The anticipation always looms more dreadful than the actual event. Well, usually.
Maybe not for delivering babies or enduring root canals, but perhaps for painful anniversaries that sneak up with a container load of memories and unfulfilled longings in its berth. March 23 approached and I buckled beneath the birthday expectations of what should be but can never occur. I desperately wanted to flee this day with its absence of candles, presents, and son to embrace and celebrate. Calendars can be cruel too.
His birth is vivid still, the first one without Lamaze breathing techniques to propel me through the trauma. An epidural offer and I was a happy woman. Oh, is that really a contraction just now? Well if you say so. My, isn’t modern medicine a marvel.
But the contractions in my stomach would come later, when his color was bluish gray, his temperature low, and the incubator had no room for a cute rattle amidst the wires and the tubes. The grim diagnosis propelled the medical team to whisk him away and place him on a plane; our final destination unknown. Congenital heart disease was no longer someone else’s concern. Now his walnut-sized heart would need paramount attention, would be frozen, sliced into and rearranged to ensure all the mismatched pieces were placed in working order.
James Cameron Mitchell would be 16 today. Tell me again, Creator, why you allowed us to experience such immense quantities of joy with him? Let me in on the secret, you who were his Father from the first, how you could ever have granted us such a child? Why such privilege to parent this precious boy for all those days you shared him with us? As he lay within my womb, you saw the imperfections, held your hand from correcting the flaws, knowing the world would be a far more blessed place if you delivered him this way. Your spectacular plans for his life trumped our feeble thoughts and you carved into his soul an indomitable spirit to overcome the myriad hurdles that lay ahead.
He scaled them, every one, just like you planned. He should never made it off the starting block, never heard the pistol ring in his ears as he flew down that Olympic track. But he came to soar, to race unencumbered by self-pity or fear, to sprint through the tight curves, to speed around the course, both lungs bursting, head held high, eyes focused on the prize down the stretch, with the yellow ribbon always in view.
Then, with the crowds cheering wildly on all sides, with great lengths of track still left to cover, you moved the ending closer. “Cross now, run through, the race is over and you have proved yourself a champion, a relentless participant in life’s tumultuous pageantry. Well done my boy,” you whispered from on high. “Just run further in and further up to pick up your well deserved prize.”
And the maker and sustainer of life and breath held us, and asked us to watch our son’s final lap.
Two and a half years have passed, and still He imputes breath into our battered lungs. No matter what the birth certificate read, James was never truly ours. Just on loan, for just a while, till we learned worthy lessons He could impart no other way.
We are learning further truths on days like this when the calendar and the Kleenex box are intertwined. When the anticipation is washed in the spring of grace, when others remember and embrace our pain, when He gives peace right where we should feel bitter anguish. Even here He is reminding us that His plans are perfectly laid out, and though they cannot be interpreted into our earthly tongue, they are nevertheless the way He has designed them to run.
Birthdays are always milestones on the way.