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God Didn't Take Her!

---- "Your teacher says that you've been gagging yourself to make yourself throw up."

---- The second grader was big for her age and a victim of circumstances beyond her control. I had struggled for two days to find time to see her.

---- "Uh-huh," she whispered softly with a vacant, dry-eyed stare.

---- "What are you thinking about when you gag yourself?"

---- "Mommy ... momma." Tears began to well up in eyes but quickly vanished.

---- Why do I hate this? I think. Why do I feel like throwing up? How come there's that same sinking, empty feeling in my stomach that I've experienced periodically for the last 12 years?

---- "Does throwing up help you bring your momma back?" I asked.

---- "Not really," she responded with an almost autistic stare.

---- Her mother died a few weeks earlier; a long, diabetic-induced illness, a couple of months in a coma with two weeks of brain-dead existence. This brave second grader had endured a horror of events.

---- "I think I caused my momma to go into a coma," she confided shortly after her mother's death. "If I hadn't seen her on that day, maybe she'd still be alive."

---- How come this is deja vu? I hate this. It's been 12 years and I'm still not fully recovered. How's this girl going to make it?

---- I celebrated my oldest daughter's fourteenth birthday birthday this year by staring at her picture for 30 minutes. I celebrated her birthday by noticing teenagers about her age. What would she have looked like? Would she be pretty? A good student? I celebrated her birthday by having an all-day, psychologically induced nausea just like I get each year on the date she died.

---- "I feel like throwing up sometimes, too" I shared with my distraught student. And my thoughts go back to the nightmare.

---- "Let's go look at our little girl!" Marcella said excitedly. "She's been using her table and chairs and coloring on some paper I left in there."

---- Our 17-month-old daughter was a joy to our lives. How often we had thanked God for this precious gift. we slipped to her door and silently peeked in to see what she was doing.

---- Disbelief and horror greeted us. Our precious baby was hanging by her chin on the end of her bed. An autopsy revealed a severed spinal cord, caused by a half-inch slip on a poorly constructed bed, a penchant for climbing, and naive parents who were not aware of the potential hazard of the headboard's lattice woodwork. The death was painless and instantaneous.

---- My wife's nursing skills took over. She started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and ordered me to call an ambulance or a doctor.

---- Panic and temporary insanity gripped my efforts at trying to communicated with an equally confused telephone operator. There was no ambulance service in our rural Kansas community back then. It took an hour of struggling to get a locally retired doctor, including a trip into town. My wife was still working on our daughter when the doctor and I came home.

---- The doctor moaned softly as he examined our lifeless toddler. Stethoscope in hand, he tried to convince us that our efforts were in vain.

---- "You take her on to the hopital," he urged. "I'll call ahead to let them know you are coming."

---- Did we cause this? Should we have checked on her earlier? Were we amiss not to have recognized the ominous silence from her room for what it was? We prayed on the way to the hospital that this might be a nightmare or that the doctor's diagnosis was incorrect. We secretly harbored the feeling that our daughter was still alive, waiting only to be revived by an unseen, caring hand.

---- "How come everybody at my church keeps praying for my momma," the little girl had questioned weeks earlier, "but she just keeps getting worse?"

---- "Your momma is very sick, and some of her body's organs are not working right. God is not taking your momma. Your momma may be dying, and God will take her spiritual body to Heaven if she does die." I hoped my explanation could be understood. Death can be the final reality for even the most fervent prayers.

---- "Just think," said our funeral director. "God took your little girl for a reason. He had better use for her elsewhere."

---- My soul and reason cried out, "God didn't take her! He wouldn't punish a proud Christian mother and father by taking an innocent child!"

---- "She's been baptized," said a mother with a very sick, newborn premie. "If God takes our little girl, we're ready," a new mother and father shared with us a few months after our girl's death. Marcella broke into sobs, and I began to feel nauseous. God doesn't take little babies! Our disappointed thoughts permeated our departure.

---- The second grader stared at the blackboard in front of me. "I don't have anyone to talk to. My dad is in another town, and I'm staying at my aunt's."

---- "You can talk to me anytime you want. I'll try to make time." I thought about my thankless schedule. The right type of talking and friendship does help, but the remorse never goes away.

---- The phone rang. The caller invited my wife and me to a "charismatic"fellowship. "The Lord had a purpose for your daughter's death: a closer and fuller relationship with Jesus Christ." Numbness dulled my senses. Am I believing what is being said? Is this Christianity? God did't take our daughter; it was a purposeless accident!

---- "It feels like a train took half of your heart away," our preacher, Darel Boston, empathized at the emergency room. Thank God for cognizant and understanding preachers who are available. "Why don't you two spend the night at our house? It will be a long night, and you proabably won't sleep anyway, but at least you won't have to stay in your lonely house." My wife and I didn't realize the importance of that invitation until years later. Numbness related to death doesn't begin to lift for weeks or maybe months after a tragedy.

---- "Have you been crying much?" I asked my suffering little friend.

---- "Not really," she countered. "I've got to learn to live with it."

---- "That's right," I said. "But you never get over it. It's been 12 years since our little girl died, and I'm still not fully recovered. But it gets easier as time passes."

---- I offered her some verbal support. "Throwing up isn't going to help bring her back, is it?"

---- A silent shake of her head met my question. Then she brightened. "Could I enter the ' Channel 5's Ho Ho The Clown Coloring Contest'?"

---- "Sure. Let's get some paper!"

---- My friend began to beam.

---- Why has it taken 12 years to pen this? How long does it take to recover from a death?

---- There are pictures missing from our family photo album, and our lives will never be complete without them."

Published, August 17, 1986 /THE LOOKOUT. Standard Publishing. (Marcella and

I still cannot read this without tears.) This experience introduced us to the world of foster children and later getting involved with many troubled, "Children Who Are Not Ours."