Touched by an Angel

25^th October 2005 didn’t start out like any other normal day.  Actually, it started off as a pretty bad day.  But I never expected it to end up being probably the worst day of my life. 

I had come home from hospital the day before, having spent just over a week there being treated for a bad case of pneumonia and emotional break down.  The last thing I possibly ever thought I would be able to cope with was my Pastor walking through my front door to tell me:  “Sharnay died this morning.” 

Sharnay was two weeks old when we were asked to look after her for two weeks while her mother went into rehab.  We went to fetch her from the woman’s shelter that her mother was staying at.  She was the tiniest little thing ever.   Weighing 2.2 kg’s.  It seemed like a simple, fun thing to do.  Play baby for 2 weeks.  Gosh was I naïve and unprepared!!!!!

  After the first night I was frazzled.  She had not stopped screaming.   I took her to the dr the next day as I didn’t know what to do with the child.  After a rather long examination the doctor sat down and laid out the facts:  Sharnay had Foetal Alcohol Syndrome.  And she was suffering from withdrawal symptoms.  The FAS was quite severe and if she did survive, she would probably have quite a bit of damage. 

She proceeded to scream for the next 2 months.  This was not what I had signed up for!  I had agreed to have a precious little bundle of joy to play dolly with for two weeks.  Not this!!!!! This was awful!!! Her mother was meant to have gone to rehab immediately.  And it seemed like she was never going to go. (She eventually went nearly four months later!!!)  Which meant the baby was staying longer!  I was tired, stressed and my sensory sensitive nerves were frayed! 

Those first mornings I would wake up and the room would have a stale alcohol stench as her pores sweated out all those toxins.  One morning after she had cried for nearly a day and a half straight I just lost it.  I sank to the floor and cried the most dramatic cry.  I can’t do this!  I just can’t do this!  I’m so tired, I have such a head ache, I don’t even want to hold her.  I don’t want her near me.  I called Kayla (6) and Cassie ( 5 ) in to my room.  And I just hugged them as I cried “I am so sorry that I have done this to both of you.  I’m so sorry that I brought this screaming baby into our house.  I’m so sorry that I am grumpy and snapping at you.  I was so wrong to do this to us, I will tell them that we can’t have her here anymore.  She needs to go home”.  I thought that they couldn’t possibly understand what was going on, they were just babies.  But they responded so preciously.  “It’s ok Mommy, we’re not sad”  “we know you are just tired and we are not mad at you.”  “We are not cross that you brought Sharnay home” “No, we don’t want you to send her back, we want her to stay”.  They were so loving and forgiving.  It made me take a good hard look at the way I was behaving.  I remember looking at Sharnay screaming in her cot and I thought “If I don’t love you as my child, if I don’t care about your well being, I can’t do this”.  That was the turning point.  I realized I actually had to love her or she had to go.  I chose to love her.

It wasn’t even that hard to fall in love with her. She and I actually bonded very quickly after that.  A couple of times  friends would take her for the morning so that I could just sleep and re charge.  She would apparently scream most of the time until she was back in my arms and then she would calm down virtually immediately.  I am so grateful to those friends!  They just made it possible for me to cope.

About two months after she came to live with us, I woke up one morning with a shock.  I lay there and listened to the silence with dread in my heart.  I had slept through the night, and she wasn’t screaming.  She must have died during the night.  I forced myself to get up and look in the cot.  As I looked in, she woke up….and smiled!!!!!!!  And that was it. The screaming was over.  I never smelt the stale alcohol smell on her skin or in her room again.  It was just gone.  About a week later, I took her to the GP for a check up (I did this every few weeks just to make sure she was ok) and the GP could not believe it was the same child.  She did different physical tests etc and she said “this child doesn’t display ANY FAS symptoms!”  she was so surprised, she just kept saying how she couldn’t believe it was the same child. 

We did a lot of special things with Sharnay while she was with us.  We knew that we only had a limited time with her, and we wanted her to have all sorts of fun experiences, even though she would never remember them.  We took her on boat rides, tubing in the snow, things she would never probably get to do again.  And of course she had a wardrobe to die for ;)

When I look back now, we were actually making memories for ourselves.  Special things that we would remember, and she would be apart of them.

We had been leading up to this day for weeks.  Finally Rhys and I discussed the fact that we wanted to adopt her.  I went and researched as much on FAS as I could find.  Even though the doctor had said there was no sign of it, I wanted to be sure that if there were problems later on, we had taken this into consideration.  I prayed about it so hard, and really felt that the Lord was telling me that she would become a part of our family.  Friends were praying as well, and believed that the Lord was saying the same thing to them.  Finally we contacted the mother”s social worker and asked her if we could adopt her.  She was so anti the idea.  Our pastor”s wife had a conversation with the mother, who said yes, she would consider us adopting her child.  We were so relieved!  The mother was in rehab at the time, and her social worker there was very pro the idea.

A few days later everything changed.  We know now, that the social worker had an issue with an “affluent” family taking a baby away from her mother.  And she swayed the mother in the other direction.  She was now out of her 2 week rehab stint and wanted her child back.  I was in a state.  There was NO WAY that I was giving my child to that woman!  She was homeless among many other things for goodness sake!  After 2 days of contacting magistrates, social services etc etc I was told that I had to give her back to her mother because even though she lived on the street there was no proof that she would be in an abusive situation.  We were not even legally fostering her so that gave us even less ground to stand on. 

The day before we were meant to leave on our first family holiday together, we had to take her back to the woman’s shelter that the mother would be staying at temporarily.  I was devastated.  My heart was breaking.  Please Lord, please!  I would do anything to keep her.  She is my child.  And how would she cope!  She was so attached to me by this stage that she wouldn’t even let friends hold her even if  she could see me.  All she wanted was to be in my arms.  She would put her arms around me and snuggle her face into my neck, and just stay like that for ages.  Even as I write this the memory brings back that warm feeling I would get when ever she would do that.  How was she going to cope being separated from me?  I tried to explain this to the social worker.  She bluntly told me that she would get over it and not even remember me in a few days.  I thought that would be the worst day of my life.  I came home broken.  Her cot, next to my bed was empty.  That night, all I heard were her cries.  It was like she had died.

When we got back from our week away (which had been dismal) I wanted to go and see Sharnay.  We went to the home and when she saw me, she smiled the biggest smile and dived into my arms.  I spent time playing and reading to her and just praying over her and holding her in my arms.  But it was different.  I knew she wasn’t mine.  But in my heart I just felt like I still needed to fight for her.  Before I left, I went to the social worker, and told her that there was something wrong with Sharnay, while I held her I could feel that her breathing was different.  The social worker angrily dismissed me and told me that she was fine.

I went home and just let go, I got pneumonia within a day, by the next day it was so bad that I was hospitalized.  The whole time I was in hospital I felt the Lord saying be still and listen to me.  Hand her over to me.  No Lord! Don’t talk to me.  I don’t want to hear what you have to say.  And I will not give this over to you.  If I do that means that you could even decide to take her life!  Just give her to me.  That’s all I want.  I don’t care about the consequences just give her to me.  You said you would, you gave me verses telling me you would, now just do it.  But I will not listen to a thing you have to say.  I spent a week in the hospital, a week where the Lord kept trying to speak to me, a week where I just kept saying no.  No I won’t listen.  No you can’t have her.  

I awoke early on the morning of the 25^th to the phone ringing.  I ignored it.  It was my first morning back from hospital.  I was glad to be home, but feeling angry and totally emotionally exhausted.  The phone started ringing again, so I went down to answer it.  “What’s happened to Sharnay”?  My friend greeted me with.  “Nothings happened to her” I replied irritably.

 “Something has happened.  I have been up all night praying for her.  Something is wrong”.  I was sure that I would have heard if something was wrong, but told her to phone the social worker.  She phoned back about 10 minutes later  to say that the social worker had been really rude.  Shouted at her, told her that there was nothing wrong with Sharnay, that they were not incompetent and she had had enough of both her and I interfering.  While I listened to this, I just knew.  I couldn’t carry on like this.  I was so emotionally finished.  I said to my friend: “ I actually can’t do this any more.  I am putting Sharnay into the Lords hands.  He now needs to deal with this the way He sees fit”.  When I went back and looked at the time of this conversation I realized that this phone call coincided with the time of Sharnay’s death.  I had finally given her into the Lords hands, and He allowed what I had feared most: she had died.

About 2 hours later,  when I was told that she was dead, I didn’t believe it.  No, she is fine.  The social worker said so.  But even as I said this, I just knew that what I had been told was the truth.  I cried and cried as I tried to reject the truth but couldn’t.  How could God do this to me!  How could He take her from me!  How could He do what I feared he would do!  Why didn’t He take this perfect opportunity to prove me wrong, show me how merciful and faithful He was and give her back to me.  He told me she would come back to me.  He told others to tell me that she would come back to me.  How is that even possible – that she died?!  She had died from septicaemia.  Caused from pneumonia that had gone untreated.  Her death was negligent.  It needn’t have happened.

Then I had to make phone calls.  I remember standing at the phone thinking who do I phone first?  I knew I had to call Rhys.   But he was the last person I wanted to tell.  How do you tell somebody that the child that they loved as their own was dead?   I could hear he was in shock.   He couldn’t talk to me.  I phoned our 3 closest friends.  Shock.   How was I even to begin to know how to tell our girls.  They were 5 and 6.  Too young to have to deal with this.  Too young to have to deal with the reality of life and death.   The death of a little baby they had just 2 weeks before loved and played with, and hoped to have as a sister.  Please Lord, do I really have to inflict this on them? 

The girls were fetched from school so that I could tell them before they heard it from anybody else.  Cassie sobbed and sobbed.  She cried for days afterwards, not understanding why this could happen.  She eventually verbalized the words that where pounding inside my head: Did God not think we were good enough to have her? 

Kayla was silent.  She got up from the couch and went to turn the computer on.  She went into the photo file and started scrolling through all the photo’s we had taken with Sharnay.  She sat there for ages.  She would never talk about what happened.  But for months after I would often find her sitting in front of the computer, just silently scrolling through those photo’s.  

We buried her together.  Her family and mine.  My heart just as broken as hers.  We both had lost our daughter.  But I realized that day, as I gave her a photo album of all the photo’s we had taken of Sharnay, that we had all the memories of her.  All she had was a book filled with ours. 

I’m grateful for that time we had with her.  If different  choices had been made right in the beginning, we would never have had the opportunity to have been touched by this angel.  This angel that totally transformed our lives, transformed our family in so many different ways.  Her story has touched lives and transformed hearts.  Her life was taken but because of it so many other children’s have been saved.

I had been leading a Mothers Prayer Group a year before.  One of the things that I would often share with the group was how I wasn’t able to give my children fully over into the Lords hands.  I was fearful that if I did this, it meant I was giving him license to do as He saw fit.  And that could even mean him allowing one of them to die.  And I just didn’t think I could ever survive loosing a child.  A few months after Sharnay’s death a close friend of mine who had been apart of this group asked me: “was it as bad as you feared?”  Only a close friend would have the courage to ask that!  And I knew exactly what she meant.  She knew that Sharnay was like my own child.  I could have birthed her as my own she was so apart of me.  Was there life for me after my child had died? 

There is the saying “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.”  There were times that the grief was so painful and overwhelming I thought it would kill me.  But it didn’t.  It certainly has made me stronger on many different levels.  It has also made me less fearful.  It, strangely enough, made me release my other children into the Lords hands – something I was never able to do before.  And I no longer fear that He is in control of them, us, me. 

My greatest comfort during this time was knowing that God knew exactly how I was feeling.  His son died too.  And it made me really appreciate and understand to some extent what price was paid.  If I look back now and see how many babies’ lives have been saved because of Sharnay’s life that was lost, it doesn’t take away the hurt or the suffering or even the loss that I still feel today.  I’m glad it wasn’t for nothing, but that doesn’t cancel out the pain.  God knew his son’s death was going to save lives, but I am sure that didn’t cancel out any of the pain and suffering that He endured during that time.  Knowing this made me feel like I was in good hands.  In the hands of someone who knew first hand what I was feeling.  There were many times I would cry and just say “Lord you know why”.  There were many times I didn’t have words deep enough to express what I was feeling.  And it was such a relief to know that I didn’t have to have them.  He knew. 

It’s been 6 years now since that day.  I can honestly say that the pain and hurt and longing and anger is no longer overwhelming.  Sometimes days go by that I don’t think about her.  I must admit that sometimes a few weeks will go by without me thinking of her.  But I don’t fight to keep the memories alive any more.  I have realized that they will always be there.  Sometimes they surface prompted by a place or an event.  Sometimes I have to dig around a bit to find them.  But they are there.  Every birthday I imagine what she would look like now, what her personality would be like.   But reality could have been quite different. 

I like to think of her, the size she was with her arms around her Fathers neck, nuzzling her face into his neck and seeing a smile of contentment and love on His face.  Knowing that she is safe in His arms.

A friend of mine gave me this poem.  Trying to let me see things from her mother’s perspective:

 Someone would like to have you as her child. But you are mine.

Someone would like to rear you on a costly mat. But you are mine.

Someone would like to place you on a camel blanket. But you are mine.

I have you to rear on a torn old mat.

Someone would like to have you as her child. But you are mine.

But this is the reality of it:  She wasn’t either of ours.  He had called her by name; she was His.