May 7, 2017.
I awake around 1:00 AM to a crying child. I recognize the little voice, and roll over to see if my wife, Kristen, will be the one to get up and tend to our little Chloe.
She is sleeping deeply, snoring a little.
"Okay, I'll go."
In the little bed in the little bedroom is the little one. I pick her up, her eyes still closed. I try as best I can to comfort her. I am a new father, not quite two years into the assignment. I still have much to learn.
Chloe does not seem to respond to my sluggish swaying and soft words. This night is the first in the last several months that I have not been on call for work. For once I am free to sleep! I want to sleep!
Still Chloe cries. I think maybe she'll calm if she's with her momma. I bring her into the room and lay her in the middle. Still, she sobs. Regrettably, my blood begins to boil.
The frustration grows until I am completely awake, my precious night of rest surely ruined.
I squeeze Chloe's little body and tell her to be quiet, with no hint of compliance. She's actively resisting a rest, if you will.
I decide to lay still, pretending to be asleep instead of again outwardly forcing my anger towards Chloe, who is uncharacteristically noisy this night. Her younger sister, Margaret, stirs a little in her bassinet at the foot of the big bed.
During breaks between blasts to my ears, I notice that Kristen is still sleeping as peacefully as ever, blissfully unaware of the misery I am enduring unassisted.
My mind races. "Goodness, she's snoring so loudly." "Why won't Chloe just go to sleep?" "How am I supposed to be fully present at church tomorrow morning?"
A few minutes pass. I look over at Kristen. Her snores are getting longer, slower, and farther apart. Chloe begins to quiet. I'm as awake as if it were noon.
Kristen's breathing begins to sound like what I learned about in school—agonal gasps and rattles, in an animalistic desperation to feed a dying brain. "That can't be right, she's just snoring."
"Wow, those breaths are getting so far apart," I think. The next gap seems to last forever, then keeps going. I poke her in the shoulder. No movement. I rush around to the other side, away from Chloe, who has finally returned to sleep. Flicking on the light, I grab her hand and squeeze her blue-gray fingernail. It turns white and stays.
"Kristen!" I yell in her ear. I slap her cheek. I open her eye and see a fixed, lifeless pupil. My heart sinks into my stomach. Something is very wrong!
I'd seen lots of dead bodies as an undertaker. For me, there is a clear absence of presence, which caught me off guard the first time I experienced it. A body on the table or in the casket is in the shape of a person, but there is no person there. I can feel no sense of presence, as I do when a living person is nearby.
It was that same feeling! I was looking at a dead body. My surprise led to a confused moment of yearning, followed smoothly by only calm, tranquil peace. This sense of peace was more surprising to me than the disturbing shock of looking upon a dead body in the room, which held few mysteries for me since finishing funeral school and embarking on my career.
How could I be feeling such peace? Maybe my decision to study funeral directing led to a hurried conclusion in my search for meaning. Death was no mystery. I had been trained to mechanize it into a pretty simple process, to effectively assist those paralyzed by grief. Not easy, but simple. Someone dies. You call the undertaker, pick the casket, have a funeral, eat lunch at the church, take the flowers home, grieve, move on. Was this all there was to it? Had the purpose of my education only been preparing for this moment?
No, it was more than that. I knew Kristen was ready to move on to her next adventure. I recognized that all would be well for her. Sure, it would be difficult for me. I had only known her a few years. I looked ahead to the prospect of meeting someone else and marrying again. I didn't want to do that. I had really hated dating.
I was so glad to have found Kristen online, while living far away, where all we could do dating wise was to talk over video calls. We didn't have opportunities to waste our time in restaurants or movie theaters doing the "fun" of dating. We got to skip all that, and go right to marriage. This was because of our remarkably aligned priorities on the big issues of creating a family. We talked openly from the beginning about the central role of Jesus Christ in our lives, and what it means to make covenants with God and with a spouse. Kristen's exemplary discipleship and devotion to keeping her covenants left no question in my mind regarding her destiny.
I was at peace.
The peace that passes understanding. The peace Jesus promises, "Not as the world giveth."
In that moment, I recognized the transcendent power of that kind of peace, my will being turned over to God by my ready acceptance of the circumstances as they were so vividly before me. I felt a solemn, holy nudge, calmly and politely inserting itself into my thoughts.
"Your feelings are correct. All will be well. Thank you for trusting Me."
"Now, what do you want?"
"What do I want? Well, what do I have to lose by telling? I've lost my wife. She's died with no outward health problems. She'll go to a medical examiner. They will autopsy her body. I don't want that. I want her to look nice in the casket for her girls to say goodbye. I don't want my girls to see her dead at all. I don't want to raise these girls by myself. I don't trust myself to raise them without Kristen. I want to enjoy a long life with Kristen here with me. I don't want her to go yet."
As I progressed from the mechanical considerations on toward my actual underlying compelling interests, I began to feel a rush of motivating power, which rapidly became something like a pure river of holy rage, stirring the deepest dregs of all I never knew I had within me for action. The sequence of events that followed seemed to be driven by this raw river of clear, focused energy. I was given what to do, and quickly obeyed.
I swept Chloe up out of the bed and returned her to hers. I gently but firmly picked up little Maggie, only four months old, by the rim of her bassinet, and moved the whole assembly into the bedroom next to her sister. I looked right at them both and firmly said, "Sleep."
I then went to the telephone. We still had a landline. I dialed 911 and told the dispatcher the address of our tiny, rented duplex. "My wife is unresponsive. She has no cap refill, her eyes are fixed, her lips are blue."
I was told to begin chest compressions and continue until relieved by arriving responders. I was surprised to hear no mention of breaths. My CPR training in high school had included breathing mouth to mouth. The dispatcher insisted I stay on the line. I agreed to do whatever they told me. I returned to the bedroom. I quickly realized I was not much good for Kristen while holding the handset to my ear with one hand. We had no speaker phone function on our budget model.
I sat the phone aside, grabbed Kristen by both ankles, and pulled her to the floor. I remember clearly wincing as she fell hard off the bed. "I'm so sorry!"
I picked up the phone again and began chest compressions with the dispatcher counting out the pace I should follow, one handed. I saw Kristen's upper chest and neck begin to flush pink. This gave me a great feeling of accomplishment. Confident I could continue this on my own, I dropped the phone and carried on with both arms and all my weight. She was turning red. Blood was flowing!
Only a few minutes later, I heard banging on the door. I welcomed in the small entourage, looking to me like soldiers, coming to continue the fight I had begun alone. I left the room to allow these angelic emissaries to ably administer further aid.
I was in a stupor as I waited for what seemed like too long. Doubts swept in, firmly replacing any remnant of the sublime peacefulness that had surrounded me. Fear began to mount. I had lost the closeness I felt to God during our earlier exchange.
I was surprised to see Kristen pushed out on the stretcher with an oxygen mask, with the same kind of agonal breaths I witnessed before she stopped breathing completely. "Not good," I thought.
I called a trusted friend and explained that Kristen had been taken to the hospital in a serious condition. I asked if she could come to my home and be with my girls. She later told me she had unusually fallen asleep on the couch with her day clothes and shoes on, all ready to go when I called.
I called my brother-in-law and asked him to drive me from his house to the hospital, over an hour away. I stepped out the back door and paused on my way to the car. It was a beautiful, clear night, with shining stars glowing. I looked up into those heavens and asked a question I had long before learned in place of demanding, "Why?"
"What am I to learn from THIS?"
As I drove myself to my sister's home, I poured out my most earnest prayer to date. Aloud, through a cold windshield, I sought to reconnect with that great One who had seen me through so many prior moments of lacking. I gave Him all my sins, pleading for forgiveness and strength to endure the coming days.
I called Kristen's parents from the hospital and told them the story in raw, cold, technical detail. Her father, a nurse with intensive cardiothoracic experience and training, would want to know all I knew.
The next several days in the waiting room of the intensive care unit proved to be the most disturbing experience I've had. Honestly, I would have preferred the certainty of Kristen dying to the uncertainty of waiting to see how much brain damage had been done. As I waited, a complete spectrum of possibility stretched before me. The two ends were certainly manageable, one admittedly preferred over the other, but the enormous middle presented the real problems. On one end, brain death and a funeral. At the other end, full, complete recovery. Between them lay Hell, in all its cruel taunting.
Would her personality change into someone I didn't choose to marry? Would her memory be gone, and would she relearn the world with a less kind outlook? Would she know me? Love me? Would she be mentally disabled? Was she going to be like a little child? Would I have to raise three children alone, one of whom would never grow up? Would she be physically incapacitated, and require my constant care for basic living? The horror of these unknowns and their terrible implications stirred me up like a screaming cauldron of foul soup: rotten, scorched, seething, overcooked mire.
Talk of "posturing," reflexive, non-purposeful movements caused by a defective brain did not improve my feelings, though it did indicate somewhat Kristen's place along that hellish spectrum I was mentally wandering.
Kristen's father came and gave her a blessing in the name of the Lord, by His priesthood authority, and in the power of righteousness and fatherly concern. This was done after anointing with holy olive oil by laying his hands on her head. He commanded the broken neural connections and all associated organs and tissues to be restored, with exactness.
She awoke later, somewhat confused, and using a funny word now and then. My joy was cautious as I marveled at the miracle of complete recovery granted. I looked at her and felt some tiny portion of what it may be like to behold a resurrected being in the flesh.
Looking at her now, you would not know anything happened. What a beautiful blessing!
As I write this now, I have the advantage of years of time spent processing these events, and my feelings and thoughts. In the moment of extremity, there is a strange warping of time that allows a whole string of thoughts to pass through the mind in almost an instant, but to explain them later may take hours, as this writing has done. The actual earth time elapsed between the first pinch of her fingernail to calling 911 was probably less than thirty seconds. In that moment, swept up into an otherworldly time reckoning, I was given a great gift.
In the scriptures, there are a few accounts of God, usually Jehovah, asking an earthly mortal what they want, and allowing them to have it. I marvel that I am among these whom the Lord has trusted with such a privilege. I did not see His actual personage then as others have, but He has drawn close to me.
It took me more than two years to sleep through a night without waking several times to verify Kristen was breathing. This has been a very stressful six years or so. It may be easy to ask why I was not immediately and permanently ecstatic at such a miraculous healing. The depth of the fear and sorrow I felt is still yet to be fully matched by an equal compensatory relief, but the weakness of being tossed to and fro is being turned by God into a strength, because I know in Whom I have trusted through those storms. I live in constant awe, in a solemn kind of happiness, knowing with surety that any future challenges I face will be overcome through the matchless power of God and His guiding comfort.
I was once given a blessing by a church leader in which I was told I would see healings as miraculous as any in the scriptures. I consider Kristen's restoration to life and soundness of mind to be among the fulfillments of this prophetic statement.
I believe in the laying on of hands for the healing of the sick. The physical forcefulness of CPR, and the calm gentleness of a spiritual administration were both needed in this experience.
As we'll explore in Part Two, this first episode in the Year of the Heart has served to prepare me for events and experiences that would have shaken me, if not for the wise preparation God gave me through these difficulties with Kristen.
Some say that difficult or extraordinary experiences build character. I disagree. Extraordinary experiences do not build character. They reveal the character we've built through ordinary experiences. Quiet, dignified right living may not be glamorous or outwardly interesting. But it is in these simple moments that we build the character needed to successfully navigate the extreme, the unusual, the test.
What kinds of ordinary experiences do we need to have? Pray to God, alone and with your family. Read the holy scriptures. Serve people in need. These and other kinds of efforts will build you into the tough, resilient warrior the future demands. You'll be ready when you're called up for action.
All glory and honor go to almighty God for causing His work to prosper here on earth. May we choose to seek Him in all our doings.
