Jan 13, 2014
One week ago today, I was wakened by the sound of my
phone ringing. Someone calling me before my day starts is rarely a good sign,
so my heart was pounding before I even said “hello.”
It was bad news. My daughter was on the other end of
the line. “Mom?” I could hear the tears in her voice. “David died.” The pain
that flooded my heart caused a cry of distress. “Oh, God. No! Not our David.” He died six hours after riding his snowmobile in a blinding snow storm. He loved snowmobiling.
David was special to me. He was the son of my
husband’s brother. He was their third child and second son. I will never forget
the first time I held him in my arms. He was a chubby little guy and absolutely
perfect in every way.
I was six months pregnant when I cuddled him that
day, and I remember praying that the child I was carrying would be a little boy
just like the one I held in my arms. My husband and I already had two little
girls and we wanted a little boy so much.
Because it was 1978 and there were no ultrasounds
yet, expectant parents had to wait until the birth of their child to find out
the sex of their newborns. Everyday after that, I prayed for a son.
On the tenth of April, exactly three months after David’s
birth on January tenth, God answered my prayers and I became the mother of a
son. My joy was complete.
Over the next five year, those two little boys
became friends, playing together at church and at family get-togethers. Then
during the summer they were five, my son died.
After I learned to deal with my grief, I began to
watch David with special interest. When he went to school, I knew if my son was
here, he would go too. When David lost his first tooth, I thought about what it
would have been like for my son to lose his first one too. Over the years,
every milestone that David hit, became the milestone my son would have
experienced too. And as the years passed, David became more precious to me. Not
only was he my nephew, he became an extension of my own son and I loved
watching him grow up.
David never lost his chubbiness, and because of that
and his endearing personality, he became the family’s big teddy bear. He had a
shy grin and made all of us laugh. Because he went to the same church as me, I
had the privilege of being the youth director when he was a teenager. He became
the group prankster and you never knew what he was going to do next. One
Christmas, he brought a special gift for our white elephant gift exchange. It
was a dead opossum he picked up off the road and froze until he could give it the
girl in the group who would squeal the loudest.
When my phone rang last Monday I began to grieve
over the loss of David, my nephew, and the cousin who was suppose to grow old
with my own son. I knew our family would never be the same without him. And my
heart hurt for his mother. The pain of losing a child is intense and it changes
a woman forever. The only comfort I can give her is that our sons, the cousins,
are once again together in a place more wonderful than we can imagine.
David was buried on his thirty-sixth birthday in a
place not far from where my son was laid to rest. They are together again, and
two mothers wait for the day when they can join their boys.
The Young Cousins, Christmas 1982
David is the third one up in the middle.
His buddy, Jason, is right in front of him, and the cousin that became his
best friend is on the left in the white shirt.
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