Cathi asked me to help bury her child.
Her question occurred several years after we met. I now wonder if Cathi’s request, accompanied by her intense, unwavering gaze, had been within her heart when she first worshipped at the rural church I then served.
Her stillborn child had been carried to near the due date. After the birth, Cathi and her husband Jake shoveled a hole in the forest beyond their cabin and gently placed their child into the earth. They had no ritual; no prayers were shared; no family gathered to join them. According to Cathi, they trudged back to the cabin, returned to their daily chores and fractured future, and rarely mentioned what had happened. Their second child Naomi was born a year later.
Before Naomi started kindergarten, Cathi and Jake decided they should leave the isolated cabin they’d built in the deep woods. They wanted their daughter to attend school and have friends. The family settled into the town where I ministered at a church a handful of miles from the highest point on California’s Highway 101. They were among many individuals and couples—called “back-to-landers”—that had escaped cities and suburbs to eke out a life with their dreams, hands, and gumption. Some grew marijuana or made crafts to sell at county fairs or engaged in a thousand other legal and illegal jobs cobbled together to get by and to stay off the grid.
But having kids changed priorities.
Like most parents, Jake and Cathi wanted the best for Naomi.
But there was the other child from the past. The baby they had named Eve died before birth and yet lived on in their unsettled memories. Cathi did not think of herself as the mother of one child, but of two. And so, she came to me, maybe trusting me because I’d been her pastor for long enough. Along with her confidence in me, I suspect she was unable to contain or be content with the soul-wrenching secret that only Jake knew. She asked if I could say a few words about Eve. Cathi didn’t need me to help her physically bury the stillborn Eve, but her mother’s longing knew something more should happen.
We planned a service. It would be at their rental home in town, and only included Cathi, Jake, and Naomi. I don’t recall what I said, but I can vividly picture the relief expressed by those two parents. They wanted to honor the thriving memory of their first child. They wanted their second child to know their family’s full history. What we told Naomi was kept simple. A child can only understand so much, but Naomi knew she’d once had a sister. What Jake and Cathi experienced was also simple, or perhaps not so simple.
They didn’t want to forget.
They didn’t want to keep a secret.
They for sure wanted to openly cry and inwardly tend to the sacred site in their hearts where Eve would always—always—live.
Cathi and Jake’s family taught me an essential truth. It was a lesson I continued to learn in my hospice work. We all carry burdens. We all bury sharp-edged secrets in our hearts that may only be smoothed out when we express them and risk a time to honestly and lovingly grieve.
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Photo by Steven Kamenar on Unsplash
My book, A Companion for the Hospice Journey is available at Amazon.
Beautiful
Oh my, that was so very touching.