On November 26th we published an episode entitled Gabriel's Wings. Gabriel was a young child who died under hospice care when I was still working full time as a hospice chaplain. It was many years ago and I have lost track of his family. But no amount of time will ever erase the footprints his mother left on my life. This is a small piece of her story, taken from a verbatim I wrote for chaplaincy school after Gabriel died. It feels like an important addition to the story of his death. An addition I believe will resonate with every family in a similar circumstance but also a story that could help those, like myself, who have never been in this situation, to understand better, those who have. 

She meets me in the lobby of the hospital. It has been only a few weeks since her 18 month old son, Gabriel, died. She is 26 years old. She is an Hispanic woman, married to a very traditional Hispanic man. She lives in a small single wide trailer with her husband, her other 2 sons, (almost 3 and almost 6), her cousin and her cousin's three young children, all boys.

She asked to meet with me, thinking her husband would join us. However, when she arrives, she is alone. She tells me her husband refused to come. When she called, she had been crying and said that none of them were doing well managing the loss of Gabriel. 

4 months earlier, Maria and her husband Manny had loaded their three kids into their old Suburban thinking they’d make a weekend of the fact that Gabriel had an appointment at Children's Hospital to further try to diagnose why he was suddenly unable to sit up by himself. They thought they could take the kids to the zoo and possibly do a little Holiday shopping. Maria was working full time at the Post Office and Manny was busy getting equipment ready for the snow removal company he works for in the winter. So an overnight in Denver sounded almost like like a mini vacation.

But, their “overnight in Denver” soon became a nightmarish hell that lasted 22 days. 

The tests performed at Children's quickly became more and more complicated, more invasive and more frightening. Gabriel’s condition worsened daily. Manny stayed that first week, coming each day to the hospital to allow Maria to eat or to step outside for a breath of fresh air. Then he took the boys home to the mountains. She tells me that looking back on it she realizes that her husband must have been very frightened but admitting to that would have been for him, even more frightening. She knows she herself had never been more afraid. She was alone and far away from her other children who she knew needed her. She was in a very unfamiliar and foreign country of medical personnel and medical terminology. Everyday a new development around Gabriel’s condition would come to light and everyday, alone and scared, she would hear words like, “Your son is not getting better.”, “We think he might be dying.” until finally, after 22 days, she heard, “There is nothing more we can do.” 

Gabriel’s tiny body was shutting down. A peg tube had been placed for nutrition and he was on continuous oxygen. His eye sight was almost gone. She was instructed in the immediate care of the feeding tube, given an order for hospice and Manny came to bring them home. The story of the rest of Gabriel's life is what the episode from November 26th will tell you.

It is now early April. We sit together in the chaplain’s office, and Maria tells me quietly that some moments it feels like the whole experience was just a bad dream. She says some days, it feels like maybe Gabriel never existed. His life was so short and he died so quickly. She feels like she has aged 10 years in 10 weeks. She cries quietly as she talks.

I ask her about her husband. She tells me that he said last night he would tell her in the morning if he was coming and this morning he did not get up. She pauses and then says, “But, it’s OK . Maybe even better. Maybe he doesn’t need to talk. He’s a man. They are so different.”

And I smile at her then lean forward and ask, “And you, Maria, do you need to talk?”

And the tears run down her face. She carries a balled up tissue in her hand already and her eyes look puffy. I can only imagine the amount of crying she has done since Gabriels death.This is when she begins to talk about how it feels like sometimes it never really even happened.

I remain leaning forward, listening intently. She tells me that she and Manny took the boys to Children’s Hospital for a memorial ceremony a week ago. A ceremony they have to honor the lives of children they served who have died. 

She said there was a room, and someone talking and some candles for each family but that they did not have a chance to speak to anyone about Gabriel. And then she said something that almost undid me as though the conversation so far had not already begun to make me feel as though I was unraveling. She said Gabriel's brother Brandon, asked if they were there to bring baby Gabriel home.

She tells me that Brandon, who has not yet turned 6, talks about him all the time. He wants to know where Gabriel is and when he is coming home. He wants to know if he is hungry, or cold, or scared. Maria says she does her best to reassure him that Gabriel is not hungry or cold or scared and that he will not be coming home. Still, when they are shopping and she buys something special for Brandon and Gus, Brandon will insist that they have to buy 3 of whatever it is. And she just does, because it's easier. She looks at me then and smiles through her tears. And says, as painful as it all is, at least Brandon talks about him. She is comforted by his questions. Sometimes he asks her to tell him stories about the baby and she does because it helps her so much to talk about him.

She says whenever they come home with that third thing she has purchased Brandon adds it to the pile of things surrounding the picture of Gabriel in the living room and won’t let any of his cousins play with any of the things that are there. Gabriel’s ashes are there also but Maria and Manny have not told Gus and Brandon what is in the black box, just that they may not touch it. 

She has calmed considerably while speaking about how Brandon is keeping baby Gabriel alive through their talks. She said she is pretty sure that Brandon never asks Manny about Gabriel. But she is not 100% sure because she and Manny do not talk much. It saddens me to hear that, not only for Manny and Maria but also for Gus and Brandon to be watching how we do this thing called grief when we don't have a language for it. They will grow up thinking this is how it is done. Quietly, silently, and alone.

Maria tells me that Manny has come back to the room once shared by the whole family but that became just her room with the three little boys while Gabriel was alive, but he is only there because her mother told her that they are a family and that Maria needs to make room for him but she admits that she wishes he was not there. He does not have patience with her tears and right now all she wants to do is cry and be left alone. “I just need to be sad” she says.

I ask her if she has been able to find a way to talk to Manny about her need to just get to be sad and she responds by saying she does not know how to tell him how angry she is with him. 

This is the first time she has admitted to anyone that she feels a rage so huge that it frightens her. 

She has been looking back on the past 6 months and he is absent. He’s there but not there. She is reliving the 22 days in Denver when everyday she was hearing really scary, complicated things about their baby, and Manny wasn’t there. When she would try to tell him what she was hearing he would say he doesn’t want to hear that stuff, that it isn’t true, that Gabriel will get better. 

But he wasn’t getting better and Manny wasn’t there. She is crying again so I wait. And I am not sorry I waited because this young mom has shown such wisdom in her grief and I know in sharing this story with me, I am being gifted something indescribable. 

Then she says if Manny had been there, she would not have been able to hold Gabriel every night, all night long, on her chest. She would not have walked the halls and sat in rocking chairs and talked to him all the time, telling him over and over and over how she loved him and how perfect he was. She recognizes she would not have had what that time allowed her to have, had Manny been there. 

Sometimes late at night she would wake and Gabriel would be looking at her as though trying to tell her that he knew how much she loved him. But she also suffers deeply wondering if in his mind, she was allowing them to do all those things to him that hurt him. That maybe he was blaming her for the pain and the fear he experienced during that hospital stay. Those thoughts have haunted her recently as she unfolds herself from the assault of his death and starts to try to make sense out of it all.

Before Gabriel died, Maria shared with me, that Gabriel had started communicating with her, telepathically telling her to “get them ready”, to “make them come and say good bye” and that he was “needing to go”. The day she shared this, 3 days before he died, she sobbed in my arms and said she couldn’t do it, she couldn't tell those things to the extended family. She said she knew he needed her to do it, was asking her to do it, but how could she, when she herself was not ready. 

The night or the night before the morning he died, I was called to the house. In the tiny living room sat Maria and Manny, Gus and Brandon and Manny’s entire family from California. Maria had called them after all and they drove through the night to get there. The day they arrived Gabriel had an amazing day of eye contact and alertness unlike anything we had seen for weeks. Maria said it was as though he could actually see these people, his elders, the people he had been asking Maria to call. But then the following morning, the morning of the evening I am there, he had woken hot and agitated, distant and not responsive to their presence. Their hospice nurse, Kathleen, had spent most of her day with them. She called me from their home that evening before she left and asked if I would come, she didn't feel like they were ready to left alone and she had other patients to see. When the door opened Manny was on the sofa holding the Gabriel, surrounded by people I did not know. He rose and gestured for me to take his place. And then, he handed me his youngest son. He placed him so tenderly and lovingly into my arms it was hard not to cry. I knew I was holding someone who was leaving us, someone who was pulling away from life as fiercely as those who had held him all day were trying to get him to hang onto it. His temperature was 104, a fever he had run all day in spite of Kathleen's efforts to cool him down. He was such a hot baby. Sitting down where Manny had been sitting was like sitting in hot mashed potatoes. The couch was deep and soft and warm. I fell into the impression Manny had left as though I’d been there all day. Maria was next to me. She was exhausted but calm and I felt that she too knew what was happening. 

There were no words exchanged among the adults but I spoke to Gabriel, softly and privately, telling him what a brave and courageous boy he was, how we knew how hard he was working and we were there to help in any way we could. Silently I prayed for that legion of angels I know exists, the ones who come to champion and escort the brave and tired dying members of our tribes. I looked up at Maria and very quietly said, “You did it Maria. You finally brought them all together.”

She begins to cry and says “Yes. I did it. I have done what he has been asking me to do.”

I take her hand and hold it against my face briefly. And then we smiled at one another. I left the house at about 10PM and Gabriel died in his mother’s arms sometime during that night. 

Okay, so, back to the chaplains office and Maria is with me. She has stopped talking and for now she has stopped crying. She takes a deep breath and just whispers “Thank you.”

She has changed so much in all of this. She is warmer and she hugs more readily and more easily. She tells me it helps to talk with someone who does not try to change what she is feeling, and I say a silent prayer of gratitude for all the moments during our time together that I didn't speak, only because I did not know what to say. 

This extraordinary young woman carries a pain that is unfathomable and indescribable. It is something that will forever be a part of who she is and in all of it she seems to have settled in a place, at least, momentarily, where she can look at what has happened and try to make some sense out of it. She is articulate and thoughtful in her perceptions. 

She is dancing around the flame of her strength and power. When she talks about Manny I wonder if this will be a marriage that survives or succumbs to the trauma of losing a child. I hope, if it survives, that she finds joy and peace in it with Manny and not in spite of him. I hope for her that she can release or process the anger to rediscover the love that brought them together in the first place.

She has helped me learn about grief by allowing me to come alongside her in hers. 

What a gift this child was to us all. I didn't know when we started out with this family that the experience would help us see something precious and sacred about our own lives. 

Maria would say she has no religion but she talked often about punishment and karma. She questioned why. She says Gabriel's life opened a whole new world to her, a world where she has found her voice and her power. A world where she is learning to seek that which brings meaning and purpose to her life. She talks about going to nursing school and helping other parents who lose children. 

When I watched her and listened to her on that day, I was overcome with a sense of the Divine at work; something of purposeful energy, something fluid and clear and good, something Holy.

I wish I knew where she was now. I wish I could see what she has done to honor the grief she was just beginning to understand, just beginning to look at, the grief she was just leaning in to touch for the first time. 

This is SJ. 

Thank you for listening and I hope you will join me again WTVGT