When From Death Comes Beauty.

 

 

“Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end. ~Ecclesiatstes”

 

Audrey’s viewing day.

I remember getting ready as it was yesterday.

The black dress. The gold earrings. The mascara that would run down my face before I could even fully apply it.

The emotions. All of them. The desperation, the despair, the torture, the anger, and the inability to accept.

Most prominently I remember the feeling of wanting to see my beautiful baby girl again, but came with it, the sickening fear that seeing her would indefinitely show the proof that death had consumed her fragile tiny twelve pound body.

I feared she wouldn’t look the same. That death had taken her for too long. That the sweet baby that lay cold in a wooden white box would trick my mind into believing that there was just no way that it could be the pink chubby-cheeked one who filled my arms only days before.

I arrived to the front doors of the church and anger filled my every being as I questioned God for the ten thousandth time. Why? How could you? Why me? Why now? Why her?

All questions I have still never received the answers to.

 I remember looking to the front of my church, the box sat out just steps away from the staging where my pastor spoke Gods greatness into my very ears just a week and a half before. Where he spoke Gods greatness into my church families ears the Sunday morning I held my lifeless baby in a hospital room only days prior.

 

To tell you the truth He didn’t feel too great to me right now.

To be completely honest I felt He was mocking me as my beautiful baby girl lay still in a casket to be seen for the last time.

I refused to accept that ANYTING even remotely good could come from this.

That if my daughters death had anything to do with glorifying him there was absolutely positivity no way that I was going to be okay with that.

Maybe because a part of me felt like I was being punished for something….that I had failed terribly.

Perhaps a piece of me was convincing myself that if I had have done things differently or had listened to Him better, sooner that I wouldn’t have been standing bare footed at the alter holding her hand and counting fingers for the last time…..

That if I acknowledged that anything good could come from her death that I was somehow approving of it happening.

I don’t know.

But I do know one thing.

My precious Audrey was beautiful even in her death.

That Gods love intensified in that over flown room filled with friends, our community, and my church family who loved me unconditionally and without judgement.

Her death was not great.

But my God still was.

That death did not consume her.

But God did.

The same God who formed Audrey in my womb, who calmed me during my pregnancy, whom rejoiced with us in her birth, and who wept with me at the alter………still was.

Two years later I can confidently say that whether I refused or not, Audreys death has glorified God.

That Gods greatness shone even in her death.

She has impacted more lives then I could have ever imagined, and she was surely an amazing piece of my story that belonged to Him no matter how badly I selfishly want her.

For some reason I was chosen to walk this journey. A journey that has introduced me to opportunities and women who have added a substance to my life I never knew could exist.

Her death led me to a God that defeats it.

That very God led me to a beauty that her death….that this world, had been blinding me from.

So this month of October I remember her.

I remember my other sweet girl Alexis.

I acknowledge that I am 1 in 4.

That I am one face in the many of mama’s who walk this very same road as me.

 

In Alexis’s death I became a Hope Mom.

In Audrey’s death I became fully His.

Because of that I can look at my baby girl and see Gods presence.

I can look at her and not see death, but life.

….and that right there…in Him……is where beauty can always be found.

 

 

 

 

 

To My Sister-In-Law…

 

For the past eight years I’ve watched you.

    I’ve stood in the hospital room waiting while he was extracted from his safe and protected place inside of your body, and I’ve sang along loudly to Happy Birthday as his eighth birthday cake was recently placed in front of him. 

    I listened when you told us he may never speak, and noticed as you both became frustrated with his inability to communicate at times. I watched him struggle and succeed,stumble and overcome….as time and age unmasked his “disabilities” to the big wide world all the more.

I tried to place my self in your shoes.

I tried to have it all figured out.

But truth is…. I never truly understood.

…..and I am sorry.

     I am sorry for the times I criticized your parenting because it wasn’t my own. I am sorry for the times I didn’t check in when you were left feeling defeated, alone, or not enough, and I apologize when your family was uninvited from activities that I thought would overstimulate him without thinking about whether or not that un-invite would instead cause  feelings of isolation for you.

I never meant to hurt you.

I just didn’t get it.

      It wasn’t until I lost my two girls that I was able to understand just how much the world is unable to see behind closed doors. 

      I didn’t take the time to think that your smiling face at the playground was masking the total exhaustion of caring for your sweet boy all by yourself while your husband worked away. That a morning of tea, talk, and laughter was the extent of your social life for the next seven days, and I never understood that you were dealing with your own denials, grief, guilt, and fears for your family’s future.

So this Autism Awareness month (and all year long) i’ll continue to celebrate him.

      I’ll celebrate that laugh that comes from way down deep in his belly…..the one that can’t help but brighten my day. I will embrace him as he climbs on my lap to cuddle, and I will light up as those little silent lips of his kiss my cheek each time we say goodbye. 

But that’s not all of it. 

I will also celebrate you.

      I will celebrate that God choose you to mother him, to love him, and to protect him……. I will be inspired as you take such a life changing diagnosis and exchange your old dreams and expectations for new ones, and i’ll watch in awe as you continue to fight for him and be his voice in a world that doesn’t always seem fair.

    I will never know what it is truly like to have a child with autism…but through you I have been able to get just a microscopic glimpse in to your challenging, exhausting, and BEAUTIFUL world.

So to someone who doesn’t get told this enough.

Thank you.

    For loving unconditionally, for continuing to persevere through the unknown, and for being a voice of positivity and acceptance in this world even when you feel you have no idea what you are doing or if you have the energy left for the next challenge along the way.

 

You got this Mama.

You are doing an amazing job!