a before and after.
When I was 15, my younger brother drowned. As you can imagine, this was a significant before and after that still impacts my family. It still impacts me. I’ve never been an adult without this history. I’ve never been a parent without it either. And as we walked through this lengthy medical crisis with our child, I never once had the ability to be naïve about a possible outcome: Death comes, even for kids. I knew it then, and I know it now. And it shapes who I am as a mom. How could it not?
Hours after signing the documents, riding the elevator and then waiting, waiting, waiting, the surgeon came out and told us the surgery was over and a success. The spleen was 3x larger than it should’ve been. (I still don’t know how it even fit in my toddler’s tiny body!) After the surgeon left our group, I went to the bathroom, locked myself in a stall and wept. In those deep sobs, I let out the breath I’d held for 18 months — ever since that day when our pediatrician called and said, “Go to the hospital in Wichita, her hemoglobin levels are dangerously low. Don’t wait.”
All along I’d been scared my daughter’s life would be taken, too. It was something I only remember verbalizing once, but it was always something I held, day-in and day-out. I was afraid I’d be left aching and bereft like my parents before me. So, I sat in that stall and praised God through the tears for one more day, knowing it was precious.
I’m now thirteen years out of that bathroom stall — the first part of the after. But the reality of parenting after the death of my brother is still hard. This has been magnified a hundred times over (maybe a thousand times, who knows) in a pandemic as a high risk family.
Since 2020, I’ve felt like I’ve had to face all this anew, but I’m not, really. It’s always been there — this innate responsibility of keeping my kids safe and alive — even when I can let down my guard. I’m not saying other parents don’t feel this too, but like I mentioned in the first piece of this series, I think I feel these things in extremes, even though it’s my normal. I’m not saying I hold the power of life and death — that is God’s and God’s alone — but I’ll admit that sometimes it’s hard not to grasp at trying.
Like so many things in the Christian faith, I live within tension. In this case, the tension lies in taking my responsibility as a parent seriously, but not clutching at so much responsibility that I fashion myself as god. Having a significant medical crisis for my child added a thick layer over an already complicated history that tangles with the reality of death. I watched my parents live a nightmare, and as far as it depends on me, I don’t want to do the same. I don’t want to bury my child. But just as I watched my parents live that nightmare, I know the outcome didn’t depend on them either. It’s a process of trusting in God’s sovereignty and knowing He’ll not abandon me if the nightmare comes. I still don’t want it to.
And so, my life is one of constantly holding, living, parenting in this tension: I don’t hold life and death in my hands, but I will honor the lives that were given me to steward…and I will do it with God’s help and to the best of my ability because He saw fit, after all, that I would be a life-after-death parent.
For More…
Hereditary Spherocytosis - WebMD
Coming Soon…
It Just Makes Sense. For now I’ve decided to make this a stand-alone post rather than a tag on. Look for it next week if all goes as planned!
Thank you for sharing. And beautiful writing