By DONALD DeMARCO
We had five healthy and happy children. “God giveth and God taketh away.” And so, in His inscrutable wisdom, He called our sixth child to His home the day after he was born. It would have been far more difficult for us if we had lost our first child. And it would have been immeasurably more difficult if the child God reclaimed so early in life was to be our only child.
I thought about the excruciating pain Rose Hawthorne Lathrop and her husband, George, felt when they lost the only child they would ever have. Little Francie passed into God’s protective arms when he was five. The couple left to posterity poignant expressions of their sorrow in poetry. Rose was the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and inherited a goodly portion of his considerable literary skills:
Sorrow, my friend, when shall you come again,
When shall you come again?
The wind is slow, and the bent willows send
Their silvery motions wearily down the plain. The bird is dead
That sang this morning through the summer rain.
George had considerable literary gifts of his own. In one of his poems to Francie, he tried to see death as a passage to a higher life:
Among the stars your feet are set;
Your little feet are dancing yet
Their rhythmic beat, as when on earth
So swift, so slight, are death and birth.
God did not withhold His Kindness in our dark hour. I had a premonition that something would go wrong. I was more than anxious during the delivery. And when James Patrick emerged, I knew immediately that my anxieties were fully justified. “Is there something wrong with the baby?” my wife asked the attending obstetrician, trying courageously to conceal her fears on an occasion which is supposed to bring joy.
The medical staff did all it could and the baby was then taken to another room. A pediatrician was summoned. Finally, after what seemed to be an interminable period of waiting, the obstetrician delivered words that I will never forget: “Dr. Friday [the pediatrician] doesn’t think the baby will live and so he has baptized him.” Life is eternal. God does not destroy the life He creates.
There would be death. That is inevitable. But, more significantly, death would be a momentary transition to a better life. The words of the poet and scholar Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who lost his infant daughter Fanny, offer comfort: “There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death.”
Spiritual life would succeed earthly life. Our tragedy was that our role as parents was already virtually over. Our role was to initiate life, but not to nourish it. I drew consolation from the fact that my wife had the pleasure of holding the baby and enjoying how he curled his tiny hand around one of her fingers. It was a gesture that could be an indication of wanting to stay and, at the same time, saying good-bye. I was deprived of such close contact and was deeply saddened that the opportunity did not present itself to me. My lot was to break the news, in small increments, to our other five who were at home.
It was a dark and emotionally intense experience. And it took seventeen years before I could write about it for the first time. But more than anything else, it was predominantly a spiritual experience. The sentiment that helped us the most was one that succinctly, but accurately, encapsulated the experience for us: “The child we could not embrace, has embraced us.”
Suffering has the extraordinary potential for unifying people. James Patrick had embraced all seven members of our family in a powerful and palpable way. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno once said, “Bodies are united by pleasure, but souls are united by pain.” Our little angel in Heaven to whom we pray did, indeed, embrace us all.
Over the ensuing years, these simple words — “The child we could not embrace has embraced us” — proved to be most helpful for other parents who lost a young child. A book of mine, coincidentally, about life and death, was about to be published around the time of James Patrick’s passing. It was dedicated to him and the words that were so helpful to us were inscribed alongside his name.
Faith, hope, and love nourished us. So did many kind and sympathetic friends. And God continued to make His loving presence felt. I left the hospital that fateful day and began my drive home. My mood was dark and I certainly stood in need of consolation. I came to a traffic light, stopped the car, and noticed a poem that I had written lying on the dashboard as if waiting for me to reread it. It had been recently published by a Catholic journal. Its theme centered on the essential importance of faith.
Could I have written it for myself, for this particular moment when I needed consolation and reassurance? It may have been that God did not want me to proceed until I read it. His Providence, even determining when to synchronize a red light, is our ever-present companion:
Though night enshrouds us
And our life has shriveled
To a core of dry despair,
Let us continue to believe,
And believe all the harder
As belief grows harder to believe,
Until belief becomes
The sole preoccupation of our mind.
Then slowly we will feel
Our doubts dissolve, our pain expire, our fears release their hold –
As we stand within the sunlight of an understanding smile,
Enfolded firm by more-than-loving arms.
Our experience was heart-breaking but not faith-shattering. James Patrick was born on March 15 and passed away the next day, one day before St. Patrick’s Day. His brief appearance in this valley of tears was not in vain. We look forward to seeing him once again, when we are reborn.
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