Into the Beautiful

On the day that I found out that baby b, Cayden, had died, I remember driving out of the hospital lot in sort of a stunned silence. It was before I knew they were girls, had ever heard of TRAP, or even imagined that things would not continue normally. All I knew was that I had two babies and lost one. I called Paul and told him. I went to my parents to pick Mia up and told them. As I was driving home from there, I remember being stopped at a train. I looked down at the seat next to me and picked up the ultrasound picture – it showed both babies. I turned on the radio because the silence of my thoughts was just too much. The first song that came on had a chorus with the words….

"Take me into the beautiful."

As I looked at that ultrasound and saw the twins and heard that phrase repeated in the song, the tears finally came. I immediately had the image of my baby being brought into the beautiful, into heaven. Running into the arms of her Creator. Of her heavenly maker. And it was beautiful. Heartbreaking but beautiful.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I had a dream last night that I was having another routine ultrasound. I was laying there, belly exposed, jabbering away about something unimportant and irrelevant. Until I caught the look in the technician’s eyes as she searched the screen. It took me a few moments too long to recognize that my biggest fear was being realized. I too looked at the screen and saw the beautiful shadow of my baby. Laying perfectly still. Too still. I saw her profile, her chest, her belly and her legs. And there, where the pumping heart should be, typically the most re-assuring piece of information on the screen, was pure stillness. Blackness.

In the next scene, I was driving out of the parking garage listening to the static of the radio get clearer and clearer as I reached ground level. Then, as I pulled out of the garage and into the light, the radio station picked up the signal and I heard that familiar song again. Take me into the beautiful. And this time, Cayden was there to greet Summer into heaven.

I woke up feeling very disturbed. Anxious. Spooked. It was one of those dreams that was a little too real. Like when you dream that your husband was mean to you and you wake up hurt. And you stay mad at him even though you know it was just a dream. But it was just so real that the feelings linger. That’s how this was. I woke up and laid there with my hands on my belly waiting for the kicks of reassurance and for my heart rate to steady. Once both happened, I had to mentally replace my panic with the truth.

It was a dream. Summer is alive and doing great. It was just a dream. Only 4 months to go and this will all settle down. It was just a dream.

And dreams aren’t real. But they do represent real things. Real feelings. Real ideas. Real fears. And I happen to be an excellent dream interpreter. Well, I think so anyways. And I think Paul would agree. (Although when I just asked him if he thought so he laughed and said ‘it’s always entertaining’. Hmm.) Either way, I also love what Sigmund Freud has to say about dream interpretation. In fact, that’s where my love affair with dreams began – high school English class.

My teacher was very unique and somewhat off center and I think that’s what made him so interesting. (He was also the only teacher in my entire educational career that ever sent me and a friend to the Deans office for talking during class. Maybe that’s why I think he’s off center.). Anyways, he was an interesting teacher so the topics he taught on were interesting and one of those topics was Freud and dream interpretation. I really became interested in why we dream what we dream. Of course much of it has to do with what’s going on in our lives, what inputs we’ve had lately (ie what we have seen, read or talked about), and our subconscious.

Whether or not I actually know how to interpret a dream with any accuracy, this last dream was easy to decipher…

Recently, my sister in law gave me the book Heaven Is for Real. It’s about a boy who died in surgery, went to Heaven and then lived to tell about it. He was only 4 and much of the stuff he began to describe in the months after his surgery made it clear that he couldn’t have made it up. (If you’re going to read the book, you can skip to the next paragraph so that I don’t ruin a part for you). One of those things was meeting a sister he never knew he had. Here's an excerpt...

One day Colton said, “Mommy, I have 2 sisters. You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t you?”

“Who told you I had a baby die in my tummy?” Sonja said, her tone serious.

“She did, Mommy. She said she died in your tummy.”

Sonja slid off the couch and knelt in front of Colton. I knew what my wife must be feeling. Losing that baby was the most painful event of her life. We explained it to Cassie, she was older. But we hadn’t told Colton, judging the topic a bit beyond a 4 yr olds capacity to understand.

“What was her name?”

“She doesn’t have a name. You guys didn’t name her.”

How did he know that?

“You’re right Colton,” Sonja said. “We didn’t even know she was a she.”

Then Colton said something that still rings in my ears:
“Yeah, she just can’t wait for you and daddy to get to heaven.”

When Colton left the room, the tears spilled over. We had wanted to believe that our unborn child had gone to heaven. Though the Bible is largely silent on this point, we had accepted it in faith. But now we had an eyewitness; a daughter we never met was eagerly waiting for us in eternity.” (Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo)

Wow. That’s amazing. Makes you think about so many things – miscarriage, abortions, heaven. It’s obviously why I dreamed about Summer going to heaven and meeting her sister.

Sometimes the phrases we use about death and loss are clichés. But most of them are still true. We just don’t like to hear them because they don’t really make us feel better. He’s in a better place. She’s shining down on you. He’s your guardian angel (ok, that one might not be true, I’m not sure it says anywhere that WE turn into angels when we die). But one thing that we should not consider a cliché is the idea, or the reality rather, of Heaven.

Heaven is not a romanticized place that we tell kids that their pet hamster went to. Saying that the baby you lost is up in heaven is not just a sweet idea to make you feel better. It’s the truth. It is very much a reality. Like the title of the book says, Heaven is for Real.

Heaven is very real.

And I can honestly say that Cayden is in heaven with Ethan. And Tiffany. And Virginia. And Abigail. And your 11 embryos. And all the other babies that you’ve all told me about that were never named.

And they are there together with Jesus. And even as our arms long to hold them, and we feel as though we have been robbed of our babies, we know deep down that they are in arms even more loving than our own.

They have been taken from us, yes.

But, they have been taken into the beautiful.