Stone for Flesh

I wanted a baby daughter and I got a stone instead.

I love her marker, in a bittersweet sort of way.  It is is the stone we chose.  With the cross, and the lamb and the verse.  It has her name.  Our baby Kate.

Yet it it also makes me think of those vacation T-shirts.  “My parents went to Maui and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt”

This will likely be a hard week.  Monday our daughter’s headstone was put in place.  Thursday was supposed to be her birthday.  She never got a birthday.  She had left this world before her tiny body was born.  When we got to hold her, inside a tiny bag wrapped in a pink blanket, she was already gone.  Gone from our lives but not our hearts.  Leaving only dreams that existed like their own disembodied spirits cursed to roam the corners of our minds haunting us with what might have been.  Reminding us of what we’re missing.

We’re missing Kate.

The room we had been preparing for her sits empty.  It is a sort of empty library.  The crib has been disassembled and hidden from site.  I have finished the painting, but instead of the pink and gray that we had chosen the walls are more cape cod and decidedly less little girl.  This is hard.

It is hard but not impossible.  We continue to cling the mercy of our Savior and the verse that is etched into the rock sitting above Kate’s resting place.  Let the little children come unto me.  And do not forbid them for such is the kingdom of heaven.

Our hope and strength is from God who also said He would take from His people their heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh.  Someday, in eternity, we will leave beside this stone and rush to embrace our daughter for the first time.

At least that’s how I imagine it. 

For now, we continue to relearn what we have forgotten.  How to live normally, how to heal, how to move on while still honoring the past—without forgetting our daughter. 

And in the meantime, we have a stone.  A memorial to honor Kate with her name.

Like the ancient Israelites set up stones of remembrance, as Jacob made a pillar for his wife Rachel, we too have had Kate’s name commemorated in rock. We seek to honor her, so we write, as if to brag about her—like any parent who loves to overshare about their child.

It is because we love her that we miss her.  It is because we miss her that this week is hard.  It is hard but not impossible, and this is because our God gives us hope. 

And though we never imagined the need or a stone such as this, we are grateful for the opportunity to give her this small garden bed and granite nameplate.  A place where her tiny body will wait until the glorious resurrection while her spirit has already sped off into His glorious grace. 

I started to write thinking more of how happy I was that my daughter’s gravestone had arrived. That she had received a stone of recognition proclaiming that she had lived, and that she was, and is, loved.  I hadn’t meant to meander into musings of sorrow and grace. 

But grief is weird.

God is good.

And we love our daughter.