Written: January 16, 2024

Is there a better sound to a mother than her baby’s first cry? 

It’s been five months since we heard you cry out for the first time. A big, beautiful baby girl – our third. You’d be trying to sit up by now, and I’d bet you’d be just as big and wide eyed as your sisters were. Maybe that dark hair would have begun to turn blonde by this point.

I sit here five months away from that terrible and beautiful day you were born. The day that started us on this path of separation. But it’s also the day I found out you had beautiful thick hair and fuzzy little shoulders. The day we first laid eyes on eachother. You, side-eyeing me as your Daddy held you next to me so I could see you, and me, nuzzling your cheek because I couldn’t hold you. We laughed when you heard my voice and began searching for me with your eyes.  It was actually just your left eye, your right one was swollen shut for some reason. When your little squinty eye found me, it stayed there. You had found your momma. 

Minutes later, you were whisked away as you went to the NICU and I endured having to get an MRI and recover without you. It was the beginning of our story of seperation.

This is not how I ever imagined it. From beginning to end our story together is just this ache and longing. Me, always trying to bridge the crevice between us, yet watching it only grow wider. My fingertips at the ends of my outstretched arms reaching for you have only touched an ever growing space between us. 

Nightmares chase me down at night. Devastation surrounding a house that stands in it’s midst, your daddy carrying you up the front porch stairs and me exclaiming “You got her?! We got her!” and weeping. We enter the house, the next morning I’m whisked away to fight for my life in gauntlet. I try to get back to you, but my feet never move me closer. I get minutes in your presence and then we’re ripped apart, and I never see you again. This nightmare repeats itself in various ways and stories, but the plotline remains the same. A desperate mother, always trying to get back to her baby only to get further and further away. 

I cannot reach you on my own accord. 

I long for us to find eachother again and know that there will be no more goodbyes.  

How long, O Lord?

“How long until we – now grieving and bereaved – see those we once thought lost waking from their slumber in your fields of harvest, shrugging off their grave shrouds as children shedding coats to feel the warming sun, running, leaping, calling merrily as they rush to join the celebration streaming through the gates of that enduring city with cries of gladness, with shouts of joy and recognition, with upwelling affections and warm embraces, joined to us again, nevermore to be parted, all eternal citizens of beautiful holy habitations, of perfect and eternal communion between all peoples of God, and their God, and his creation? How long? How long until all that is lost is found again?” Every Moment Holy Volume II A Liturgy of Intercesioon: Lament for a Loss, p 197. 

To have known and love you Gemma is one of the most wonderful gifts of my life.