Embracing the Cross

The past two weeks have just increased the love and admiration I have for my wife.

When I consider that Wifeofdadwithnoisykids, by fulfilling her vocation to the married life, opens her heart to more than just joy and happiness, I am awed that she has the strength to continue to live a life full of charity. Nothing shows that more than the way she has responded to the loss of our little unborn child, Therese.

I have tried to write a post to describe the events of the past few weeks, and my wife and I have struggled to understand why God would permit a family which is open to life to lose a child. We have no answers, but we do have some thoughts as to why this had to happen. Of course, whatever the reason does not make the sorrow any less.

My own personal theory is that in our present world, God has willed that someone must mourn the death of an unborn child. For the past 30+ years abortion has been legal, and the culture of death has been explaining away all the unborn dead as ‘tissue,’ or a subject of ‘choice.’ The last thing the culture of death wants is to put a human face on the aborted dead. Our unsolicited role in God’s plan in this instance was to be mourning the loss of a child who died in the womb at seven weeks. Not only did we put a face on our child, but we also put a name on her.

Without going into details, Wifeofdadwithnoisykids ended up needing a D&C in the middle of the night. A surgical team was called in for this emergency, and the procedure was over quickly. When she awoke from the anesthetic, my wife spoke to her obstetrician about how much she had wanted this child. Through her tears, she told how we had named this child, how we wanted this child, and how it hurt so much to know that she was gone.

After the obstetrician left, the recovery room nurse started telling my wife that there was no baby there, that there was no child in the womb. It was nothing. Wifeofdadwithnoisykids started disagreeing with her, stating that there was a baby in the womb, only that this baby was dead, and that the baby was named Therese. At this point the nurse got within inches of my wife’s face and told her to be quiet so she could finish her paperwork.

“Close your eyes and just be quiet. Don’t say another word,” she said.

She obviously didn’t want to hear what my wife was saying, as she immediately started talking to another person in the recovery room.

My wife lay there silently praying.

My take on this is that the nurse probably had a past experience with abortion causing her to react like this. Either she had participated in abortions or had had one herself in the past, and to hear my wife mourning the loss of an unborn child was more than she could take.

But where else will this woman hear someone refer to an unborn baby as a human being? Perhaps our presence was a pricking of her conscience which has been living a lie for so many years. Perhaps this was a means for God to call her to repentance. Perhaps this little incident in the middle of the night will lead her back to the road to repentance. I don’t know, but in some way God is bringing good out of this time in our life.