Lucas

Tomorrow is June 30. A day in 2000 that changed my life.

Many who work in a hospital, as a paramedic, a firefighter, a police officer...many of these people can tell you about that one person, that one patient that will affect them forever. Death is never easy, illness and disease are never easy, but after a while you develop coping mechanisms. Well if you are lucky anyway. I have had opportunity to do that since that day, but Lucas is my one. Lucas is my angel. He led me to God.

Lucas was a beautiful, happy little boy. Six months old. The joy of his family. Lucas died in his sleep from SIDS. He was brought into the ER just before my shift started. I heard things that day that will never leave me. There are sounds a mother makes when she loses a child that pierce your soul. One by one I watched family members arrive and simply fall apart upon learning of his death. The one word I heard over and over again was 'unbelievable'.

It was. Truly. These are the nightmares that keep us awake when we are pregnant. These are the fears that keep us running in the night to check on our babies one more time because they slept 3 minutes longer than they normally do. These are the things we do everything to prevent. But deep down, these are things we never really think will actually happen to us. Yet there it was, happening to them. And real to me. Talk about a jolt of reality. I had my own 10 month old son at home. I could not help but imagine it was him, me, us in there. My deepest fears were now tangible. And I got angry.

Having never really declared my love for God, or accepted Him into my heart, it was not hard for me to be angry with Him. What kind of God would do this to a family, an innocent beautiful little boy? However, I did begin questioning things I had never questioned before. Looking back, I now see this was the beginning for me.

About a year later, a co-worker and friend of mine lost her son Max. He and another young boy drowned, because of someone else's negligence. Again, I watched helplessly as his family could not believe what had happened. I watched his mother, a woman of faith, become angry at God. Always, always asking "why". If only I could make sense of "WHY" this happened. For what purpose? For what reason? What good will come of this?

I had always known that if I lost a child, I would surely crawl under a rock and die. I can not imagine the going on one must do after such a loss. Yet over time I watched these women pick their broken hearts and live their lives. They went on to find joy and peace in their lives, despite their heartache. Again I came back to that word- unbelievable. How could they survive? Where did they get the strength?

It was then that I started to understand faith. Faith, for me, had always been what I could see and prove. It was then I started to learn that there can be no faith without doubt. You get up, you go on, and you believe, even when you feel you can't. You have faith. The promise was never that we would be spared from pain, the promise is that we will be carried through it. The promise was never that bad things would not happen to us, the promise is that it will always lead us to where we are meant to be.

Lucas's death is not about me, nor is Max's. I will not dare begin to claim these were my losses. That pain is not mine to have. But Lucas gave me a gift. His life, and his death had purpose and meaning. To all who knew and loved him, and to a stranger he never met trying to find her way to Grace.

I was able to share all of this with Lucas's mother sometime later, and it was a gift to her as well. Everything has a purpose. Everything happens for a reason. Even the unimaginable, the unthinkable and the unbelievable. I have faith, because of Lucas.