Sometimes it’s difficult for me to remember where I was a week or month ago. I do remember, however, where I was a year ago today…
Five days after discovering that our unborn child had died, Darla and I gave birth to him at Banner Desert Medical Center. I don’t even know how to put into words what hell we went through over the course of those 5 days. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Everything felt wrong. We tried everything to get into the hospital to get done what needed to be done. We kept telling ourselves that God had a plan for what was going on. Sometimes it was difficult to say it with any conviction. We shed a lot of tears and talked bitterly about the rapid hope loss.
On March 10th, we were finally admitted. We had made enough of a noise for them to finally get us in to deliver our son. We spent the first night anxiously waiting as Darla was pumped full of fluids and was given medicine to help induce labor. After our visitors left for the evening, we tried to get some sleep. Darla was given two doses of sleep medication, which turned out to only give her hallucinations. I, on the other hand, fell asleep quickly, but woke several times throughout the night when the nurse came to check on Darla.
Early in the morning, Darla started having contractions. I tried to comfort her as much as possible. You remember sitcoms where the husband’s hand hurts from his wife squeezing it to relieve the pain of the contractions? That’s exactly how it is.
At 9:02 a.m., our son was born. Our doctor didn’t make the birth because it all happened so quickly. Apparently, delivering a 1lb, 2oz baby is much easier that delivering a full-term baby.
God has a funny way of getting your attention sometimes. The nurse that delivered our baby was named Hope. After a week of talking about how our lives would change and how we couldn’t find any hope in the situation, God gave us Hope.
We spent the next few minutes with our son. I can’t even describe how difficult it was to hold him. I cut the umbilical cord – something I swore I couldn’t do. It was the epitome of bittersweet. Here I was holding my firstborn son, but I would never be able to see him smile. I could never rock him to sleep or teach him how to play baseball.
Darla held him as I walked out to bring in family to see him. I walked out and it was cold as ice in the front lobby. It had been raining all morning. It was the first time since we found out Darla was expecting (5 months earlier) that it had rained. Yeah, it’s kinda corny to say that it was like God was crying for us. But at the same time, I knew that His heart aches for His children. Somehow, I took comfort in that.
As our son was introduced to our closest family, his name – which we had planned to keep a secret until he was born – was revealed.
“Cole Michael”, Darla and I would say proudly.
I’ll never forget watching my dad burst into tears when he heard Cole’s name. A pillar of strength for our family, he melted because he knew Cole’s middle name was for him.
I watched my father-in-law tenderly kiss Cole’s forehead. It was a precious moment for all of us.
After a while, our family left to allow us time alone with Cole. Darla and I just started talking to him. We told him how much we loved him. It may seem strange, but to us it seemed natural. He was our son. It was our only time to talk to him face-to-face.
We took lots of photos of us holding Cole. In the end, we spent about 8 hours with him before we needed to let him go. 8 hours. It seemed like an instant. He was supposed to outlive us.
We’re doing surprisingly well with what has happened over the past year. We went to a few of the support groups and found that we were handling things better than people that had lost children years earlier. We know that our faith has helped us grow stronger together. We still think about Cole all the time. We still miss him. We always will.
Darla and I are expecting again. We know that what happens isn’t in our hands. God has a plan regardless of what happens. It doesn’t help the general nervousness, but it does give us hope.
