Reflections on Loss

(A word of caution, this post is about infant loss)

{I’m writing this piece through the fog of grief. This piece is unpolished and ragged around its edges but it was important for me to put it here in my substack. }

This time last Thursday I stood at the bedside of my sister-in-love waiting and watching with her and my brother-in-love for the delivery of my newest nephew. For a good portion of the morning we watched monitors and listened to his heartbeat, and talked about our shared anticipation of the arrival of Isaac Joel, who months earlier, had received a life-limiting diagnosis (Trisomy 13).

The myriad of possible situations around his birth could have colored the day in gray but despite the storm rumbling outside of the hospital, that delivery room was anything but gloomy. Emily Dickinson called hope “a thing with feathers that perches in the soul”, and I say that hope is a baby wildly loved from conception, born into unimaginable circumstances.

“Love in our world is suffering love. Some do not suffer much, though they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving. If I hadn’t loved him, there wouldn’t be this agony.”¹

For months, doctors and specialists warned of the complications. We knew that if he survived to his birth, Isaac’s life would be brief—every milestone was a miracle.

At 2:15PM, friends who did not know what stage of labor was unfolding at that hour, circled up and prayed for this little life. At 2:17PM, as these friends, states-away from Isaac prayed, Isaac was born alive.

Forty-three holy hours later, Isaac left this world for another.

I told a friend this week that I feel like my heart and head are not moving at the same pace. I watched my nephew Isaac come into this world, and I stood by him just a few minutes after he breathed his last. And all of it was holy.

You can know a thing and still not know what to do with that thing.

I know that Isaac lived. That he was here, and now he isn’t, and I still don’t know what to do with that. Death unties all of the bows we are often quick to tie up. We can get lost in the tangles of all of its non-sense and the mess of unresolved questions left in its wake.

Death leaves us with questions that cannot be answered. And the death of a life so brief?—it staggers the mind. The unanswered questions could swallow a person whole.

“The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.”²

Before Isaac was born, my sister-in-love, Esther, reframed the question so often asked in affliction—why me? to why not me?—and I can’t stop thinking about how much perspective changes everything.

A couple of weeks ago I shared a photo of my new vintage Ledger on instagram and said that it reminded me how important it is to consider how the time I’ve been given is spent. That old ledger reminded me that taking life inventory is critical because it’s easy to waste what we have been given chasing the vapor.

In thinking about little Isaac, I have been struck by how purposeful his life was. His greatest accomplishment was his birth.

Descart said “I think therefore I am”, reducing our value as people down to the intellect, down to something we can measure and quantify, but this is not what makes a life worth living. This is not what gives a person’s life value. We are, because God is, and we are valuable because we exist. It is not what we produce or bring to the world that makes us a person or gives us our worth. I know this, but as I watched Isaac make his entrance and take his leave of this earth in less than 2 days without accomplishing anything measurable by worldly metrics, I am struck to the core with this Truth. The fact that Isaac existed at all—even for such a short time, has changed our lives.

I witnessed a miracle in his coming, and nothing looks the same now. And it seems fitting for that to be the case.

“How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us?…We strain to hear. But instead of hearing, we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.”³

In loving memory of Isaac Joel Camealy, August 3, 2023-August 5, 2023

1. Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff

2. Lament for a Son, Nichols Wolterstorff

3. Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff