Infants Remembered In Silence (IRIS) - Stories - In The Years To Come, I Will Not Forget You

In The Years To Come, I Will Not Forget You

By Rev. Terry Morgan

She would be ten now…
And I wonder, would she have dancing curls and sparkling eyes and a dimple in her cheek like her mother?

She would be ten now…
Perhaps too old for laps but not too old to be tucked in at night and kissed and told not to let the bedbugs bite.

She would be ten now…
Daddy’s little girl, full of ideas, opinions, and laughter.

We lost her ten years ago. She was our first child. She was our last child. We had awaited her with eager expectation. I bought a crib and sanded it down myself and repainted it in the garage. We painted the room and it became a child’s room with a cute little lamp. But that room would never hold a child nor would we. We made many mistakes, but we were on a road without maps and did not know the way.

We didn’t name her. We had decided to call our first baby girl Emily. But when we had this broken child who lived only four hours, we told the nurses just to call her Baby Girl on the certificates that marked her birth and her death. We have since given her back her name and mourned her death and celebrated her brief life. She was a real child, her loss a real loss. Her birth was a real birth, her death a real death.

We did not see her. You see, she was badly broke and in our brokenness we did not think we had the strength to look on hers. I have since seen such broken babies. I have held them, and I have watched their mothers hold them as they quietly slipped from this world into the next where God would hold them for eternity.

We did not have other children. We felt the risk too high,
the pain too great. Now, as we have grown into middle age, we wish we had taken the risk. No, the healthy ones will not replace the broken ones. Each is as unique as their fingerprints. Subsequent children will never take the place of the child you have lost, but other children will fill a place in your heart – not the lost child’s place, but another place waiting to be filled.

She would be ten now… Not a day goes by that I do not think of her, wonder about her, try to picture her in my mind. Losing a child is not something you will get over, but it is something you will get through, and something you can grow through as well as go through. When I think of Emily now and her name is whispered down the corridors of my dreams, it is less often with sorrow and more often with joy…joy that someday we will see her in that kingdom where all brokenness will be healed, all tears wiped away, and the eternal afternoon of laughter will begin. I see her there now, and she is ten.

By Rev. Terry Morgan from the book, Dear Parents, Letters too and from Bereaved Parents, Centering Corporation
Emily died shortly after birth due to anacephaly

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