Looking ahead to the sunrise

Bryan here again. It's been almost a week since I placed the casket containing David's body into the ground. Over the past week, our reality has alternated between intense grief and a incredulous feeling of "did this really just happen to us?" At times, it seems too horrific to have actually happened. Through the prayers and support of our dear friends and family, we have felt God holding us up in His strength. We marvel at the fact that we are going to survive this...though a large part of us effectively died with our son.

For those of you going through a similar situation, one ray of light in all this is that the weight of David's impending death is gone. Over the week or so before his death, it was almost crushing us. A large part of the weight was due to the foreknowledge that God was going to take him in January. I recall back in November God telling both Heather and I separately that his passing would occur in January. While our conscious minds forgot this for a time, I guess that our subconscious minds did not. Statistics suggested that his passing would most likely occur around Christmas, sometime between weeks 24 and 28. He made it into week 29 before passing.

For me, the most difficult days in this ordeal (so far) were the days when we first found out that something was wrong with David, the day when we found out that it was definitely Trisomy-13, the day when we had to go to the cemetery to pre-plan the funeral, and the day of the funeral.  The day of his birth was pretty rough too, but it really helped to have family coming in and to have the prayers of hundreds of people lifting us up.  I would like to specially thank Heather's doctor and nurses at Community Medical Center. All of them did an outstanding job in the most difficult of circumstances. 

Benefits of this trial so far have been a deepened bond within our family, a realignment of our perspective (as it turns out, many things in life really aren't all that important), and a stronger desire to make sure that our lives make a difference in the eternal scheme of things.