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| Christmas Day, 2012. Crying exhausted her, and I held her while she slept. |
The Day In Between
December 26—the day in between when I celebrated Christ’s birth and the day I found out my 3-year-old daughter would die…sometime in the near future.
Abigail had fought stage-4 cancer for 2 years, and as of Dec 22, had “No Evidence of Disease.” On December 23 she started crying, and the hyper-suspicions of an oncology parent’s mind kicked in fiercely. She had her routine scans already scheduled for Dec 27, so for 5 days we held our breath and enjoyed every happy moment, punctuated by her pain, crying, and sleeping.
At her initial diagnosis in January of 2011, it was scary because I knew too little about neuroblastoma. At her relapse diagnosis on December 27, 2012, I knew too much. I knew she had less than a 1% chance of surviving it. And beyond that, I knew in my gut it was God’s message that He was calling her home.
During dinner time, she spiked a fever which landed us back inpatient on the oncology floor of the children’s hospital, and we were there over the New Year celebrations. Happy New Year, indeed. Spiteful, hateful words! This was the year my baby would die.
The Years In Between
It has now been 8 years since that day. I vividly recall that Decembers were really rough for the first several years. But I can also now boldly testify that Christ heals broken and shattered hearts, and while He doesn’t take Abigail’s place, He has soothed it and bound it and healed it until we are reunited. There is now joy where mourning once was, and the exciting part is that this is joy-while-we’re-apart….and I get to look forward to the indescribably joy that will come when we are together again.
Healing
This is a tender topic. Every individual is unique, and even my husband’s experiences are dissimilar to mine. But I can share the key points that enabled my healing, and hope they may be of some comfort or enlightenment to others.
1. Faith. I had to actively pursue Christ’s injunction to “Let your heart be comforted.” He would not override my agency to replace sorrow with peace, and it was truly work on my part to choose comfort when it felt so normal and natural to feel grief. This became easier with Key 2.
2. Time. Elder Neal A. Maxwell said essentially that time is foreign to us, because we are not mortal beings, but eternal beings. It is appropriate to grieve and take all of the ‘mortal time’ you need and no one should tell you otherwise. It is also appropriate to grow into the new person you are after trauma, and time helps distill and clarify just who that person is—how you function and what you focus on “after.” Time does not erase, but time does allow space.
3. Forgiveness. I had to forgive one of Abigail’s oncologists that had inflicted a great deal of emotional pain on our family. This was not easy, and it was several years before I felt a completion of forgiveness in my heart. Additionally, I had to forgive myself for inflicting a great deal of physical pain on Abigail, in the name of “treatment.” Without delving into lengthy specifics, we had limited treatment options and went with an antibody treatment in NYC. It was a week of excruciating pain for her, mitigated by being dosed with an opiod drug repeatedly, almost monthly for 8 months. After her death, I felt an immense pain at putting her through this, because it hadn’t worked.
One
day several months after her death I was mourning and lamenting in prayer about
this, and then spoke outloud to Abigail. I told her I didn’t know if she was
listening, but that I was so very sorry for that pain. And it was one of the
few times she has verbally communicated with me since her death. I heard her
say, “Mom, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter
anymore.” Bold typeface doesn’t justly communicate the release of pain and
relief that came from the feeling attached to her words. It really DID NOT
matter to her anymore. It encompassed not only her NYC treatment, but all
the pain she had experienced for 3 years, which was a lot of pain. And so I
could let it go, too. This was, and is, a sacred experience to me.
Back to the Day In Between
So today is an anniversary of sorts. Each December I reflect on this time of deep, immense emotional pain, and marvel at how the Lord has morphed and shaped it into something deeply and immensely beautiful in my heart. A few tears roll down my cheeks as I type and reflect on this again, but they are soft, peaceful tears, traced with longing for my child and joy of where she is and joy of Christ’s healing and future reunions.
This day, along with thousands of others that will occur between her death and our reunion, are all days “in between.” Because of His birth, all of the days in between that event and His return can be used to glorify Him. I know this is true, and I gently and joyfully proclaim that mourning can be turned to joy.
Faith.
