My Miracle

A few months after Grant died, I was on a road trip with the boys.  We were going back to the home in St. George where we’d lived when he died.  This was going to be the first time back since that happened.  We had left shortly after his death because I couldn’t be there.

As we drove I had the thought, why, as if asking Grant?  Why wasn’t there a chance?  A chance for something we could have done?  Why didn’t I at least get to pray my heart out for a miracle before the outcome was already set? 

As we drove home, we stopped for burgers.  There was a couple sitting at the table next to us, who kept drawing my attention. As we waited for the food, I was watching the boys and kept glancing over toward them.  Somehow we struck up a friendly conversation. 

She was a school teacher and he was a coach. They were on the road like us.  Then something came up, the reason I must have felt drawn to them.  He was recovering from an accident.  He had been in a motorcycle accident the previous year. 

He couldn’t walk a year ago.  He almost died.  The Doctors said he’d never walk again and yet, here he was before me, looking as if nothing had ever happened to him to the degree they were describing.  He’d broken his back, his neck, legs and arms.  Unbelievable and yet here he stood before me.  Looking as healthy as ever.  I thought about my husband.  His injuries seemed less significant than this man’s injuries and yet here he was standing before me and my husband was dead.  Why?  I thought. 

Why… Grant.  Why not him?  I didn’t even get a chance to try to change the outcome. I didn’t get to beg for a miracle, to see a miracle nor to create a miracle.  Even if I didn’t get the miracle I hoped for, I didn’t even have the chance.  When I finally found out he was dead, he’d already been dead for hours.

When I first saw my husband after his accident, he’d been dead for 5 days.  What I saw before me was an unfamiliar corpse.  No recognition of the man I knew other than the physical shell that only mildly reminded me of the man I once knew and had never again and never would see again.

I couldn’t help but wonder again, why some live and some die, and yet in the end; we surely all do die. For this couple before me they got what they felt like was a miracle.  I didn’t.  It’s as simple as that.

They had story after story of events that happened moment to moment in those days. They talked of when his life teetered on the edge death and in any moment it could go either way.  Days of this, I’m sure were exhausting.  Yet each time, there was the miracle.

Each time he almost died, he didn’t.  He lived. They went through it all together. She held his hand as he lay unconscious. She prayed.  She watched him fight, not knowing what would happen, but she was there.  I didn’t get any of that.

And I felt… if only I could have prayed for him, maybe things would have been different.
A year later, another friend of ours was skydiving and crashed.  He didn’t die either.  He was in the hospital for months, critically injured and motionless. 

He lost the use of his legs and arms.  His whole life changed and looked so different from what it did before the crash.   He also had many miracles that made life possible. Yet, the miracles they hoped for, were different.  He did not stand before me, but sat in a state of the art wheelchair.

I saw this friend with eyes glistening with hope and sadness. His eyes contained the loss that cannot be described; even with many miracles, his miracles, that sustained his life.  I thought about Grant again.  What if he had survived?  What if he’d been in this condition? 

I’d still be alone. I still have 4 children to care for on my own and a husband who couldn’t help me at all; but also added to my responsibility.  Would this be a miracle had he lived? I couldn’t fathom what that would do to our family, and to me. 

It was not because I didn’t want him to be alive, but because as much as I love him, adding another person for me to take care of  wouldn’t be the same as being with him. It would all still be without him even if he were here, like this. 

So what is a miracle? These three families, terrible accidents, and two survived.  My family, a terrible accident and this daddy didn’t survive.  I thought about miracles.  I thought about myself, my life and the things that I knew and felt. I knew I had my miracle. 

My miracle was that I could see all this, feel all this and live through all this.  My miracle was that I was not dying in it, but living.  My miracle was that in this tragedy, I am becoming a new person that didn’t exist, even couldn’t exist without this.

How could I ask for a bigger miracle than to find who I am in the big moments of questions that have no answers?  Or that I become stronger from them and not die myself.  That is a miracle, my miracle.