40 hours of life

Fr. Denis came to the Hospital about 1 A.M. and performed the baptism

One week ago yesterday our sweet baby boy came into the world at 12:22 am and was baptized not long after that.  The months of waiting, the last couple of months of wondering if the ultrasound would be correct......were.  It all seems so incredibly fast now.  We found out that something was wrong with our precious baby eight and a half weeks ago.  Even the long waiting all of July for him to come, seems like a blink of an eye now.  And then his forty hours of life....did it all really happen?

resting together after his birth

He was not able to nurse, but was comforted by NG tube feedings every couple hours

I really really really thought that he really really really would have a  miracle in his little body.  Even though I prayed for God's will and felt at peace before his birth about his death in my heart, I thought that if God only healed one thing.  If his heart was healed then they could do surgery on the other things.  If God healed his diaphragm then he would be strong enough for the other surgeries.  Every time I went forward to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, I felt like the woman who just knew that if she could just touch the edge of His garment she would be made well.  I knew that if I could just receive Jesus, He could make my baby well. I filled the freezer with easy things for the girls to make meals with so I could be in the hospital with the baby for as many weeks as it took.  We made a schedule so that life at home could have a routine that worked as Mark and I spent time with the baby and his needs.  Whatever it took, I was up to the challenge and as I held my sweet baby boy in the hospital as he was slowly passing away  I told him "I would do anything in the world for you. anything".

What a joy to take care of Mark-Jerzy for the 40 hours

How do I go from missing his presence to being thankful that he is where I should long to be.  My heart aches and my arms are empty, how do I feel thankful for the precious forty hours that I held him, taking in his sweet newborn baby smell, kissing his little deformed hands and feet, telling him how much I love him.

I have been wondering why.  Not "why God did you do this to us?",  But there seems to be so much purpose in his little life.  Purpose in the pregnancy.  Purpose in us being here in KC.  Why God, why did you give us him?  What is it you are teaching us?  His brothers and sisters who have been loving him since they found out that he was coming.  He gave the world Mark-Jerzy for forty hours. Why?  What is it that You are teaching us?

The kids singing with Jon during communion at the funeral mass

This is the song we listened to during labor, afterwards, Jon sang at the funeral mass, and continue to listen to.

      Mark and I have been reading Interior Freedom, by Jacques Philippe. On the day after Mark-Jerzy's Funeral we picked it up and read the following:

       "It is natural and easy to go along with pleasant situations that arise without our choosing them. It becomes a problem, obviously, when things are unpleasant, go against us, or make us suffer. It is precisely then that, in order to become truly free, we are often called to chose to accept what we did not want, and even we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here; one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!

To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control."