Why loss was for us, a Shining Gift of God

I try not to write on the subject of our Nathanael Marcus because I always wonder if people think, “Haven’t you gotten over him yet?”  Isn’t it strange what my mind would say?  Well, you never truly do get over it, do you?  Losing loved ones changes us.

I wouldn’t be writing now but for the fact that one of my managers has read our memoir of Nathanael’s life, Shining Gift of God, and he was so moved he wrote a poem.  He was on retreat, writing at dusk:

As slowly ebbs the light, 
My soul is graced with the words of a heart-scribe.

He has poured out on pages the sorrows and joys of the little lost life of Nathanael Marcus.

And yet this life is not lost – it has passed through into eternity, to sit with Jesus – 
for us an age, but for him and for God a mere momentary blink before reunion.

What sorrow and what happiness, flowing mingled down.   
A grief observed.
179 hours to compress life-long memories, birthed through
the cool embrace of the precious child.

A tree planted, a heaven day created, 
A legacy provided, an inheritance taken early,
A hope and expectation of eternity in joy.
Together.   

It is well, it is well with their souls.
— Bruce Burgess

What strikes me about the poem is its summative quality — a smooth 124-word composition of a 308-page book.  There are so many significant fragments from the period that Bruce has picked up on, even to remind us!  The joys and the sorrows.  A “mere momentary blink before reunion,” which gives us enormous comfort, for we will go to him and to the others we’ve lost in an instant from eternity’s viewpoint.  179 hours was the exact time Nathanael had between being stillborn and his funeral.  Even the words, “cool embrace,” are significant, because his body had to be kept cold.  We planted his ashes and we celebrated his heaven day on the first anniversary of his stillbirth.  That Bruce picked up on the legacy Nathanael gave is astonishing, juxtaposing it with the paradoxical inheritance taken early.  “It is well...” was our song of the time!

If you meditate on this poem, you’ll get a good glimpse into the heart of Shining Gift of God — what we learned on our journey in losing our infant son.  Notwithstanding the other issues that plagued that time, some that are reprehensibly unmentionable, the true silent grief, God was right there with us every step of the way.

Now if you read the above paragraph and read between the lines you can see two things: in all conflict and grief it’s Satan that tries to confuse, overwhelm, divide and conquer, but it’s God who can give us peace especially because of our loss and grief.  There were both threads going on for us at the time — absolute opposite extremes.

We drew close to God, we had thousands praying, we felt carried constantly to the throne room of God, and yet we felt constantly pressed by an enemy trying to break us.

But nevertheless, we were carried to the extent that we were able to face our grief each day.  We were able to function and do God’s work right throughout, every single day, and still groan and lament throughout.  My wife was the first one to say we needed to be kept busy.  We were able to face uncertainty each day for four months.  We were able to face our deceased child.  So many times, we thought to ourselves, “We don’t have what it takes, help me, God.”  Our Lord never failed us.

The moment we waited in the preparation room to go in for the emergency C-section — minutes before we would meet our stillborn son — we wondered if we had the strength to have our hearts shattered in encountering his limp body and lifeless face.

At every point was God, there, present, in the midst with us.

Loss is a gift, because we can meet God there.  Pain takes us to a place where the divine meets the mortal.  Something mystical occurs.  But we may also encounter God’s enemy there, also, trying to steal, kill and destroy.  The enemy would have us dismembered by grief otherwise, paralysed, unable to recover.

Evermore is it important to cling to faith and to reach up for God in the trial of loss.

Nathanael Marcus literally means ‘gift of God’ ‘shining’.  For us, that terrible season was also one filled with God’s mystical presence — as if Nathanael Marcus was himself the shining gift of God to remind us.

Image: Sarah clinging to Nathanael on our last occasion to see him before his funeral.