The physical exhaustion, too, was surprising. No matter how much sleep I got on any given night, that entire first year was marked by a deep, bone-tired fatigue.
How intricately entwined we are—minds, bodies, and souls.
Friends found creative ways to show their love. My friend Sandy BeLow invited me over for a surprise outing one sunny spring day.
“Meet me at my house at nine,” she said. “And wear shoes that can get dirty.” She had piqued my curiosity.
At nine o’clock sharp, I entered Sandy’s kitchen, where she was packing an ice chest.
“We’re going on a picnic,” she said, a gleam in her eyes. The ice chest had a greater ratio of carrots to regular food—which gave me a hopeful hint. Sandy knew I was a horse lover.
Sure enough, she was taking me to the ranch where her daughter took riding lessons.
“It’s springtime,” she said, “and you simply must see the new foals!”
And so on a sunny Saturday, we ate our picnic lunches and used our carrots to bribe several broodmares close to the fence so we could properly ogle their adorable, gangly, fuzz-coated babies. We told stories and laughed hard, as we always do. And we took long walks in the field. Then in the barn, leaning on the gate as a warm breeze blew in from the pasture, Sandy asked me about Katie and listened with soulful eyes as I talked and laughed and cried.
Laughter and tears. Both/and. They make for good friends.
As spring unfolded, we planned a family trip to California for Bethany’s college graduation on May 9. Mother’s Day was May 10—my first without Katie. I was adamant that this Awful First not interfere with our celebration of Bethany. I was so proud of all she had accomplished, especially after this horrid year. I made plans to pre-grieve the Katie part of my Mother’s Day at the crash site before we flew to California.
The last time I’d visited the site, I had noticed that the laminated photo of Katie hadn’t weathered its first Chicago winter very well. I went to FedEx to laminate a new eight-by-ten-inch print of Katie.
On the day before our family flew out to California, my friend Kaye accompanied me to the crash site. We met at my house, and she helped me load a shovel and some potted flowers into my minivan. I tucked the photo into my purse, and off we drove.
But when we arrived at the site, I discovered that the original photo was just a five-by-seven—much smaller than my freshly laminated replacement. I removed the weather-beaten photo and thumbtacked the new one onto the small wooden cross. It looked huge! It reminded me of a campaign poster, as if Katie’s head were popping out of the grass, saying, “Vote for me!” Kaye and I burst out laughing.
It was the perfect joke for a girl who had loved being in photos, whose thinly veiled attempt at being “caught” on film had led to her classic quote, “Are you filming me?” I could almost hear Katie giggling at the inside joke of the campaign poster planted on the side of the road for all to see.
The photo smiled up at us as we planted pink petunias and some orange tiger lilies around Katie’s crosses. They mingled with the yellow dandelions and tiny purple violets nestled in the wild grasses.
When we were done, Kaye took a Mother’s Day photo.
Then we drove to a nearby forest preserve, hiked a loop of trails, and came across a solitary picnic bench, where we stopped to pray.
“Father, we are surviving, and I think we will live,” I said, “but I hate that Katie is gone. This side of heaven, I will never understand how her death was a good plan. I just want her back.
“You are the God of time and space. You see the landscape of eternity. I am asking You, one final time, for Mother’s Day: Turn back the clock. Give Katie a symptom, a sign of her aneurysm. We will rush her to the hospital, and she will be saved, and no one will be the wiser. Please, please, I am begging You. Turn back the clock!”
I waited.
“And if You don’t turn back the clock, as I think You will not,” I said, “help me let go of the life I wish I had, the life I loved so deeply. Help me embrace this uninvited life You offer me, the life that is still mine to live.”
Three days later at APU, as the setting sun cast its rosy-gold rays on the San Gabriel Mountains behind APU’s Cougar Stadium, our Bethany walked across the stage in cap and gown to receive her diploma. In spite of just having lost her sister, she had carried a huge academic load, worked long hours at two jobs, and still graduated summa cum laude. Bethany had prevailed. What a warrior she had been.
The pre-grieving had done its healing work. On Sunday—Mother’s Day—I rose early and stepped outside. I knew my friends Lynne and Kaye were praying for me back in Chicago on this day. And I knew Sandy and my mom were praying too. Once again I was being carried. I felt their prayers.
The perfume of the tropical flowers blooming in the hotel courtyard hung in the sultry morning air. The sun was just appearing above the horizon, casting a vacant purple glow and chasing away the last of the stars. The sting of this “first” was already behind me.
Thank You, Father, for the gift of being a mom to these five kids of mine. Thank You for each one. And thank You for nineteen years with Katie.
I stepped back inside, ready to share another Mother’s Day as a family—and to celebrate my firstborn daughter, the lovely Miss Bethany Paige.
39
ON MEMORIAL DAY—just six days ahead of the one-year mark of Katie’s death—our doorbell rang. Outside on our sidewalk stood two landscape workers bookending a huge tree in a giant pot. The tree towered over their heads, and white lilac blossoms hung heavy from its upper branches.
“Mrs. Vaudrey?” one of them asked, extending a card and receiving slip toward me. “This is for you. Can you sign here, please?”
I signed the slip. Who is this from?
“Where would you like us to put it?” he asked. I directed them to our back deck and thanked them.
Scott, Sam, and Tember gathered around as I opened the card and read it aloud:
Dear Vaudrey Family,
This time of year reminds us all of losing Katie just one year ago. I have spent a lot of time thinking about your family and praying for you in this season. Our heavenly Father knows and sees all you are going through. You are deeply loved.
The painting of Katie’s I remember the most is the one Scott mentioned she had been painting in the backyard—The Bleeding Tree. Your APU family thought you might plant this smaller tree in your backyard to remember and celebrate again how deeply your amazing daughter, sister, and friend impacted our lives for the better. One year later, we continue to remember, continue to miss, and continue to hope in life bigger than just the here and now. We hope this flowering Japanese lilac tree will remind you of your daughter, who brought beauty and joy into every space she entered.
Grace and peace from all of APU,
Woody Morwood
Campus Pastor, Azusa Pacific University
We were deeply moved. Our girl was not forgotten. And clearly trees were a theme for our family.
Matt, Andrea, and Bethany were coming to town to commemorate with us the first anniversary of Katie’s death. To distract myself from the pain of this looming landmark, I’d been doing some spring cleaning. On the morning of May 30—the day the kids were to arrive and the eve of the one-year mark—I took a load of stuff to Goodwill. On my way home, something on the side of the road caught my eye. At first I thought it was a squirrel—but the rings on its tail made me do a double take. A baby raccoon was wandering alone on the edge of the busy street.
All my life, I have been a lover of animals. I grew up on a farm, and as an adult, my obsession with animals has not waned. I brought all manner of pets into our home over the years “for the kids”—seven dogs, seven cats, innumerable guinea pigs, a lizard, a rabbit, tropical fish, exotic birds, and even a pygmy hedgehog. Not all at once, mind you. But still . . .
So when I spotted a baby raccoon in harm’s way, maternal instinct trumped reason. All thoughts of Katie-sadness shoved aside, I pul
led over, parked on the side of the road, and hurried toward the little one, who screamed like a banshee when I picked her up. Once I took off my sweatshirt and wrapped her in it, she settled down.
I know “technically” you’re supposed to leave orphaned wild animals alone, but right away I noticed that this tiny raccoon was dehydrated and skinny. Her nose was dry, her eyes dull, her belly sunken, and her gait unsteady. My guess was she’d probably lost her mother a few days prior and had finally left her nest in search of water or food. I scoured the woods beside the road, listening carefully for any rustling of leaves, but there was no sign of brothers, sisters, or mom. If I left the baby there, she’d be roadkill by dusk. So I did what any sane person would do.
I brought home a wild raccoon.
Suffice it to say this wasn’t my first such adventure with wild critters. It seems I have a slight reputation in my family for bringing home strays. My children are convinced that this habit of mine will be the end of me someday—that I will either live to be 105 or I will be mauled by a wild animal that I thought was my new friend.
Scott and the kids feigned shock when I showed them my tiny new acquisition. I pulled out our old rabbit cage (I knew it would come in handy again someday!) and set it up.
When I unwrapped the raccoon from my sweatshirt, she was ticked off—frightened beyond words, no doubt, and crazed with hunger. I wrapped her in a towel and placed her in the cage with a bowl of water; then I drove to Petco and picked up some cans of kitten milk and a teeny bottle. When I returned home, the baby sucked down the warmed formula in a heartbeat and fell fast asleep in my lap. I did a quick examination of my fuzzy little ward. She was indeed a girl, and I determined by her emerging teeth and a quick Google search that she was about five weeks old. Within an hour, she was awake again and hungry, her nose cold and wet like a dog’s, her eyes bright, her gait more steady, and her rage transformed to affection for her favorite new bottle holder—me.
That afternoon, when the California kids arrived from O’Hare, I introduced them to my new charge. “It’s Gloria!” Bethany declared, recalling illustrations of the baby badger with the black mask in her favorite childhood book, Bread and Jam for Frances. Gloria she became.
Thus began my summer as Gloria’s mother. And Petco’s “raccoon lady.”
The next morning—the one-year mark of Katie’s death—I was not drowning in sorrow as I’d feared but excited to be bottle-feeding a hungry, curious, masked furry baby, cuter than words, which gazed at me with adoring eyes from behind her little bottle and patted my fingers with her tiny hands.
The gift of Gloria did not escape me. From the outside, it might have appeared that I was caring for her, providing her with what she needed to survive. But really—on that particular day and for a woman who had loved animals her entire life—who was caring for whom? God’s fingerprints were all over this gift.
When Gloria finished her morning bottle, I carried her into the backyard and sat down in the grass to let her play. The scent of the earth and the freshly cut lawn drew me back to just over a year ago, to my first morning home from the hospital and my 4 a.m. rantings to God. I had wanted to throw myself facedown in the dew-soaked grass, grab God by the ankles, and have it out with Him. But I had resisted. Undignified. Wet grass . . .
I felt drawn again to lay myself before Him, though not to rail. Over the past twelve months, I had worn myself ragged with the sobbing. No angry or heartbroken words had gone unspoken, no agony unexpressed. And I was grateful for the many gifts God had tucked into the folds of this past year, one of which now nipped and gnawed on my ankle.
But not everything was resolved between God and me. I felt Him calling—calling me to . . . well, I wasn’t sure to what.
God, You have been so amazingly good and kind at every turn of this year. But I am still shocked that Katie is gone. You could have prevented this, but You didn’t! You allowed it, and can I just say that, from my vantage point, it was a stupid plan. I hate that this is our reality.
I’m not pulling away from You; but nor am I ready to roll over, to resign, to surrender to this new life that lies before me.
Not now, not yet.
That night Scott and I laid our heads on our pillows.
“We’re one year out,” I said. “How can I still be shocked that this is real?”
“I wonder if we will always be shocked,” Scott said. “This will never feel normal.”
“Never. I’m so raw. I’m still horrified that she’s gone.”
“Yep. There are no words.”
“But looking back over this past year, my heart feels warm and full, too. Every time I thought I couldn’t survive this, God showed up in some way. He kept trumping our pain with His goodness. People’s kindnesses toward us, the tree we received last fall on the very day Katie’s petunias froze, Gloria showing up yesterday . . .”
“It’s the paradox,” Scott said. “It’s the both/and. So awful that I will never understand, and so beautiful that I am shocked.”
The “new normal” wasn’t new anymore. Nor did it yet feel normal. I was still resisting. I could not yet bring myself to surrender, to let go of my girl—whatever that actually meant. But I felt more certain than ever that God, endlessly patient and good, would not let go of me.
Holding on, letting go . . .
“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.”[3]
It felt good to fall asleep with hope.
Grief . . . cultivates the soil for the seeds of joy.
ANN VOSKAMP
A broken heart is not the end of anything. It’s the beginning of everything. Find the beautiful, right in the middle of the mess. March into the mess.
GLENNON DOYLE MELTON
40
ON THE FIRST MORNING OF YEAR TWO, I stepped onto the back deck. Before me, a blizzard of cottonwood seeds drifted through the air like miniature angels, their tufts of white stark against the backdrop of towering trees and a cerulean blue sky. “I am good . . .” I had sensed God say a year ago as I stood on that ambulance bay staggering under the weight of what we were facing.
He had been good. What a year it had been. Our hearts were broken, but we had survived. I stared into year two with a healthy dollop of curiosity—and some respectable caution.
Two things troubled me about entering year two. First, I didn’t like that it was now more than a year since Katie had died. For the past twelve months, if someone asked me, “When did your daughter pass away?” I had found comfort in being able to answer them in months: “Four months ago” or “Seven months ago.” Their stunned reactions matched the degree of shock I felt inside. But now I would be answering, “A year and a half ago,” which made Katie’s death seem like a thing of the past—a part of history—when it was still shocking news to me.
Second, my very identity had been rattled. Who was I in this new day? I used to be Mother of Five. I’d taken a little pride in that, to be honest. “Five” generated raised eyebrows, a few jokes about birth control, and some “How do you manage?” incredulity. Frankly, I had enjoyed the attention, and I was so proud of our lively, well-behaved gaggle of kids.
But now people viewed me not as Mother of Five but as Mother Whose Child Died, and this generally freaked them out. I was living their worst fears. I frightened them.
Over the past year, I had met a few people who had lost a loved one and seemed to wear that loss proudly, like a purple heart. It was as if their tragedy had become their new identity. They bent every conversation back to their pain and compared their experiences to everyone else’s. I saw hints of this propensity in myself, and it alarmed me.
But I had also met plenty of other people who’d lost loved ones and responded just the opposite. They grieved wholeheartedly and allowed the fertile soil of sorrow to grow a depth of character in their souls that I admired. At work I met a young woman whose sister had committed suicide three years before by drowning herself in Lake Michigan—in winter. My friend had gone to the
morgue with her cousin and siblings to identify her sister’s body. I can only imagine the horror this must have been for her. She and I shared occasional conversations about our losses. Even though she was twenty years my junior, I found she possessed an “old soul” wisdom, a joyful countenance, and a tender peace that gave me hope. Her loss had not ruined her. It had grown her.
I began to notice that the people I looked up to most had this in common: Life had dealt them deep pain or disappointment, from the death of a loved one or from divorce or a significant illness or the demands of raising a special-needs child—any type of life-altering loss. But rather than becoming stalled in their grief or letting it drive them to bitterness, over time they became more alive, more joyful, and wiser than might have been possible before they became acquainted with heartache. They had allowed their sorrow to do its transforming work in their souls. They had stewarded their pain well. I wanted to be like those people.
I was Mother of Five. I was also Mother Whose Child Died. But neither of these roles, frankly, was adequate as an identity. Each was just a title determined by circumstances. Who was I beyond these circumstances? I had no clue. Clearly I had work to do in year two.
Standing on the deck, I reached out and caught one of the cottonwood seeds as it floated by. Just a tiny seed, shorter than a grain of rice and half as fat, surrounded by the snowy down that gave it flight. The cottonwood seed had no control whatsoever over its circumstances; the wind simply shook it free from the tree, then blew it around until, if lucky, it landed on good soil and sprouted and grew. Yet this unassuming little seed carried the potential to be transformed into something that far surpassed its current state. It had everything necessary to become one of the most resilient, thriving trees in North America.
I felt like this drifting cottonwood seed, with no control over the circumstances that had shaken me from the beautiful life I had known. But unlike this tiny seed, I wasn’t dependent upon luck to provide me good soil. My circumstances themselves had planted me in soil that held the most growth-producing potential of all: pain. Could I, like the seed, be transformed by the soil of Katie’s death? Could I be that resilient? Could I actually thrive?
Colors of Goodbye Page 23