Bright in the Dark

Ten months ago our first child was born the day before her due date. She was beautiful and precious to us. She had dark hair and reddish eyebrows the color of her father's goatee. In fact she looked a lot like my baby pictures with the same nose. Jenny cried five months later, at Christmas when she unexpectedly happened upon a baby picture of me because we looked so much a like. She had Jenny's chin and eyes and petite size, she only weighted 5 lbs 14 ounces.

I haven't taken the time to write this final post to this blog because I haven't want to spend the tears necessary to write it. I loved her. When I held her and looked at her and traced her features with my finger tips I felt proud and full of love for her. I wanted to share her with the world, but knew I never would because she was cold and limp and I was rocking her in a rocking chair in an empty hospital room with a nurse supervising my visit with my child because they didn't trust me with her. Through the tears she was even more beautiful, arrayed in a glistening halo of light. My wife lay in a room down the hall spent physically and emotionally from giving birth to our beautiful child and afraid to see her. Not an hour later she gathered her courage and held her. Her tenderness broke my heart. My mom called right then and I told her we were spending time with Jade Lynne. It was my chance to share her with my mother. I described her first grandchild to her without shedding a tear.

We spent time at the Shorts house, some friends from Taiwan who lived near the hospital and who four and a half years earlier had attended our wedding. The next day my parents had come in and we went to the funeral home she'd been sent to. I dressed her alone and anointed her body with tears. I brought her out to my family and I experienced a life long nightmare. One by one as I brought her around and shared her with my family I looked into their tear filled eyes. I don't know why, but since I was a young boy I've had a recurring nightmare that either my father or my mother or my sister, Resa, had died; but strangely when I looked into their face they were always crying with me. After I married Jenny I had the same dream about her. I often awoke from this dream crying in the night. Now my dream was real, but it wasn't their death but my daughter, Jade Lynne's, that we mourned. We gathered together and my dad said a prayer. It was one of the few times I've seen him cry. I don't know if he stopped crying the whole time. Then he read the Bible to us. Psalms 103. A photographer associated with the network http://www.nowilaymedowntosleep.com/ came by and took pictures for us of our daughter. She did a wonderful job and took some beautiful pictures we will always treasure. We cried more and said good by to her for the rest of this life.

Now ten months later the wound. The gaping hole in our lives reopens with ease and the blood and water pours out. We had planned a life with her... Planned our lives around her, and now those plans are null and void. After two weeks at my parents, during which letters and cards from friends and family around the world poured in, we decided we needed time alone back home in WV. We stopped in Berea at the Carricks on the way and were further comforted. Before we left Southern Illinois my parents church ordered the stone in the picture at the beginning of this post. It was a thoughtful gift we still appreciate. Back in WV we slowly began to pick up the pieces. The world beneath us had spun out of control and we had fallen and now we tried, falteringly, to get up.

God was faithful to us.

Slowly we've found that we can say, with Job, "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Really it is only through our relationship with Him that we've been able to

bear up under this. Actually He has often had to hold us up because we couldn't

hold our selves up.

This is a slide show shot and put to music by Robin and Sam Watson. Sam actually planted the flower less than a month after Jade Lynne died. He e-mailed me his plans and then e-mailed me again when he had completed his plan. It was touching that he did what he could from where he was to comfort Jenny and I. The more I think about it the more I appreciate the living memorial he's erected, in Taiwan, in memory of our daughter Isabelle Jade Lynne Pense. Like me, her father, Jade Lynne grew up in Taiwan, and so it is fitting there is a memorial to her there.

I had been planning on putting up this final post up for about eight months now, but I haven't had the strength or courage to do it until now. It took Sam's slide show to get me going. Then it took over and hour of tears, but here it is. I plan on editing this post and furnishing more pictures as time goes on, but this will be the last post on this blog.