No More Death

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The sheer amount of loss around me about which I keep hearing has been disconcerting.  One of my students lost her dad.  It's hard to hop on FaceBook without hearing about someone losing a friend or family member.  My husband mourned his mother's angelversary a few days ago, a day or two after my friend mourned hers.  What is it about death and the holiday season?  Is it that I'm just more attuned to it over the holidays?  This is my nephews' first Christmas without their mother.  I know they're feeling it.  The holidays are so hard when everyone around you expects you to smile and be happy when all you want to do is sit in the corner and cry. 

[My sister's dogs, Thanksgiving.]

Last time, I talked about my dog's still birth.  Well, the specter of death appeared too close to home again, still in the animal kingdom.  I housed my sister's five Pyrenees pups in my backyard, like I did over Thanksgiving.  She finally found buyers for the three unadopted pups the last day they were back there, and she bid farewell.  She was going to hold the other two for their prospective buyers.  All was right with the world.  Until the first then the second then the third and fourth started throwing up and showing all symptoms of parvo.  One stayed immune.  Any breeder will tell you this is their worst nightmare.  A pup can seem healthy and strong one day and be dead the next.  One pup that had gone home with someone else and another that stayed with my sister vomited blood and had to be put down.  The other two are recovering.  My sister was devastated her babies were dying.  She thought she couldn't feel any more pain.  Then, her mother dog broke the chain and got hit by a car.  She's had this dog for three years and loves her deeply, as do her children.  I've housed this dog and loved her myself.  She was a sweet angel dog, one who was loving to everyone.  I know these losses may not compare to some others, but they're still devastating to all involved.  And just like the others I mentioned before, smack dab in the holiday season.  And I now have the specter of death, the nearly impossible to kill parvo germs all over my backyard and possibly in my house, threatening my own newborn puppies. 

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What is it about the holiday season that seems to invite death and then make it so much harder when it comes?  It's supposed to be a time for joy, a time for love, and a time for hope.  I know we can be together forever with our families, including our four-legged family, one day.  That's what the promise of Christmas means.  We'll be together again.  But in the meantime, the holidays will continue to be hard for a lot of people, including me. 

Loss that Resonates like a Plucked Guitar String

[My very pregnant dog.]

It wasn't a big loss, not like miscarriage or child loss.  A couple of months ago, my Pomeranian got pregnant.  I was able to feel babies moving and kicking in there, reminding me of my advanced pregnancies of so long ago.  This is my little sweet doggie I got over the summer.  She is six pounds and so has felt like a baby to me, even though she's between four and seven years old.  We watched her nest and got all excited to watch her give birth.  I've never actually seen a dog of mine give birth. I saw the last few babies of my friend's chiweenie come out in their individually-wrapped packages, so I thought I knew what to expect. 

[Snoopy, the angel pup.]

Except the first one came out without a placenta.  It was maybe a bit large, hard to push out for such a tiny dog.  It wasn't moving, but she wouldn't let us check it or hold it.  I ran looking for one of those bulbs to pull out mucus, but I couldn't find one.  I was only told when it was too late there were a few things I could have done to prepare for this moment.  Even as I held his little inert form and tried to rub life into him after someone suggested it, I knew he was gone.  It was too late.  My husband buried little Snoopy, the white dog with black spots, in the same place where we'd buried newborn kittens that didn't make it a few years ago.  It only struck me later when someone suggested the things I could have done but also that maybe my angel Alli wanted a puppy, too, that this hurt like another loss.  That this tiny little loss was hitting at all those places I keep hidden, even from myself, especially as the holidays approach.  Tears formed for my loss now, for the possibility that this little boy could have been saved, and for my losses before, Alli and the string of miscarriages.  I never knew this puppy, but he brought with him and then took out a string of possibilities and hopes for the future, like any baby. 

[The first that lived.]

We'd been told Snow only gives birth two one or two babies, so I was afraid this was the only one, that my horrified girl saw in the box, that would come at this time.  I was afraid I'd have to chase her upstairs and explain that her hopes to at last hand raise that puppy of her own were dashed.  We've gotten puppy after puppy plus the occasional full grown dog, and with each one, she hoped this was the one that would look to her above all others only to have it join my pack of worshipers.   I didn't want to tell her here during the holiday season that we were going to fix Snow because this was the result of months of anticipation.  But then, I looked in the box again, and there was a little, yellow body, and it was moving.  It was exactly the color I envisioned, between the mommy's pale cream and he daddy's vibrant orange brown.  The black-and-white of the stillborn had been a bit of a shock.  We chased the new mommy around and hold her down to be able to cut the umbilical since her teeth were mostly gone since her care had been neglected by the backyard breeder from which she came.  I worried this little baby didn't have a fighting chance by itself, but this was two out of two we'd been told to expect. 

[The second that lived.]

I washed off mom and gave the two some privacy in my room since the mom kept barking at anyone who came through the living room, and I was worried she'd trample the little yellow one.  A short time later, my sister and her kids came over for dinner and to see the puppy.  Except instead of one little squirmy body in the box, there were two, including a strong, healthy one that looked a lot like Snoopy, the little one my husband buried.  Three.  We'd hoped but didn't dare expect a third.  This one came with the placenta, so we knew this was the end.  I don't know why having a second Snoopy makes me feel so much better about having lost the first, but it does.  With the stronger puppy there, the two survived the first night and cry out with a will to live every time their mom moves or goes out to go potty.  And she freaks out at any real or perceived threat to her little bundles.  I find I don't envy my dog her new babies like I may have a few years ago.  I'm not young anymore and am past the age when mom stopped giving birth to the seven of us.  I no longer long for a bundle of my own.  So I will live vicariously through my dog and hope and pray these two little ones stick around to bring someone joy, maybe even us for one of them.  But in the meantime, I will still mourn the loss of that little pup that came first and the whole line of losses his brings to the surface.  'Tis the season for loss to hurt more, but 'tis also the season of hope that we'll see each other again. 

Facing the Holidays

[Family]

Here we go again.  Is it just me, or does it feel like we had the holiday season just happened a week ago?  Maybe two.  As usual, the melancholy creeps on as I consider who is and who isn't here.  I consider my two beautiful and intelligent children I can still hold.  I reach out for my husband, and he's there.  My sister moved next door just recently, so I even have extended family nearby.  I have a home, good jobs, gifts and talents to share, fluffy animals to love.  I'm so blessed. 

[Christmas]

Yet, as the holidays creep on, the hole in my reality is almost palpable.  I've lived nine Christmases, ten if you count the one before she filled my arms, without my angel and not one with.  I never got the anticipated first Christmas or second or third.  As the blessings build up under the tree, as loved one pull closer, it's still hard to hear singing about babies and angels and not think of my angel baby.  I know I'm not alone.  Holidays tend to be hard on those in mourning, no matter whom they have lost.  The presence of everyone else somehow amplifies the sense of absence.

[Baby]

Yet, Thanksgiving is for giving thanks for what and whom we still have, for the gift of time we did get with our loved ones, no matter how short that time was.  It's a time for a spirit of gratitude, even for our challenges.  Christmas is for celebrating the One who overcame death and sin, so we could one day live together as families forever, so we can one day be reunited and never parted again.  Why is it then so hard, hurt so much?  It's part of mortality.  I'll try to celebrate Thanksgiving, giving thanks for my angel.  I'll start my angel jar, the gift we give our angel every year.  It's a jar of slips listing the gifts and service we as a family offer to others.  We will celebrate the holidays as we have and celebrate the gift of our angel and all she does for us. 

Día de los Muertos

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In the US, we celebrate Halloween.  Everywhere I go this time of year, I'm likely to see suspended skeletons, undead clowns, rubber rats and snakes, zombie hands reaching out of cauldrons filled with candy, costumes in all their polyester glory, pumpkins carved in every conceivable shape, and all sorts of other tokens glorifying the threatening and chilling side of death and the human condition.  When I was a kid, I liked trick-or-treating and haunted houses, thinking nothing of it.  It was just a thing. 

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Then, I had my own kids.  Trick-or-treating was going out of vogue, but the kids loved parties and trunk-or-treating.  It was fun to see them dress in costume and enjoy the season.  We still do, to some extent.  But I stopped intentionally walking into Halloween stores the day I wandered into one and saw what looked like a plastic undead baby that had had an autopsy.  That's the day my real experience with death and the "fun" side of Halloween came crashing together.  And the fun side became a hollow shell that in no way captured one's real experience with death.  It became a mockery of my grief.  It was hard not to look at the plastic stitches on that plastic head and not think of other stitches on a very real head that had been alive such a short time before.  I can't walk into a Halloween store again because I don't want to revisit that experience. 

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When I went on a mission to serve the Spanish speaking people of California, I became familiar with a holiday I like so much better, the Día de los Muertos.  If you've seen Pixar's "Cocoa," you'll be somewhat familiar with it.  It's the celebration of the lives of loved ones now passed beyond the grave.  It doesn't treat death as an abstract concept for thrills and chills but views death as part of life and the dead not as faceless zombies but as real people who are no longer among the living.  That's the day I'd rather celebrate.  They use bright colors to show joy at the thinness of the veil between life and death on that night, to show joy in lives well lived.  Sure, I go through the motions of Halloween, for the sake of the kids.  But my heart is in the Día de los Muertos.  Give me that holiday any day over my own because, indeed, the dead are not just empty shells reanimated in horror stories but angels that will one day be resurrected to rejoin the living on a day to be celebrated.  I look forward to that day. 

Pleading for Peace

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I went to visit my nephew yesterday, the one who was emotionally destroyed by his mother's loss a few months ago.  You have to understand that this nephew tends to only believe what he sees.  He's never considered himself religious.  But the burden of his loss grew so heavy that he turned upward.  He plead for peace like his life depended on it.  In some ways, it does because he has been simply existing, an empty shell.  It has been months since he's actually lived his life.

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But then he plead for peace.  He sought hope, a sign, something that would help him move beyond the void of his existence.  And that night, his mother's voice came to him.  He heard her reassuring him, encouraging him, sharing the love he had craved as badly as a starving man craves food.  His late dog was there, sharing his love, supporting him.  His brother even felt the thump of the tail. As my nephew spoke of this experience, tears sprang to his eyes, and he did something that awed and inspired me: he bore testimony of God.  It was beautiful and intense.

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I am a religious person, but I haven't had this kind of experience.  I have read scriptures and prayed.   I have sought both joy and peace.  But I can't say that I've put this kind of passion and intensity into my prayers.  And it may be this is a gift God knows he needed but I do not.  Angels speak by the power of the Spirit.  And the words she spoke to her son sounded like her voice.  The Spirit was strong in the room when he shared his story.  I have no doubt this was his mother speaking to him because he needed it.  He needed her hope, her strength, her love.  In a way, I envy that experience.  I'd love to hear my angel's voice.  But I haven't sought that gift with my whole heart.  And I probably haven't needed it like he did.  God knows what we need.  And if we plead with Him, it may take a while or it may be fast, but He will answer.  Sometimes, that answer is no.  And sometimes, as it was for my nephew, that answer is yes.  And if, by some chance, we do have the sacred experience of such a gift, we get it for a reason.  Now, it's up to my nephew to embrace that gift, the gift of hope and the reminder of his mother's love, a love that can sustain and motivate him to live again.

Close Calls and Miracles

[My big boy preemie]

Do close calls haunt you as much as they do me, moments when you were either aware of how close you came to loss at the time or considered it later?  I've had close shaves in traffic that haunt me for quite a while after.  I should have lost my boy because of his fragile umbilical, which broke on its own when he was born a month early (early enough to be called a preemie but big enough that he didn't look it).  He could have died had he twisted the wrong way while in the womb.  Thoughts of this kind of close call haunt me. 

[My perfect (but shouldn't have been) second baby]

My girls were both miracle children as well.  My older girl should not have had a picture-perfect pregnancy and delivery due to the Kell antibody, a rare antibody that acts like RH- but with no possible treatment.  It treats the baby like a disease in the womb, one which needs to be attacked and killed.  Many babies have died of anemia or have had to be induced way early due to anemia.  My first daughter was in no way affected but should have been. When I was pregnant with my angel, we found out that we were 100% guaranteed to deal with Kell every pregnancy.  Yet it wasn't an issue with my first daughter.  Although we drove a 2 hour round trip every 1-2 weeks to the hospital to have my angel observed, she showed no signs of stress.  Both little girls were miracle babies because Kell didn't affect them, didn't seem to even touch them.  Meanwhile, I'd read a study of 6 women pregnant with Kell babies during the 80s.  All six babies died.  Mine were untouched. 

[My tiny angel who came and went]

Then, four months after birth, my second daughter, one of my miracle children, died in an accident, rolled into a pillow.  That was not a close call.  That was loss and pain that colored every other close call from before and after. Loss and pain that changed everything.

[Ambulance ride to remember.]

 
Now, I'm hypersensitive to close calls.  At the end of the summer season when my baby died, my older daughter collapsed in the beach with a grand mal seizure.  We were rushed an hour away to the closest hospital.  I knew I could have lost her there, but she was preserved.                                                                                                                                                                         

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Close calls haunt me elsewhere, too.  If I have that close-call in traffic, it bothers me.  When I tripped and fell on a sidewalk, and my head somehow skimmed past a bumper to land between bumper and ground, I knew I could have died.  I found out fairly recently a serial killer was working at the same school where I was working in college.  He was picking up and murdering women who roamed those streets mere blocks from my campus.  That feels like a close call to me.  Close calls are scarier than they ever were before because I understand mortality more than I ever did before.  I know I'm not in the "safe" land of it-couldn't-happen-to-me.  I understand bad things can happen to anybody at any time.  Close calls become scarier when you understand the angel if death is not far off for any of us at any time. 

[Helping hand]

Which is what makes our guardian angels all the more precious, what makes the protective hand of providence all the more prized.  When my daughter walked away after treatment for the febrile seizure with no permanent harm, I was reassured in a blessing that my children had a mission, that they would be preserved until that mission was fulfilled.  I know I have a mission, a purpose, here.  And I will be here and safe until that mission is fulfilled.  There is fear in focusing on close calls but comfort in focusing on faith.  At any one time, we can choose to embrace faith, to trust God and know He knows the grand plan.  He knows when it is our time to be preserved and when it is our time to be called home.  If I trust in Him, He will protect me until my mission is done.  It's easy to let fear creep into my mind, to remind me that close calls and loss are around every corner.  It's up to me where I allow my mind to dwell.  And my life is a lot happier when I trust in the hand of the Lord. 

Stories of Loss

[Covered wagon like those in which pioneers had to load everything they owned.]

Recently, my family went on a vacation to see pioneer sites.  People told stories of things pioneers lost like homes, children, fathers, mothers, freedom, and so much more.  Yet the people at the time viewed it all with such faith and peace.  How can one bury one's child along the prairie with no grave to visit, no flowers to leave, no child to hold, and only a memory to take with you?  I can't imagine it.  They lost everything they held dear and yet were able to continue to breathe.

[Joseph and Emma Smith's graves.]

I think over what people went through and wonder how they could find peace after what happened to them.  In Nauvoo, where we went, for instance, people like any one of us, living in a nice home with their family, were suddenly made to leave.  They got little to nothing from possible sale of their home.  Yet, when they left, they were not just peaceful but cheerful.  When they lost children, spouses, mothers, and fathers, they found a way to move on.  I think, or instance, of Emma Smith.  She endured home loss after home loss, child loss after child loss (burying five babies, six children in all), then the jailing and murder of her husband.  Yet she managed to move forward. 

[A typical Nauvoo home--they lived like the rest of us.]

These people were just normal people, living normal lives.  I've dealt with legal troubles.  It was nowhere near the scale that Emma did, with her husband being falsely accused and imprisoned repeatedly.  I've lost a baby, just one.  I never got cast out of my home.  I never had to bury my husband.  I have empathy for this woman, for these people because I've been through a fraction of what they endured. 

Yet they moved on.  They found joy again.  They found a way to heal, to move on.  And the source of that survival strategy, their healing, and that peace seems to be their faith in the Lord.  They trusted in the Lord and in the atonement.  They knew their families would be reunited again, that they would be together forever after all their pain was done.  I admire these people for their ability to go through what they went through with such peace and joy.  I know faith is the key to true healing.  Yet I'm still seeking that peace and joy.  Most of the time, I'm okay.  Most of the time, I feel the peace.  Yet full healing feels ever-elusive.  It still hurts.  I wonder if they felt the pain of all their loss.  I think so.  I look at a later picture of Emma's eyes and see an overwhelming sense of sadness, of pain, that isn't there in early photos. 

I know healing is possible.  I know those who have lost loved ones can find joy.  I know the Lord will heal us if we trust in him.  It's just not easy and not necessarily quick.  You, too, can find healing.