No Easy Answers

Tonight I stood in a quiet hospital room feeling absolutely helpless.

I felt shock, anger, sadness and without words as tears streamed down my face.  The clock on the wall in the hospital room was the only steady noise to be heard even though the room was filled with people.  The steady noise I longed to hear, the steady noise the dear mother laying on the bed longed to hear was the sound of her sleeping baby.  My precious friend was holding her newborn baby boy in her arms and he was perfect in every way.  His cheeks were chubby and soft and tiny fingers intertwined with his mother’s shaking fingers as he seemed to be asleep.  Only he was not sleeping, he was dead.  


Her tiny son had been kicking in what seemed to be anticipation when she arrived that morning for her scheduled C-section but things got complicated quickly.  I felt like a knife pierce my heart when my friend looked at me and sobbed “This was supposed to be the happiest day of my life but it has become the very worst.”  Even now, I shudder to remember her tear streaked face hovering over that tiny baby’s peaceful one.

My feet echoed down the tile hallway when I left the birthing center, a crushing weight of sorrow on my lungs, my breath coming out in shallow gasp as I tried to cope with what had just happened.  The echo of my shoes in the empty corridor brought me back to a few years before this day when I was leaving a different birthing center room in a different city.


I had felt the same feelings of helplessness and sorrow after saying goodbye to my longtime childhood friend.  Even though her eyes were filled with tears, a sense of shock hung in a hospital room designed to welcome a newborn baby that had instead became a resting place for a tiny baby girl.  That baby girl was also perfect in every way from her dimpled fingers to tiny toes but her unique baby cry would never be heard on this earth.  My dear friend will one day hear her laugh and witness her baby girl run and dance…but not yet.


One day both of my friends will hold their babies and feel those little bodies snuggle into their arms, full of life and full of joy…but not yet.


One day I will get to hold our baby boy. I never got a chance to breath in his soft baby smell or blow on his chubby belly and hear him laugh that baby laugh, the purest sound in the whole universe.

So tonight, as I rode the elevator back down to the parking lot, my heart heavy and my eyes blurry, I had to wonder the question we all wonder in times like these, “Why?”


I knew there was no easy answer. If there was an answer, we would have to wait until the other side of Eternity.  Standing alone in the elevator, I realized I was asking this question to Someone who really can relate to me and the many others whom have had to do the unthinkable: bury their own child.


It was 2,000 years ago that God watched the burial of his own beloved Son.  What kind of sorrow filled his heart to see his Son die a cruel death after a life lived in such selfless love?  When his Son stepped out of that tomb three days later, what excitement must have filled Heaven as a joyful Father got ready: I’m going to hold my boy again!  His Son made a way so that each one of us can make a choice and one day, we can forever hold those we have lost.


Why should a parent ever have to bury their child?  I don’t know.  I shudder to think about this terrible side of life.  But there is one thing I do know, He cares and He understands.