by Tavis Smiley
Throughout his last year of school, Paul received therapy to increase his fine and gross motor skills and improve his speech, which had been affected by the tumor and the radiation treatments. Paul was diligent in working to complete the requirements necessary for graduation; he attended school as much as he was physically able. He had an aide who assisted him during the day. Some students would make it a point to have lunch with him, and when it was time for his high school prom in May 2000, he had two dates instead of one. As the students got used to Paul’s condition, some who knew him before he became ill and some who did not rallied around him in his fight against cancer. They helped us hold a number of fund-raisers at different locations around the city we live in. We held one on Mother’s Day 2000 at Blockbuster Video on Ramsey Street. Paul sat in his wheelchair holding a sign announcing the car wash, and a couple of us began to wash cars. I would check on him in between cars, and he listened to music. At the end of the day Paul said to me, “Mom, only you would do this for me.” He gave me a small bag with an orchid that sits on my living room table to this day.
I would have done anything to give Paul the life he deserved and anything to take away the cancer that was robbing his life. Prayer was constant. Though I shed many tears, my talks with God helped to sustain us throughout Paul’s journey, to renew our faith for better tomorrows. Paul kept saying that God must have something special in mind for us, and he did. There were no boundaries, no limits, nothing that could have stopped me from helping him meet his dreams and achieving his goals. His goal was to graduate; my goal was to save my son’s life.
On June 1, 2000, Paul accomplished his goal, walking across the stage using a walker with the assistance of an aide to receive his high school diploma. He received a standing ovation from his peers and their families in a coliseum of people. The courage that it took Paul to complete that journey is not one that I take for granted; God helped Paul discover his faith and his purpose in life. By his desire to complete what he started, he set examples for all of us to follow and honor in our lives. He never gave up; he just kept forging ahead. He never cried out for the loss of friends who deserted him because of his declining physical abilities; he found compassion in others where there had been little for him.
On January 5, 2001, Paul was diagnosed with a secondary tumor located in the frontal lobe of his brain. It was a glioblastoma, the fastest-growing kind of tumor. It was the worst diagnosis Paul could have received. He had surgery on February 7, 2001. I remember walking into his room in the intensive care unit after they had told us they could not wake him from the anesthesia and that they had tried all they could. They had not tried the love of a mother for her son; as soon as I spoke his name and touched him, he raised his finger in response. He had been unable to speak since October, and so we had created a different form of communication between the two of us. He worked so hard to live a while longer, so that I would have time to accept his death. He spent the next two months in the hospital and came home on my birthday, March 28. He turned twenty the following day.
As a result of complications from the surgery, Paul needed nursing staff sixteen hours a day. The other eight hours I was with him. My day was not complete until he was settled in and all the machines around him were monitoring him correctly. Dr. Moore from Pitt County Memorial Hospital in Greenville, North Carolina, assisted us in getting the necessary services in my home so that we could be together. I would be forever grateful to his kindness and understanding. Paul’s dad was able to come out to visit him twice before he passed. Our last journey together was a trip to my younger sister’s house in Virginia the week before he passed. It was the best of times for all of us. He was peaceful and knew he was loved. Darlene, his day nurse, accompanied us and drove the van through the Blue Ridge Mountains. We took time to smell the flowers. I will forever remember the feel of his skin beneath mine as I kissed his cheek or wiped the sweat from his brow. I was always hugging him and telling him how much I loved him.
Yet I can never say that I was prepared for the day that he died or express how I have felt since then. There is so much emptiness in my life; there are times when the sadness is so deep that each breath is filled with loss. Yet, in my heart, I know that Paul lives on through all of this.
GAINING FROM OUR LOSS
Ray Thomason
Many times people associate the effects of love with some sort of telltale sign or earth-shattering event. The world somehow slows down while music swirls or some smooth-voiced singer croons the soundtrack of your moment just as every detail of that instant falls in line with perfect precision. Ideally, that’s how things are supposed to flow. In reality, life throws an equation at you that can be neither solved nor studied for. A man will do his best to fix this minor imperfection in life. After all, that’s what men do—fix things, solve problems, and move on, right? Not quite. A man may have thought an emotional situation was under control only to find it still current and, in turn, controlling him. It’s in these situations where the power of devotion is truly discovered and felt. It was how I discovered just how infinite and far-reaching that power is.
I’ll never forget the total shock I felt in November 2000 when I heard my wife’s panicked screams. At the end of her first trimester, she had just miscarried. I did what I could for her and got her ready for the paramedics’ arrival. That’s when the finality of what just happened hit me. We weren’t going to be parents any longer. All the joy I had felt at the discovery of her pregnancy was taken away in an instant, and the vacuum left from its departure was the cruelest and worst feeling the mind could ever endure. But I couldn’t dwell on that fact. My wife needed me to be strong for her. As much as I was suffering, she surely must have been close to total devastation, and my coming apart at the seams wouldn’t do the both of us any good. The following days would give me a glimpse of just how mighty devotion is.
The days spent in the Women’s Health Center would be some of the longest and most wrenching days either one of us had ever experienced up to that point in our lives. I sat by my wife’s side, holding her hand, as the nurses and technicians drew blood and stuck several IV needles into her. I watched through my tears as the remains of the fetus were removed from her, wishing I could take her place in the receipt of pain. All I could do was watch, to be nothing more than a spectator wanting to fix what was harming my wife. To my amazement, though, she was thinking of me. She would ask if I was all right; can you believe that? Within a period of forty-eight hours she had lost a child and undergone minor surgery, and she still was more concerned about my well-being. How much love can a person have for another in order to fight through those circumstances and have enough energy to try to provide comfort to someone else? I had no choice but to be strong for her no matter how tired or heartbroken I was. She provided living proof of the strength love gives to those during their most desperate moments.
The day finally came for her to be discharged from the hospital, and I was happy to have her home even though home would be an alien place. We spent the next few days, weeks, and months dealing with the aftermath of the loss coupled with learning how to deal with one another during that period of adjustment. We stumbled through it, without a doubt. She, being such a strong woman, never had to rely totally on someone as far as her emotional needs went, but for the first few days she had to lean on me. At that time, we’d been together eleven years and married for six. During this eleven-year period she had never had to use me to prop herself up the way she did then. Without a doubt, it was scary. I was shown another facet of love coupled with trust that I hadn’t experienced up to that point in time.
Once she found her balance again, she returned to work in an effort to gain some “normalcy” in life once more. I did the same, hoping to stay busy so I wouldn’t go insane thinking about the cruelty of our experience. I returned to work with individuals who had children but didn’t appreciate the glory of their situation, so eventually work wound up reminding me more of the irony of life. We were trying
so hard to have our first child, while many of my coworkers minimized the blessings they possessed. At least my wife had the support of colleagues who had gone through similar experiences. They could tell when she was hurting and would console her at that time. I just muddled through my suffering and prayed constantly.
With time we moved on. That’s all that we could do, considering the circumstances. People don’t ever get over this sort of thing; they either move on or suffer for the rest of their lives. I never knew just how much love could be generated for someone that I’d never met.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds; rather, it gives a person the skill to live with the damage inflicted by whatever caused the harm in the first place. Such was the case with us. We definitely grew closer to one another instead of letting our loss pull us apart. Ironically, nine months passed before we decided to try again to start a family. Careerwise, I’d been promoted and my income could handle the addition to the family, so my wife didn’t have to work. We were blessed once again late in the summer of 2001, and we were so happy to be given another chance to help bring life into the world. Things fell into place for me professionally and personally like a new beginning. Naturally, we were cautiously optimistic, given what we’d gone through, but the joy of possibly being parents once more helped balance out whatever concerns would creep into our heads. I stayed in prayer instead of worrying about circumstances beyond our span of control. Once the first trimester passed successfully, we just knew everything would turn out to be fine.
We’d decided to wait and see what gender our baby would be. But my wife told me one day she had dreamed that our child would be a boy. I was kind of annoyed that she’d brought the subject up, and I snapped back, “Why don’t we just go ahead and find out what the baby will be?” She looked at me as though I’d gone crazy and had lost some common sense. Maybe I had, but I just didn’t want to get into discussing whether the baby was a boy or girl. All I wanted was a healthy child. I didn’t want to allow myself to fall into a comfort zone only to be let down by some unforeseen event. I jumped into the shower feeling bad about how I had just snapped at my wife. Minutes later she pounded on the door and alarmingly yelled, “We gotta go!” I distinctly remember saying, “Oh, no!”
Her water had broken! She was in the middle of her fourth month of pregnancy and her water had broken. She stayed calm while I raced around to get dressed and grab everything that might be needed at the hospital. I was in a state of disbelief because we had just been to the doctor that Wednesday, and it was only Friday. We got to the hospital and shortly thereafter found ourselves in the maternity ward. My wife held it together until we were left alone in the exam room, and once again I became a spectator to events found in my nightmares. The doctor who had seen my wife a few days before stopped by, and I could tell he felt more than terrible. The previous Wednesday a mix-up in scheduling had meant that my wife saw this doctor, who didn’t specialize in high-risk pregnancy. Usually in such pregnancies an ultrasound is performed to monitor the baby for any indications of trouble. Had this been done, perhaps we would have seen signs of trouble. Only God knows why events occurred as they did.
More doctors stopped by and eventually gave us their diagnosis of the situation. Our baby didn’t deliver, but was still inside the womb without the amniotic fluid. It was explained that my wife could either go home and wait for the inevitable or be admitted to the hospital in order to attempt to carry closer to term. To us, there was still hope. We prepared to make the hospital our second home for the next few months. This was no small feat, being that my wife despises hospitals, but for the sake of the child, she would stay for years if it would make the difference.
My wife told me that in spite of all that passed during those terrifying hours on January 4, 2002, she had an overwhelming feeling that all would be fine. That, in itself, calmed me some, because this hadn’t been the case during her first pregnancy. I was so proud of the strength she displayed and the determination shown in a moment where she had every right to fear for the worst. She was my hero. I prayed that the Lord would be merciful enough to grant her courage and strength to endure whatever lay ahead. I prayed for strength for our child to hold on until he could be treated.
I was still on holiday break from work, so I was able to stay at my wife’s side for the first few nights. Each time the nurse would come to check the baby’s heartbeat in the early-morning hours I’d wake from my troubled sleep to listen. The heartbeat was good and strong and offered hope in a situation that otherwise was nonstop despair. Once I returned to work after the Christmas break, I settled into a routine of spending the evening at her side in the hospital and leaving late at night to get ready for work the next day. I was willing to hold this routine until her ninth month, just so I could be there with her every step of the way. We both accepted the situation as a part of our life that had to be dealt with. After all, our child hadn’t given up on us; he was fighting for life, and we would be there for him no matter what it would take. I felt horrible inside, but I leaned on my faith to get us through that period.
The evening of January 9, 2002, I returned to the hospital from an errand to find my wife’s hospital room empty. Faith was all I had in this world to deal with what I knew had happened while I was away for those hours.
I asked someone at the nursing station where my wife had been moved to. I was guided into some sort of room that looked like a midway point for women about to deliver. I found my wife there, alone, with tracks of tears on her face. While I was away, the routine check of the baby’s heartbeat revealed that his heart had stopped. We were to endure the loss of another child within a year. I felt weak, angry, confused, and hurt, and there were other emotions too numerous to put into words. Worst of all, I hadn’t been there at the exact moment she’d found out our child was no longer living.
We were moved to a birthing room (an ironic place given our situation) in order to prepare for the stillbirth of our baby. Hours passed as we waited for the labor to complete what is normally a joyous celebration of life. During that time I witnessed a mother’s agony of losing a child. I saw my wife, full of pain, throw a tantrum, asking, “Why? Why?” It was so heartbreaking to see her go through such hell, and I was powerless. Throughout the evening I made the phone calls no human being wants to make, to family and work to let them know of the situation. Early on the morning of January 10, 2002, I simultaneously witnessed the birth and loss of our baby boy, Malcolm David.
Our first experience of losing a child did nothing to prepare us for the shock of the circumstances following the loss of our second. Our first child was so early in development, we didn’t have much of a choice but to allow the hospital to destroy the remains after the autopsy. With our second experience we were able to say good-bye to our son. The nurse asked if we wanted to visit with the baby one last time, and I immediately answered yes. I at least wanted to hold our son, touch his fragile skin, and look for the physical features telling us he was ours. My wife at first didn’t want to deal with the power of that situation, so she declined. She eventually changed her mind later that morning.
When the time came for us to see our baby, I experienced the most amazing feeling ever felt in my life—I felt love from our baby boy. I know his spirit wasn’t in his body, but I felt love from his soul touching mine! His broken body was so tiny but still perfect in my eyes. I saw the motherly love my wife had for this child, and I knew that the bond they had shared for the brief period of time he was with us was as real as any connection two human beings, even ones who’d known each other for years, could ever make. We were indeed parents this time—the feelings inside our hearts told us such.
I never thought I’d have to bury a child at the age of thirty; nevertheless, there we were, making burial arrangements. It was a surreal experience. The days preparing for the interment were hellish for my wife. Again she was left empty, feeling as though the rug had been yanked from underneath her. A man will never understand the bond a mother and child make
from the womb—or in life, for that matter—and I witnessed how true this is. She told me how much she missed him, how she had been getting used to being pregnant without any worries. She described how alone she felt when she showered and how she didn’t want to leave him alone at the funeral home, as if she were failing him again. She wanted her baby, our baby, back!
We traveled to South Carolina to have Malcolm buried near family. My work has me constantly relocating, and we wanted someone to be able to watch over his grave site. We didn’t have a traditional service with a long procession and such; we just wanted to lay our boy to rest. He’d been through enough, and we wanted a simple, respectful gathering for our child.
My parents, brother, and grandmother attended and helped us shed tears. My father quoted scripture, and I said some words to express how much Malcolm would be missed even though we had known him for an instant. As I was speaking, something happened that I didn’t quite know how to interpret. The wind picked up and swept throughout the cemetery, indicating a storm was moving in, yet storm clouds never came. It continued after I finished speaking and as long as my wife and I stood over Malcolm’s grave, shedding tears. When we finally brought ourselves to leave our baby, the wind calmed and finally stopped. My grandmother feels it was Malcolm’s spirit letting us know he was cared for, loved, and in a glorious place now. Maybe he was trying to comfort us and wipe away all the tears with the wind. I don’t know. I didn’t feel better, so to speak, but I did feel some comfort.