Taylor's Gift (24 page)

Immediately she texted back, “You're way too pretty.”

After a long pause and some more cajoling, she sent me a text that said, “Okay, this isn't beautiful, but here you go.” It was just a quick phone shot, but it was my first glimpse of her. She was sitting on her bed wearing pink pajamas. I could see her stethoscope sitting on the table next to her bed, and my first reaction was, “Ah, there she is.”

It was my first chance to see Patricia as her own person, not just an extension of Taylor. Now I had two reasons for wanting to meet Patricia in person.

I found comfort at Taylor's grave, but like Taylor's friends, Todd found comfort in her room. I rarely went upstairs, but when I did, and I saw her door open, it bothered me. I started insisting no one go in and that her door stay closed so that I wouldn't have to see inside.

One day, a dear friend confronted me about my insistence that the door stay closed. “Your children won't go in there because you want the door closed. You're making it seem as if her room is off-limits, and you're denying them the privilege of finding comfort there. You find comfort at her grave. They don't have that. Their connection is her room, and you've closed that off from them.”

She was right. We opened the door to Taylor's room.

A few days later, I had to go upstairs for something.
You can do this
, I told myself, knowing the door would be wide open. I forced myself up the stairs, slowly exhaling as I took each new step.
It won't be that bad
, I promised myself. But as I reached the top step I had to catch in my breath. I couldn't believe what I saw.

“Todd! Todd! Grab a camera and get up here!” I said, moving closer to get a better view.

Todd came dashing up the stairs, with Peyton right behind him.

“Look!” I said, pointing to the carpet.

Originating from Taylor's room was a giant sunbeam. Though the sun obviously was shining on that side of the house, none of the
other rooms on the same side had light spilling out into the hall. The sunbeam radiated from her room and landed on the floor outside of her door, producing a warm sunny spot on the carpet—in the shape of a cross. Todd took a couple of pictures while we marveled at the unlikely occurrence, but Peyton didn't say anything. She just lay down on top of it and pressed her nose into the carpet.

Todd

The kids had been sleeping on the air mattress in our room for over three months. Tara wanted our bedroom back. I wanted my wife back. We also wanted to return the mattress so the family who had loaned it to us could use it for an upcoming camping trip. But Ryan and Peyton weren't ready to sleep alone in their rooms. They felt isolated and scared. We compromised by moving them both into the guest room. It was hard to get them to sleep at night at first, but eventually they did it and we were proud of them. We were all taking steps forward, but there were setbacks too.

On the Fourth of July, we went to a concert with Tara's mom and dad. About thirty seconds into the music, Ryan saw the French horns and it reminded him of Taylor. He had to get up and leave. He also didn't like going to St. Ann's. He was trying to avoid things that triggered feelings he didn't know how to deal with. Peyton had her own way of dealing with grief—she clung to Tara. Whenever Tara left, Peyton would want to know where she was going, when she would be back, and how long she would be gone.

Our house seemed like the stock market. While one person's emotional stock was rising, another's would be staying steady, while two more might be dropping. We hoped the general trend was upward, but at this point in the mourning process our emotions weren't stable enough to make any long-term projections.

By default, Tara and I were fix-it kind of people. Our first inclination was to help the kids
get past
their grief. So we went to family therapy. It didn't help. In many cases, it only made things worse for Ryan because it brought up things that were too painful for him to process. Ryan had a lot of feelings mixed up inside of him—he had seen Taylor hit the tree.

“No one knows what I've seen. You're the only one,” he'd say to me on his bad days.

He was right. I did know. I had seen Taylor too, but I also knew what it had felt like to look up and see the terrified look on my son's face. More than anything, I had wanted to console him, to turn his eyes away from the scene and tell him it would be okay. But I couldn't. I was deep in the snow, straddling my injured daughter and praying she'd be okay. It had been heart-wrenching to have to choose between consoling my son and helping my daughter. It was even more painful now to look back and know I hadn't helped either one.

Thoughts of being on that mountainside, unable to help Taylor, still ripped me apart inside. After the ski patrol had loaded Taylor on the sled, Ryan and I had to ski down to the lodge.

“Can you do it,” I'd asked him, “or do you need to get on my back?”

“I-I can do it,” he'd stammered through tears.

“She's going to be okay!” I said, to give him strength and reassure him.

I repeated that phrase, or some version of it, all the way down the mountain. Later, we would find out she wasn't okay, and now I felt as though I had lied to him.

Ryan and I were bonded by sports and music; unfortunately, we also had another bond that no father and son should ever share: we
were the ones on the mountain with Taylor. The terrible things we'd seen and the helplessness we'd felt put us in a dark and secretive society of two. We couldn't revoke our membership in this club, we couldn't escape the memories, and we couldn't talk about it.

I would have given anything to take the kids' pain away. Instead, just as Tara and I were learning to deal with each other, we had to learn to give Ryan and Peyton the grace and time to grieve in their own way.

After Ryan had a particularly bad day, I tried to find a metaphor to give him words for what he was feeling and to give him hope for the future. “Your life is like a book,” I said. “When you're reading a good book, you just sail through the chapters and enjoy the ride. Then suddenly, something bad happens to the main character. Maybe there is one chapter that is really difficult, and you sort of struggle reading the book because that chapter is hard. You're not sure if you want to keep reading, or if you even want to know what happens next. But when you get to the end of the book, you love how the story turns out, and you recommend it to your friends. That's when you understand why the author put that hard chapter in there. It all makes sense once the story ends.” I put my arm around him and said, “Your life is like that book, and God is writing the story. Just know that some day when He is almost finished writing, you'll be able to look back and say, ‘I totally get why that chapter was there.'”

That was also my hope.

Someday, I wanted to look back and see the purpose in all of this. For now, each of us just had to keep moving through the difficult parts of the story.

Since I wasn't going into an office every day, I tried to be as disciplined as possible at home. I got up at the same time every morning and went outside to sit on the back porch to read and pray. I had decisions to make for the foundation, and so many things
were coming up that I had to seek direction and guidance from Scripture on a daily basis. I liked using the YouVersion app to read the Bible on my phone because I could quickly find related verses or search by topic. One day I started reading James, and for the next several days, I found myself working through his words about suffering, such as, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance” (James 1:2–3). James also talked a lot about how action should come from our faith—something that resonated with me.

Tara would often join me outside. We just needed to be near each other. Over time, I noticed she was also reading. First, it was books on grief—most written by mothers who'd lost a child. Tara couldn't focus for long periods of time, and stories seemed to hold her attention the best. After a while, I noticed she had started to read devotionals. But lately, I noticed she'd also begun to pick up her Bible and read. I asked her about it one day.

“I think you reconnected with God faster than I did,” she said. “You immediately saw a purpose and His divine fingerprints on things. I'm still searching.”

At least she was looking in the right places.

Tara

In the hospital in Grand Junction, Todd had promised to be my rock. And he had been. I marveled at his strength. There was only one way to explain it—it was the work of the Holy Spirit.

I often imagined the Holy Spirit swirling around Todd and protecting him. How else did he have the capacity to handle the things he handled? How else could he juggle simple but overwhelming tasks, like answering the hundreds of emails that poured in? Or more complex things, like taking care of a wife who was totally incapacitated and always on the verge of losing it? Without help from God, how else could he deal with setbacks when his own loss was so fresh?

I thought about Pam Cope saying we were handpicked for this. Who were we to be chosen? But aren't we all chosen for something? We had a choice. We could follow God's leading, or we could strike out on our own. We could curl up in grief and shut everyone out, or we could stay the course, even when it got hard—even when there seemed to be no end to the pain.

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Heb. 11:1). Faith is belief without proof. Though I didn't have evidence, I believed that one day in the future the pain would get easier. I also believed there was a place where Taylor waited for me—and I had faith that in that place all pain would be gone.

Through July and August, my relationship with Patricia, Taylor's heart recipient, continued to grow through texts and emails. We texted about our kids, our families, and her job as a nurse. Though I still wanted a bit of distance—for example, I wasn't ready to talk to her on the phone—we decided to reserve a date on the calendar for us to visit her in Phoenix. We planned a trip for Labor Day weekend and invited Gary Reaves and his crew from WFAA to come with us to do a story that would inspire organ donations. Patricia agreed, and it was all set. I was scared and excited at the same time.

As a precaution, Todd wanted to verify Patricia was who she said she was. Todd called Donor Alliance to tell them we had been corresponding, and we were planning a trip to see her in a few weeks. Once again, Donor Alliance was caught off guard. I'd only recently sent them a letter for them to send to all of the recipients, and they hadn't sent it out yet, so they hadn't received permission from the recipients to pass on contact information. After a few emergency phone calls and meetings, once again they sent us forms to sign. They also contacted Patricia to see if it was okay for them to release her name to us. Of course she agreed, and we laughed about it in our text messages.

It was real. She was real.

Patricia had Taylor's heart. She also had a stethoscope. In a few weeks, I would put that stethoscope to my ear and hear Taylor's heartbeat again.

I couldn't wait.

Overall, my days were getting better. Though I still had ups and downs—to use Todd's stock market analogy—I was trending upward. Then August hit and school started. On the first day of school, I got Ryan and Peyton off, and then I fell apart. It would have been Taylor's first day of high school.

After dropping them off, I wanted to go to bed, but I also wanted to be as close to Taylor as possible. For the first time since we'd lost her, I crawled into her bed. She was the last one to sleep in it, and the sheets had not been washed. I lay down on her pillow and inhaled the smell of her sheets.

A couple of hours later, Todd came in. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said, bursting into tears. “She'd be at high school.”

“Let's go out and get lunch,” he suggested. “We'll go somewhere completely out of Coppell.”

And so we did. We went to a quirky little taco place that Todd had found online, and for an hour or two it distracted me. When we got back home, I went back upstairs to her room and lay there.
I have got to get up
, I told myself after I'd been there for a few minutes.
The kids will be home soon. It's their first day of school. You can't do this to them. It's already hard enough on them
. So I did. I got up, made her bed, and went downstairs.