“One day we will understand why this is the best thing that could have happened to us.”
Those were the first words that came from my mouth. Where did they come from?
Unscripted.
Unexpected.
Unrehearsed.
I looked into the eyes of my two daughters who, with me, had just helplessly watched on as their mother and my wife, ceased breathing with one laboured, exhaling sigh.
In that moment, Marilyn’s body had surrendered to death, and her spirit surrendered to life…. into the safe arms of Jesus, and away from ours.
Fast–forward approximately ten years.
Belinda, one of the two daughters who, a decade previously, had stood at her mother’s bedside, now lay in the intensive care section in Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred hospital. Four years earlier, this had been the very place where she had received the gift of a liver transplant.
A grieving family somewhere in Australia had given permission for that organ to be taken from the dying body of their loved one and placed into Belinda’s dying body to give it life.
Now a rare and aggressive cancer was sweeping through her body like a firestorm. Its rapid advance had been made possible by an immune system, purposefully lowered to prevent her body from rejecting the new liver.
Rohan had been my son–in–law for an agonisingly brief fifteen months. Together, we watched numbly as the life support machines were turned off one by one. At 32 years of age, Belinda took the same safe passage into eternity her mother had taken ten years earlier.
How does one go through experiences like this and rise again to a new normal, richer and stronger for the experience?
Read on…