When Hope Drifts

The strangest feeling overcame me when my wife suffered a miscarriage years ago. I was sad and disappointed, of course, but more than that, the strangest sensation hit me that we merely lost a body. The soul that was to be born in that lost body was still hovering nearby, and come hell or high water, she would be born the next time we got pregnant.

I knew it was a girl. I knew what her name was. And I had a sense of her personality. Strange and whacky, I know, but I had been having a sense of this soul since I was about 18 years old, and in the time since I had first felt her presence, I had also sensed her growing impatience with me to “get on with it.”

She wanted to be born.

The following pregnancy was difficult. The baby got sick. We were given very slim odds a few times for the baby surviving the night. And as scared I was in those moments, I held onto the hope that the spirit of the child would win out.

Again, she wanted to be born.

She would go through periods of quietness. Days would go by without a kick, and we’d panic about another miscarriage. We’d rush to the hospital, and as soon as the monitors were strapped to my wife, the baby would start kicking as if to say “bugger off.” After leaving the hospital, we would always go to Cracker Barrel for a meal, and that’s when the baby really started jumping back to life.

So, after a while, we would instead go to Cracker Barrel first, have a meal, and then decide if a trip to the hospital was warranted. I’m not sure what it was about Cracker Barrel, but it always worked, and was far cheaper and more enjoyable than the hospital.

After my wife got very ill and required surgery in the seventh month, we began to say that all we needed to do was get past the pregnancy and things would get easier. It became a mantra. But the universe had a cosmic joke in the works.

She came into this world quiet.

The nurse put her on my chest and another strange sensation overcame me. I saw images of her life flash in my mind, ending with a vision of her as a grown woman, old and beautiful, looking much like my wife’s grandmother, leaning slightly to her right against a cane.

“Whoa,” I whispered, unsure if the vision I had just seen was more than just my overactive imagination. “You’re finally here.”

Her tired eyes looked as if to say, “It’s about time.” She peed on me.

She beat the odds time and again, yet she was born to face the biggest odds yet: Complex Congenital Heart Disease. Specifically, her diagnosis included pulmonary stenosis with right ventricular hypertrophy, multiple holes in the heart, and malformed valves.

My wife stayed at the hospital to recover as our baby and I rushed downtown to Rush Medical Center.

The doctor explained how they would stop her heart, put her on ice, and do the repairs. He left me alone with her as I rocked her and sobbed over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”  Having a child suddenly felt so selfish. 

By the time the family arrived, she already had several lines of fluids and medicines running into her through her first of many “cutdowns,” where a vein was spliced open and a tube sewn in place.

A few times, getting in and out of the rocking chair meant twisting and turning, putting this arm up and out through that set of lines, and that leg over and in through this set of lines, and finally stopping as the nurse rushed in with a chuckle.

“Uh,” I’d look about the knotted mess we became. “Help?”

She looked so fragile that when I had asked my mom if she wanted to hold her, she balked. “Oh, I can’t.” She really wanted to hold her granddaughter. “I’ll hurt her.”

Gently, I warned her, “You might not get another chance.”

“Okay,” she swallowed, tears in her eyes, and readied herself for the handoff.

When my daughter was three days old, she went into her first of many heart surgeries. I don’t know why I saw the things I did when the nurse first handed her to me. I would like to think God was giving me something to cling to whenever things get really scary.

But there are times when the idea that “God” seems so remote, when I’m sure that what I saw was just my imagination, when it is my daughter’s spirit that I cling to most.

However far hope and faith drift at times, my daughter’s overwhelming spirit remains near.