Stilts of Grace: My Narrative - Chapters 2 & 3

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Chapter 2: the phone call

The phone rang, reaching my ears only because I was primed to hear the automated call announcing school's cancellation due to the blizzard we were anticipating. It felt so early, what time was it? 4am. Why was the district calling so early? I reached to answer the phone only so it would stop ringing but found an unfamiliar number instead of the name of the school district. 

"Hello?" I managed through a stupor of sleep. 

A sickening terror ran through me as I recognized Kevin's wordless voice, agony flooding the, "Uh.....Uh....Uh," he kept repeating. His words, when he found them, offered no comfort, and as I listened half my heart slipped behind a shielding wall of numbness. 

Kevin was saying, “Heidi…uh…she…the doctors say if you want to say ‘goodbye’ you should come now…”

“What?” I interrupted, frozen, mentally grasping for anything that might make this make sense. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I…I know it’s the middle of the night. It’s ok if you don’t want to come…”

“No! No, I will come! I just… What happened?!” I was so confused, plunged into this abyss of what sounded like horrible nonsense. 

“Her blood pressure dropped in the night. She lost consciousness. They say there’s nothing more they can do and that her heart will stop in the next hour or so. I’m sorry if I sound matter-of-fact, I have done my crying, so much crying.”

In my own state of disorientation, his lack of tears were the furthest thing from my mind. What he was saying about Heidi still didn’t make sense, but if it was true every moment on the phone was a moment wasted and I had to get to her. 

“I’m coming! I’m coming now. Where are you?”

He gave me the name of the hospital and a room number. 

Where was that? I’d never heard of it; it couldn’t be close. “Ok, I, um…I’ll…” my mind raced through what I needed to do and the impossibility of getting there in time.

"I’m on my way.” 

Chapter 3: the fire of unreality

I hit “end call” and stared blankly at the small blue post-it with the name of a hospital and a room number freshly scrawled on it. Utter loneliness encircled me and I brushed away a baffling urge to sink into a sleep of avoidance that whispered invitingly that this was all a misunderstanding and if I slept I  would awaken in the morning rescued from this hellish nightmare. 

The air around me felt charged but I was shielded from the grief of this shock and horror by the new and unfamiliar wall of numbness. I was inexplicably unable to experience the intense sorrow that I knew should be crippling me. Confusion and terror were my immediate companions, but grief felt remote, and that frightened and confused me further. When in the hours, days, and weeks to come I cried, I felt like my own observer.

Initially this did not feel like a grace, leaving me instead questioning whether I, who up until now could not even handle the idea of attending funerals of complete strangers without dissolving into a puddle of tears, had suddenly turned into a psychopath. But as I discovered, it was a protection and a profound grace that allowed me to bear the burden of the days to come. The numbness thawed slowly over the course of the following months, returning me to myself, plunging me into an ocean of past, present and future grief. But now in this moment this grace served me for the first time as unencumbered adrenal propelled me forward.

I needed Mark. “Why a business trip now?! Why 4am?! Why aren’t you here?!” the thought a panicked wave of helplessness rolling through me. I needed his consolation, wisdom, and grasp on reality. I tried calling him but knew his phone would be on silent as he slept. No answer. I tried again and again. I prayed for a miracle that he would wake and notice. Nothing.

“I can’t just drive across the twin cities in an unplowed blizzard and leave the kids alone at home!” my rational mind screamed, racing through whether there were any other options. My parents, normally close by, were an hour away in Rockford with the Keiser kids because...Heidi. I had to…what? I had to get to Heidi if what Kevin had said was true. It couldn’t be. But it was, and my only option was an objectively reckless one: I would leave my 7 children in the middle of the night to drive through a blizzard, buoyed only by the hope that God wouldn’t allow both Heidi and me to die on the same night. Surely he wouldn’t. If ever there were a good reason for abject stupidity or unbridled faith, depending on how you see it, it was this. I pleaded for protection for myself and my children, and set to the task of leaving.

What was next, then? A mental list wrote itself, each item a lead weight slowing me down. Would I never get out the door? I had to tell Iain, our oldest, a high school freshman, that I was leaving. “Oh gosh, I have to tell him,” the thought paralyzed me. 

“This isn’t really happening, it’s going to turn out fine, she’ll be fine, and none of the kids should have to know how horrible this moment is,” I pleaded, silently. But I had to tell Iain because I had to leave. Parents don’t just disappear into a blizzard at 4am. I had to let him know he was in charge and that required an explanation, one I didn’t believe myself. Even with adrenal coursing through me, the disorientation was crippling. My brain was working feverishly to find something familiar in this fire of unreality. “I have to feed the baby.” Yes, that was normal. It was unusual to wake her up, but if I could feed her and get her back to sleep, that felt blessedly normal. But first Iain. My heart pounded.

The small lamp in my bedroom illuminated the dark hall, offering light only as far as the children’s bedroom doors. I stepped silently towards the boys’ room, apprehensive, unbelieving, but fiercely propelled by…what? I was numb. Dread? Duty? The electric current running through me directed me forward, further into this nightmare. Suspended in disbelief, I quietly opened the boys’ door and walked through the darkness to the bunk where they were sleeping. Iain, nearly 15, slept silently on the top bunk tucked under his blue comforter. Joey, our miracle preemie turned goliath 2nd grader, slept below snoring softly, feet towards his pillow, head resting on his giant stuffed animal tiger, limbs askew. 

“Iain. Iain!” I whispered urgently, reaching up, gently shaking his sleeping body, trying to get his attention without waking Joey. 

“Hmm. What? Yeah?” he slurred back at me.

“Shhh. I need to talk to you right away, please come to my room.” I turned and went back down the hall.

He appeared moments later, squinting in the dim light of my bedroom, still half-asleep.

I began, sickened by the words coming out of my mouth, “Uncle Kevin called. Aunt Heidi is dying. I need to leave now to make it in time. I’m going to feed Felicity and then take off. I don’t know when I’ll be back. No one goes to school until I get back, ok?”

“Uh, sure,” he blearily replied. I was surprised and relieved at his tired acceptance and lack of questions. 

“Good. I love you. Go back to bed,” I finished, wondering if that was really all that was needed. It was too much and not enough, but I couldn’t offer more. I didn’t understand it myself, and frankly, there wasn’t time. Cell phone in hand, I headed to the end of the hall, this time to 10 month old Felicity in the nursery. 

The nursery project had been a Christmas Break family affair. Felicity had slept in our room since birth, an arrangement that had worked perfectly, until it didn’t. Our little extrovert, she began to enjoy socializing until all hours of the night and by Christmas Mark and I were desperate to get her into her own room. Lydia, our newly-minted teenager, and Sophie, a cherubic Kindergartner, had shared the small room at the end of the hall for the past few years. The two of them together were an amusing pair of mini-mom and adoring younger sister. They enjoyed rooming together, but Lydia was ready for something different and Sophie didn’t mind moving into the larger room next door with Lucy, four years her senior.

Less than a week before, Lydia’s loft bed had been taken down and sold, and in its place a new-to-us white crib was acquired and assembled. All four girls delighted in the shuffling of rooms, roommates, sleeping arrangements, dressers and closets. Not only that, but this was the maiden voyage of one of our guest rooms turned older girls’ bedroom. Knowing that the girls would need to expand into that bedroom with the addition of Felicity, baby girl number five, Lydia and Annie had been begging to move down there ever since we brought Felicity home from the hospital. Being stair-step sisters, Annie younger, with a relationship more akin to oil and water than love and friendship, we were cautiously optimistic that their shared excitement to room together was the herald of something new. Time would tell, but we weren’t going to dampen their enthusiasm. They had eagerly helped with repainting, arranging, and decorating their new bedroom, and at last they were sleeping in it.

Despite my concerns that Felicity might require a few nights to acclimate to her new crib  alone in a new room, she slept through from night one. Now I stepped quietly over to her crib to break the spell of the new nursery and wake her. Not wanting to startle her, I put my hand on her back and softly stroked the pink and white polka dotted fleece sleepsack, watching her shift in her sleep. She was such a beautiful and good-natured baby, the delight of the entire family. She cracked an eye in quiet confusion as I adjusted my hands around her and lifted her scrunched sleepy body out of the crib. The lamp from my bedroom down the hall offered just enough light to create a halo of her red tufts of hair framing her silhouette in the darkness. I settled into the armchair, adjusting the floral throw pillows that were a nod to the developing nursery theme that was my current project. 

I was grateful for an excuse to pause for a moment as she nursed. This was normal-ish. I tried calling Mark again. Still no answer. What was the name of the hotel? Who was he rooming with? I couldn’t remember. I recalled that I had numbers for quite a few of his coworkers. Dismissing my dislike for phone calls as well as my phobia of inconveniencing people, I started through my contact list, dialing every person I could think of who was at the conference. Over and over and over each number rang, went to voicemail and I hung up. I could only imagine what thoughts might go through their heads when they woke in the morning and saw my missed call from 4am. Some of them, good friends of Mark’s, I tried twice just in case. In the deafening silence, unreality raged on.

Someone had to be told I was leaving my kids at home alone in the middle of the night; that my sister was dying and I was driving through a blizzard to say goodbye. Someone had to pray for her, for me, for all of us. I finished nursing Felicity and, saying a prayer that she would ease back into restful sleep, I stood up with her and put her pacifier in her mouth. I watched with relief as her little hand reached up to cup the side of her face, her telltale sign that she was eager to sleep, and she leaned away from me towards her crib. I laid her down and she re-scrunched her body, bum in the air, hand still cupping her face, pacifier bobbing softly, eyes closed. “I love you.” I mouthed and tip-toed away, closing the nursery door silently behind me. Walking back down the hall, I texted my women’s group.

Miraculously I got a response! I would learn later that two of them were as shocked as I was that they were unusually awake at that early hour of the morning. It was a tremendous relief to know that not only were they praying for Heidi, but for all of us as I drove off into the night.Those women, and additional members of my group in the next hour, were instruments of great grace as the Holy Spirit used them as the first to set in motion prayers and help that would sustain us. But in that moment of first contact, their awareness of the situation offered a grasp on reality that I so desperately needed.