Jessica: our little angel with Jesus

This entry will be pretty raw and unsmooth. I'm not sure how to make it nice and pleasant.

My wife had been carrying our 4th baby for nearly 9 months. As of Monday and Wednesday monitorings at the hospital, the baby looked healthy and active. My wife felt stronger contractions throughout yesterday (Friday), so we arrived at the hospital at 1:00 a.m. this morning for what we felt would be another happy day. All our previous 3 deliveries have gone smoothly and we've enjoyed discovering each new child as he or she arrived.

After we checked in, we went to the monitoring room. I tried to watch the eyes of the midwives there to see reactions. Instead of the usual healthy heartbeat, there was no sound when they tried to find the heart. So the first one got a second midwife. Still no sound. So they got the doctor on call. When she didn't find anything, she said that she had the sad news that there was no heartbeat, which implied that our Jessica was no longer alive.

We went into a delivery room then and prayed against hope that God would heal our girl. The midwives gave my wife an epidural to ease the pain. The child that she delivered stillborn. But she looked so beautiful, with the same dark hair, small nose and other features of the other kids.

We had about 1 1/2 hours alone with our little girl's body. We rocked her, kissed her, and told her how much we had been looking forward to her being in our home. We prayed for God to miraculously raise her from the dead. But she remained lifeless with her eyes closed. The feet that had kicked the monitor in previous visits remained motionless.

I went in to the same room where our other 3 kids had been measured and weighed as babies. I remember our son christening the scale with his urine nearly 7 years ago. Jessica measured 49 cms. and weighed 3.1 kilograms.

We signed the papers for an autopsy to be performed on her. Afterwards, we will get her body back and have some type of funeral service. I have no idea how all this works in France.

My wife mentioned as we were caressing Jessica's body that Jessica hadn't felt as active as the other 3 kids had felt. So we wondered if there might have been physical problems with her that might have shown up later on.

Despite the terrible circumstances, we felt God's peace throughout much of the time at the hospital. Hundreds of people had been praying for Jessica and her delivery, so it's not that there was no spiritual coverage. We believe in a loving, all powerful, and merciful God, so we don't feel that this is just a chance happening or that God was powerless to do anything or disinterested in this whole situation. In this way, our faith has remained strong so far, although we are likely to struggle with existential questions later.

I got home at 6:30 a.m., right when the kids were waking up. I was able to call the grandparents and let them know. But I haven't told the kids yet. Hopefully my wife will get checked out in the early afternoon. We need God's wisdom to explain this to our kids.

I feel a mixture of emotions, including disbelief that this really happened, sadness that she won't be part of our family life after we were all so looking forward to her, bewilderment in trying to make sense of the whole situation, etc. I was looking forward to seeing her go through the usual grown processes and even willing to lose sleep over them.

Somehow I'll probably always feel that she is part of our family. I look forward to seeing her in heaven and discovering the person whom I didn't get to know on this earth. I can see her already being with my mom, her Grandma Dawn who passed away about a year ago now.

I've been fortunate so far to not have had to deal firsthand with a lot of deaths so far. Many others have wrestled with these situations way more often then me.

In some ways, it's probably easier to have her pass away now than it would be if she had already spent some time outside the womb in our household. But I still wish she was around this morning.

The words of Matt Redman's song "Blessed Be Your Name" popped into my head as I was driving home. Whether God gives or God takes away, His name is to be blessed at all times. This is just one of those times where this is more of a choice, than something based on happy feelings.