This weekend will mark the six month anniversary of our loss. It’s hard for me to think that six months ago I was washing baby clothes and figuring out how to organize the little dresser in a small bedroom overtaken by two cribs. The grief is still there and it comes in waves. You think you’re doing okay and then something causes the swell to start – maybe it’s seeing a photo of a beaming new dad as he holds his firstborn son, or having the eyes of an infant meet yours while walking through the grocery store, or seeing someone with twins. Sometimes I can fight it and press on – breaking down in HyVee is not ideal, after all. But sometimes I give myself permission to feel and to weep.
It seems to be hitting me harder the past few days and I think the anniversary has something to do with that. One thing I have discovered over the past six months is the importance of having the truth planted inside of you. I cannot trust my feelings when I am overwhelmed by our loss. I have to trust something outside of me. I have to have something other than myself to lean on. Someone other than myself.
In a moment of clarity in the weeks after our loss I wrote a eulogy for my sons. I found myself returning to it when the waves of my grief became tumultuous. I found the hope that I had written of to be an anchor in the raging waters. It seemed appropriate that I should share it this week and let it be a reminder of the hope that is bigger than the grief.
I’d like to tell you a little about our boys, Phineas Jon and Abraham Steven Bottorff – we called them Phin and Bram.
Allyn and I first became aware of them on a Saturday morning in April. A positive pregnancy test – an answer to prayer, but greeted with a somewhat muted joy, because this was our second pregnancy. We already had a taste of loss and shattered dreams from a pregnancy that ended after only a few days of knowing we were expecting. Months had passed and the Lord was teaching me to trust in His good plans and I knew that another pregnancy would be difficult. The first few weeks I struggled hard, waiting for the bottom to drop out again, fighting for joy. I am not much of a journaler, but this week I came across a prayer I had written out a few days after we discovered we were pregnant. I wrote of the battle between fear and joy, and the assurance that life is a gift. I asked the Lord to help me that nothing would steal my joy, and to bless this pregnancy and that this baby (no idea it was actually babies) would be one that I could hold in my arms and raise to know Him. But, I mentioned in my prayer, I would trust the Lord that He had a plan for this baby, just as He had a plan for the first one.
The photo we used to announce our pregnancy
Two babies. Shock and excitement. I was thankful that I was lying down in that moment. Our world had just changed forever.
We broke the joyful news to our parents and a few close friends who knew of our pregnancy. What joy we had that day! Soon though, our joy was somewhat tempered as we discovered that not only were we having twins, but we were having identical, monoamniotic twins. This is a very rare type of twin pregnancy where the babies share a placenta and are in the same amniotic sac – really a one in a million situation. We met with our obstetrician who informed us of the very real risks associated with this type of pregnancy. I did some research online and remember weeping with Allyn over what I found and feeling as if I was a ticking time bomb with these babies. Such high risk and absolutely nothing I could do about it. At any ultrasound we could go and discover that these babies were gone because of problems with their umbilical cords being entangled and cutting off blood supply. How was I to live with this?
We pressed on in faith and with much prayer and enlisted several of you to stand with us during this pregnancy in petition to God to keep them safe. We had visits with a specialist and ultrasounds every two weeks and were repeatedly amazed by the good reports we had. Our babies, our boys as we soon discovered, were doing marvelously. Good growth, normal development, no sign of complications, even no real sign of cord entanglement – “very unusual” according to our specialist. We were so thankful that the Lord was answering our prayers for healthy babies. We started making preparations for the boys to come live with us – two cribs, a dresser, decoration for their nursery, a baby registry. Again, I approached this process with some fear and trepidation – what if the worst happened? We had not only prepared our hearts, but our home for these little guys, now known to us as Phin and Bram – but what if they never make it here, how will we handle that? I would combat my fears with the truth of scripture – God will be enough. He is sufficient. He will be our helper. And with the reassurance of all the good reports we had seen thus far – no complications, surely these boys will make it.
Profiles of the boys at about 20 weeks gestation
Wednesday August 28 was our 23 week mark. I had an ultrasound and doctors visits scheduled for that morning and was mentally preparing for the following week when I would embark on my hospital stay. I hadn’t felt the babies kick at all that morning and shared that with Allyn, feeling slightly concerned, but they had been so active during the preceding days and all our check ups had looked so good, so I was not overly anxious. After about 10 seconds of scanning with the ultrasound, we discovered that the boys were gone. The Lord had taken them quickly and quietly, probably sometime during the night. Our boys had gone home, but not to our house.
I am not sure that I could recount to you a play by play of what happened during the next 36 hours, nor would you like for it to be recounted to you. That was a time of shock and grief and loss, but yet a time covered with sweet mercies from the Lord – their homegoing was quick, we were spared from making awful decisions about their care, and we got to see their tiny bodies and hold them and say hello and goodbye.
Many of you here are acquainted with loss. I know some of you have lost babies to miscarriage, some even to stillbirth, perhaps you know the loss of a baby a few weeks or months into life. You know shock and grief, you know the emptiness and the loss of the dreams that you had for life with that precious one. And we have been comforted by many of you who have come and shared with us that you too, know loss and that you are praying for us to experience the Comforter in a real way.
One night this past week as I was awake, crying out to the Lord, He brought something to mind – He showed me that His people throughout the ages know what it’s like to lose a son. The first family that ever existed knew the grief of losing a son; Adam and Eve lost their son Abel. The Hebrews in Egypt lost a whole generation of sons during the time of Moses. When Jesus was born, King Herod murdered several mothers’ sons. And God Himself, God our Father, knows what it is like to lose a son. “For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son.” God did not just lose his son, but he gave his son.
And there is our hope. That God, our Father, “who did not spare His son but gave him up for all of us” not only knows our pain and our grief, but because He sent his son, because He lost his son, we will never lose ours.
For Phin and Bram are more alive than you and me. Phin and Bram are whole and complete, never to know grief or sorrow or pain, never to know hunger or loss, or heartache. Phin and Bram are with their heavenly Father. You see, though they are our sons and will always be our sons, they were forever belonging to God and are now Home where they belong. When I begin to mourn that they will never come home to our little house, I try to remember that our sweet boys bypassed our house for Home. They are with Jesus, and one day Allyn and I will join them there and we too will be whole, and this grief and this loss will be soothed and restored by nail-pierced hands.
Dear friends, as we grieve this very real loss, let us not say that these little lives were cut short. No, they just were short. For our Father has written and allotted each of our days. No mistake was made, no oversight on God’s part caused our little boys to die. God had always known that Phin and Bram’s days would be 150. He always knew the purpose he had for their lives, though they seem short to us. And while he takes no pleasure in families being separated, and no pleasure in his people being broken-hearted, He reminds us that “this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…”
The Lord is at work, He is good, and He is sovereign and nothing can change that. As for Allyn and me, we grieve our loss, but rejoice in Phin and Bram’s gain, and wait on the Lord.
Come Lord Jesus, come.
