A Long Goodbye
Saying “goodbye” is never easy. Many people are acquainted with the grief and heartache of broken relationships or death. These types of goodbyes bear a heavy and solemn weight.
Saying goodbye to our son, Quinlan Godfrey, is a heartache that I never thought I would have to feel. And it is a heartache that will always be with me. When you lose a grandparent or relative that has lived a long life, it is still not easy, but there seems to be a certain sense of justice in it when the person lived a long and full life. Death is never really just, but I guess it seems fitting that someone would die when they get old, and not when they are young. No parent should ever have to bury their own child.
When you lose an unborn son before he even had a chance to experience life outside the womb, it seems that this kind of death is a grave injustice. For the longest time (and there are still hints of it for me) my wife and I felt that this is all very unfair. It’s not fair that our family didn’t get to live life with Quinlan. Instead it feels like we live in the shadow of his death.
The true sting of the pain for me bites deeper on days like today. Today we celebrated what would be Quinlan’s first birthday. What should of seen him trying to wobble around, open presents, and throw cake at the wall, found us at a little rustic cemetery on the outskirts of our city sending a balloon up to Heaven to “greet” our son.
The pain of this season for me has been realizing that grieving our son is not going to be a temporary thing. This is not a “hard season” that we will be going through. This too “shall not pass”. We will always hurt. As our pastor spoke at his funeral: “this is a wound that will never heal.”
Seeing my kids watch with glee as a mylar balloon shaped like a present was slowly whisked into the heavens is very much like what the rest of our lives are going to be like. A sudden release. A punch of momentum. Followed by a long, slow fade into gray.
Saying goodbye to Quinlan is like saying goodbye to that little balloon. His death was sudden. A swell of activity followed. Labor induction. Stillbirth. Leaving his decaying body on a hospital bed. Coming home empty. Staple it together enough to get through the funeral. Then collapse into gray. The two words I would use to describe this past year are: gray and empty. That is what my soul has felt like. Similar to the kind of Hell that C.S. Lewis chillingly paints in The Great Divorce.
In the wake of all this, I have found hope. The birth of our son on January 25, 2016, has brought joy and light into our world again. That is why we named him Lumin. For the light that he is and will be, by God’s grace. On my way to stealing some time with the kids shortly after his birth, I went to Quinlan’s grave to find it unexpectedly bathed in light.
God showed me something in that moment. The light of our newborn son was reflecting on Quinlan’s grave. Even in death there is hope. He is alive with Jesus at this very moment. God was able to using something joyous to bring some light into the gray and show me that somehow everything is going to work out all right.
Fast forward to now. It doesn’t feel like everything will be all right. It doesn’t feel good being without Quinlan. Even holding Lumin, it doesn’t make up for the loss we experienced. We have 4 kids. It feels like 1 is missing. It will always feel like this. As we watch our kids grow up, Quinlan won’t. He will always be the baby whose body we held. The baby that we lost. The baby whose life was never realized.
I know that we will get to experience a fullness of life with Him in God’s Kingdom that will someone make right every wrong in his death. I know that. That doesn’t trouble me. What troubles me is the answer to a question my children asked me today. We were talking about Quinlan and I asked the children why they loved him. They gave their answers and then my wife told them to ask me why I loved Quinlan. When I thought of the answer I burst into tears. I love Quinlan because is my son. I just love him. Period. And I love having my children with me. Quinlan isn’t with me and that devastates me. And there is nothing I can do to change it.
Every day is another day closer to Quinlan. But they don’t feel closer. They mostly feel gray and chilly. Many feel like that slow fade of the balloon. A wound that never heals. A long goodbye.
