Audrey

In October 2013 my husband, Chris, and I found out we were expecting our first child. We had been married for a little over three years and I was full of so many conflicting emotions. I felt unprepared, nervous, scared, but mostly excited. In January of 2014 we left our 20 week anatomy scan knowing we were having a little girl. We celebrated with dinner and then went shopping for sweet baby girl clothes and accessories, of course. What we didn’t know is that in just four short weeks we would be meeting that sweet baby girl. My pregnancy was mostly uneventful up until the day before she was born.

I was currently working full time as a Radiation Therapist, which could be physically demanding at times. I came home from work on February 12th with a slight back ache. I didn’t think much of it because it had been a doozy of a day. I was also the Wednesday night piano player at my church during that time, so after work I came home, got ready and was off to church. When church was over, my back pain increased and I had started having some pretty intense stomach cramping. When we got home, I called my physician and he advised that I drink plenty of water and take it easy. Over the next hour, I realized that these were definitely contractions and we went to the Emergency Department. When we got checked in, it was confirmed that I was completely dilated, there was no stopping this labor, and our sweet girl was on her way. It was a whirlwind to say the least. We didn’t even have a name nailed down. The neonatologist came and spoke with us and told us to pick a strong name. The only girl name we had been discussing was Audrey. Chris held my hand, looked into my frightened eyes and said “Looks like we’re meeting our Audrey Lynn tonight”. We later found out that the name Audrey means “noble strength”.

Audrey’s heart rate began to show signs of distress, so they quickly took me back for an emergency C-section. During the caesarian a song titled “He is Here” kept playing in my head. And I knew this to be true, because I felt God’s peace wash over me in an overwhelming way. On February 13th at 5:14am Audrey Lynn was born into this world. And in that moment the heart of a mother was born in me. I was completely overwhelmed with the love that I felt for my daughter. It’s like nothing I have ever experienced and it was beautiful. The NICU team was in the room and took her to their station on the other side of the room and
began working on her. I couldn’t see her, but Chris could see her tiny leg. He began to feel discouraged as he watched the dismal expressions come over the faces of the team. They were doing everything they could to save her but her leg remained limp on the table. In that moment Genesis 1 filled his mind. It speaks of the earth being void and formless, but when God breathed His Spirit over it, it brought forth life. Chris then prayed for God to breathe that same Spirit into our daughter.
And within that moment Chris watched Audrey’s leg as she began kicking it like crazy. All of her limbs were moving non-stop. She was full of life and we were grateful. There was no doubt in our minds that God was right in that room with us.

Unfortunately, the hospital I delivered Audrey in did not have a NICU capable of caring for her, so she was taken by ambulance to a hospital that was able to care for her complex needs. Chris split his time between my hospital room as I recovered and Audrey’s NICU room a couple miles down the road. Initially, Audrey was holding her own and remaining relatively stable. We learned she had an infection, but her medical team assured us that they were treating it with antibiotics. The following day, Valentine’s Day, I received a call from the neonatologist that Audrey had taken a turn for the worse and I needed to get to her
as soon as possible. The hospital I was in did not give “travel passes” to visit your baby, so I had to wait to be officially discharged. Again, another whirlwind as we packed up our bags in a scramble and raced to get over to Audrey. Chris had made Valentine’s Day dinner reservations for us about a week prior but instead of taking me out on a date, he was taking me to the NICU where I would officially meet my daughter. When we got into her room, Chris and I stood on opposite sides of her and slipped our hands into her isolette. Her tiny hands immediately gripped onto our fingertips and she refused to let go. I was amazed to
see such a tiny human being gripping on to us with such strength. It was then we were told these machines were no longer going to keep her alive, and that it was just a matter of time.

Our family came and gathered around us and our daughter. We prayed, we sang songs, we read scriptures to her, and we gazed at the tiny soul that had tremendously changed us in such a short amount of time. Audrey Lynn, the one who made me a mom. We were encouraged to hold her before she passed, and quite honestly, I was afraid to. I knew, that unless God intervened, my holding her would result in her leaving us. I was unsure that my heart could handle her passing in my arms. The more I contemplated it, I realized the most motherly thing I could do for her, was to wrap her up, hold her close, and let her feel secure as she left this world. Kind of how I felt God was doing for me, wrapping me in His love and peace through it all. I still knew without a doubt that He was right there with us and I felt secure. Audrey passed after just a few short minutes of me holding her. It was quiet and peaceful and heartbreaking. As I gazed at her perfectly formed being, I kept waiting for God to breathe life back into her. I believed with all my heart that He was capable of that. I’ll never understand why He chose not to in this life. One thing I do know, is that one day He will. And I believe that what Chris witnessed in the operating room was a glimpse of what God will do again. So I stopped asking God why, and I look forward with hope to the day that He will breathe His Spirit back into our daughter once again.

We spent a couple of hours there at the hospital with Audrey.
Someone from the bereavement team came in and asked if she could
take some photographs for us. At the time it felt like a strange
thing to do, but, today I am very grateful for those photos.
There is one particular picture that I found myself studying
just the other day. It is a photo of me and Chris cradling our
daughter shortly after her passing. I looked at my young 24 year
old self and my heart broke for her. This photo represented my
entrance into motherhood and that stings.

We left the hospital in a daze. Because I had been so focused on
Audrey, I fell behind on my pain medications and my body was
beginning to feel the effects of that. We stopped at a drug
store, stocked up on some ibuprofen, and crashed on the floor of
our living room when we got home. It felt like a terrible
nightmare that we were begging ourselves to wake up from. Did
the events of the past two days actually take place? It was too
much to take in and process in such a short time and we were at
a loss of where to go from here. My brother is a worship song
writer. On the day Audrey was born God had given him a simple
chorus with these lyrics:

“I will trust in the Lord this day.
I will stay. I will pray. I will obey.
And when life’s trials come my way,
I will stand up and say,
I will trust in the Lord this day.”

As we laid on the floor of our living room, wondering what to do next, we listened to the recording of this song that my brother had sent us the day before. In that song, I found the answer. I realized we didn’t have to go anywhere. We would stay right here with God and we would trust Him. We would lay down and grieve, but one day He would give us the  strength to stand again. And with that we went to sleep.

The following day was bleak. I was experiencing a lot of physical pain so I spent most of the day in bed. Worse than my physical pain was the crushing weight of my grief. Up until this time in my life I had never experienced the degree of heartache that you can actually physically feel. It was heavy and it was dark. I wondered if this is how I would feel the rest of my life. I didn’t know how you recover from losing your child. As Chris sorted out arrangements at the funeral home and bills, I
attempted to sleep as much of the day away as I could. What a gem he was for taking care of all those things so I wouldn’t have to face them. And by gem, I mean rock. Chris was a steady source of strength and stability then, and still today. What a gift of grace that God allowed me to be his wife. I decided to roll out of bed and I went into Audrey’s nursery. In her crib lay a single rose, surrounded by hand and foot prints and impressions, the blanket we held her in, and other sweet
mementos the hospital gifted to us. It was a sweet display of
her memory that Chris had arranged. It brought me to my knees as I broke down in tears on the floor of her room. This crib that we had recently put together was supposed to hold our daughter, but instead it would only hold her memory.

When I finally gathered myself and left her room I felt oddly different. I went downstairs to sit with Chris and told him, that for reasons I
cannot explain, I felt lighter. He felt the same way. About 20 minutes later, Chris got a text message from a church friend that the entire congregation had just finished having prayer for us. And then we knew the reason. We felt lighter because our brothers and sisters in Christ were shouldering our burden by interceding for us in prayer and as a result we felt some of the weight of that crushing grief come off our shoulders for a bit. It was such an encouraging moment. It also gave me hope that I would not feel this heavy forever. I would grieve the loss of
our daughter for the rest of this life, but over time the grief would change.

Over the next several weeks, my grief would come in waves. On a
particularly difficult day, I was determined to get out of bed and get myself ready. I asked God for something special for that day. Something that would remind me that He was near. As I was getting ready, I had Pandora Radio playing on my phone. It was a station I had listened to many times before but it began playing a song I had never heard before. I checked my phone to read the song title and it read “I Will Carry You (Audrey’s song)” by Selah. I have listened to Selah for years, but never heard this song of theirs. I began to look up the story behind the song and found that the lead singer, Todd Smith and his wife Angie, also had a baby girl named Audrey that only lived for a few short hours after birth. Angie went on to write a book about their Audrey’s story. Woven in throughout her book, Angie included biblical truths on the topic of grief. She addressed the story of Lazarus and how the Bible tells us Jesus wept over his friend’s death – even though He knew Lazarus would live again. I felt like this gave me the “permission” I needed to grieve my daughter properly. It is possible to know the hope of our future and yet still grieve the loss of today. That book was an integral part of my healing process, and I found it as a result of God dropping that song into my lap, at exactly the right time. Another gift of God’s grace.

A couple weeks later, I was out getting groceries. It was a gloomy day, and when I pulled into the driveway the rain began to pour. My grief felt heavy that day, and when the skies let loose, so did my eyes. As the tears poured down my face I cried out to God telling Him, the hurt was just so incredibly deep. Not a moment after I uttered those words, I felt God say to my heart “My love for you goes deeper.” I was reminded of Romans 8:38+39:

“ For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor
rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers,    nor
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be
able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Grief has a way of sneaking questions and doubts in your heart. But God just kept counteracting those doubts with the blessed assurance that He hadn’t left us.

Days after Audrey’s death I can remember begging God to allow me
to hear His voice in an audible way. I never heard His voice but I felt impressed to read the Psalms during that time. It was there I began to really fall in love with God’s Word. I realized that’s how we can hear His voice today – by reading His Word. I continued to watch over and over how God would use His Word to carry us through some of our hardest days. Alongside His Word, He used so many precious people to come alongside us to support us in our time of sorrow. I will forever be grateful for the family, friends, and co-workers God placed in my life during that time. Yet another gift of God’s grace.

Time continued to march on, and we slowly got into our “new normal”. The grief was still present, but God was helping us get back on our feet. As I mentioned earlier, the day Audrey was born, a mother’s heart was born in me. When Audrey passed, I had all this love in my heart, but my child was no longer here for me to tangibly give that love to. I began to ask God if I would ever have the pleasure of actively mothering a child in this life. And today, I can gratefully say I have 3 beautiful children living in our home. My heart will always ache for my firstborn, Audrey, but it has also been made full with the lives of Asher, Cora, and Jane. God really is good, all the time.