Words of a father

[A rare post from Keith]

This year, Friday the Thirteenth fell on March 13. I was out with my staff that day, at a cooking class at Fort Canning. Midway through learning how to prepare an Asian-style roast chicken with Vietnamese spring rolls, Fiona called me.

She was in tears. The results from the pregnancy screening had just come back, and, as she has recounted in the blog, were bad. Parlous. Devastating.

I went through the rest of that morning in a fog, going through the motions of what I was supposed to do, but with my mind elsewhere, or nowhere at all. A few years earlier, I was in the middle of a dinner I was hosting for a visiting academic, when I got a phone call telling me that someone in my youth group had died, unexpectedly, after a game of soccer. I hung up, went back to dinner, barely made it through in a fog, and then went home and cried with Fiona that night.

It felt similar this time. And later that evening, when our gynaecologist called to tell us about the possibility of Edward's Syndrome, things came crashing down on us.

Fiona has recounted enough of our shared experiences through the last seven weeks, so I will not go through it all again. But let me recount three vignettes.

- The Monday after, March 16th, I had to drive to work as I had something on that morning. I really didn't want to be at work. As I drove and listened to the music, this song came on. At first, the tears just came, unbidden, but then I just yelled and howled like a terrified animal in the car, stuck in the morning jam on Nicoll Highway. I did not want to lose a child.

- One of the thoughts that kept coming to me was: What would I say at the funeral service of my daughter? (For I was quite sure that this was a girl.) One of the things I would have said was this: "My dearest princess: I pray that God will give me dreams of you, of who you were meant to be, in all your beauty and loveliness and health. So that at the Great Reunion, I would know, without a shadow of a doubt, who you are. And you would know me too. And we would dance together at that great Wedding Feast, finally." Each time I went through these words, as I rehearsed this scenario in my head, I would start to cry again. Even now, as I type these words, tears are streaming down my face. Tears of gratitude. Tears of solidarity with every parent who has lost a child in an untimely way.

- There were nights in bed, when I turned to Fiona's sleeping, grief-wearied form, and I wondered: Would we ever be happy again? When we our feet find normal, solid ground again? And I knew that we would, even if we had to walk through dark and murky waters to get there.

*

Miracles happen. I am so grateful for how things have turned out, and at the same time, as I read the blogs of many others who have had children with Trisomy 13, 18 or 21, I grieve with them. My heart knows only a tiny, tiny sliver of their grief. Fiona and I are well aware that we dodged a bullet. We will spend the rest of our lives finding out, and living out, the reason why.

And even now, more than a week after the good news, the phone call, I still go to this blog, to Fiona's post, at least once a day, as a reminder and a marker of the new reality that we live in (and also, so that I know that I'm not dreaming). We've alive. Our children are alive and well. Lucy is alive and well! And even before her birth, people from all over the world, some of whom didn't even know us, were praying for her, and us. What a privilege and blessing. Thank you, thank you, thank you.