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“Would you like to hold her?”
On a cold winter morning more than 30 years ago, a young mother gently placed the body of her stillborn daughter, carefully wrapped in blankets, into my arms.
She had come into the world that morning. And she had left our world that same morning.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that the death of a single infant calls into question everything we believe about God. In ways that are difficult to describe, I’ve never really been the same person since that morning in the hospital when I held that little girl.
Numerous preachers have called attention to the information that is typically chiseled on a gravestone.
Prominence is given to the date of birth, as well as the date of death.
In between those two dates is a punctuation mark – a dash that represents the entirety of that person’s life.
The dash contains all the stories we tell about somebody’s existence on earth. All their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Their travels. Their education. Their most memorable Christmas. Their worst decision. Their goofiest pet. Their favorite childhood toy. Their hardest final exam. Their wedding day. Their most challenging illness. Their best friends. Their spiritual crossroads. Their most awesome memory.
Those are the categories, the common indicators of personality and character, by which we tend to talk about our own lives and remember the lives of others.
They are the benchmarks by which we say that someone has been alive – or, as the case may be, that somebody “really lived.”
But a child who never takes a breath in this world has a different kind of tombstone.
There is no dash.
If there are no stories to tell, how can we affirm the wholeness and the real life of such little ones?
Every child has one-of-a-kind fingerprints and DNA that will never be repeated. That’s enough to establish uniqueness. But what we long to know is something far more important: significance. How can we affirm the meaning of a stillborn life?
There is a deep assurance in Scripture that meaning is connected to our relationship with God. And God intimately knows every one of us.
The psalmist writes, concerning God, “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made… My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place… How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” (Psalm 139)
Followers of Jesus have long declared that there is a special grace that surrounds the lives of little ones who go to be with God – even if there is no “dash” in their lives.
When King David loses his newborn son in 2 Samuel 12:23 he sighs, “I know he can’t come and be with me. But I will go and be with him.”
That reflects the hope that our stories in this world are not, in the end, the whole story. There is a reunion awaiting us that will one day make all our stories complete.
Several years ago, a young father whose son was lost in utero a few weeks before birth tried to put into words his thoughts and feelings:
“When we lost you, my child, we felt an anguish unfelt before. Our minds told us that this happens, that Nature has its way, that God has his own plans for us, for you. But our hearts…our hearts told us that we would miss you, that we would miss those physical moments so precious to our tenuous, fragile lives. We would grieve your passing as passionately and as thoroughly as one another’s, for you were part of us, part of our love.
“Oh, my child, we miss you already, we miss you completely, for we loved you as much as two humans can love another, as completely as our Lord loved us to give up his own Child…
“As we gazed upon you through the miracle of ultrasound, lying in your mother’s womb, we could see your little arms enfolded in a cross. We know beyond doubt that you are God’s child now.
“And while we cannot know, in our simple human minds, what heaven is truly like, we dream one day, when our time has come, to meet you at the gates of heaven and to know you, finally, as the child we longed to know here on earth.”
Only a God big enough and gracious enough could ever make such a thing possible.
The wonderful news is that that is the God who is really there.