Today marks the sixth anniversary of the longest day of our lives. Well, it actually began a few days before but extended for 22 more from this point on, while a little life hung in the balance and the rest of us held our breath.
I am not the centre of this story, but his life in many ways has been at the core of mine.
The time from when we knew he was on the way, till the time we said goodbye, has been like a BC – AD division of history in my life. There is Before Elijah and After Elijah. So significant it has been. And due to his coming and passing, so much in my heart and life changed. One night I wrote a list six pages long of areas of my heart and thoughts that had been impacted by this season. I only stopped writing because I was too tired to continue.
I think more about him in this month of February, but there isn’t a day that I don’t think of him at all.
That long long day was a succession of phone calls and drives to KEMH, tension, precious moments, the continuation of normal, exhaustion and tears.
And it was followed by a much much longer night. A night which is not mine to tell but in which I was deeply enmeshed and which was mostly invisible to almost all around. A night which lasted years…
Some of you are my Facebook friends because of contact made around this time six years ago… And others or you are still my friends because of the love and care expressed through that time. I feared judgement and we received grace. I expected rejection and we got loved. I still have all the emails in a folder… A great many of the stories shared were different situations but of people’s greatest pain and have lodged in my heart as the most significant kind of sharing – and like the little box of Elijah memories under our bed, I cannot open the email file – I know it is there and i treasure it all.
The story isn’t finished, I don’t know when it will be, or even if. But for me there has been a great healing by a Gentle Friend who has walked beside in every moment.
Before Elijah was born I had a sense of stepping off a precipice. This impression came to me as I was giving birth to Miss Taryn who was three months old when Elijah was born. The precipice impression was as gripping to me as the birth process happening at the time. Tarri was posterior, the doc had commented that it was as though my body had forgotten it had done this before (7 year gap) and the pain was more like a first than a seventh delivery. I was totally loony on the gas but felt Gods presence acutely. With this impression of the precipice came the correlation to birth… That I had no option but to trust in time passing, in the process and in those caring for me… and the God who sees, cares, comforts and walks beside. In going over the precipice I had no option but to trust in those same things.
So I did.
Some years later I had another impression. This time, of having been set gently down. I had indeed gone over that precipice, but like the eagle, He had swept in under me and set me so gently down that I didn’t even know when it had happened.
Just that He had.
And so we remember
The presence and passing
Of a little life
Who mattered
One through whom
We grew and were changed
One who
Forever will be
Part of the fabric
Of our family
