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Stephanie Knight’s life had ended the night her daughter died on the emergency room operating table at Harbor Hospital; at least, that’s how it felt. She barely remembered what the doctor had said to her, but the moments directly afterward were vivid in her mind. She recalled screaming, falling to the floor, her father’s hands under her arms. The doctor had stayed for a minute longer, and then he’d disappeared through the doors. She hadn’t seen him again, not even when the nurses took her back to see her baby before shuttling Rachel’s body off to the morgue. That was the hardest part, and she had shuddered when she thought of all that her daughter must have endured.
That’s what had haunted her for days afterward—the morgue. The thought of her sweet, vivacious baby girl lying in a freezer among dozens of the dead was enough to break Stephanie all over again. She had wanted to stop them when they wheeled Rachel away. She’d wanted to scream, to beg them not to bring her down there. But by then, she had no strength left, and all she could do was let Rachel go.
She worried what her daughter felt before she died. Did she have a lot of pain? Was she unconscious? Did she hear the paramedics or anything going on around them? These were questions that she knew she would never get the answers to in her lifetime. She would only know these answers after her own death when she met with her daughter again. She knew she would see Rachel again someday, but worried how long it would be before that moment.
She felt like a terrible, awful mother. Why had she even let Rachel go out that night? No matter how many times she berated herself, Stephanie knew the answer was simple: She hadn’t known Nadine would be driving. If she had, she would have said, “Absolutely not, Rachel Grace. You know how I feel about your friend’s driving.”
But she didn’t. And now they were all gone.
Her parents, Valerie and Howard Knight, made most of the funeral arrangements. Stephanie had stepped in to pick out the casket. Then there were the flowers, and the dress in which Rachel would be buried, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak on the phone about her daughter’s death or to meet with the mortician in person.
The days following the accident seemed like one seamless blanket of emptiness. When Stephanie was alone in the house, she would cook, or clean, or watch TV, anything to keep her mind from falling back into the bottomless abyss of her sadness. The days seemed like months.
Often, she would find herself on her couch, staring into the living room and seeing nothing. She could only feel the loneliness and incredible pain in her heart. In the moments when she couldn’t keep herself from thinking of Rachel, she pulled out photo albums and worked on immortalizing her daughter’s memory, creating love-filled collages of her short life and trying not to get her tears on the poster board.
The images of Rachel’s face, from gap-toothed kindergarten smiles to shots at thirteen just before a school dance the weekend before the accident both soothed and saddened Stephanie. She held each picture for a long time, running her fingers over the images as if she could reclaim the moments through touch. Everything seemed so incredibly distant like it was a dream. She felt as though her pictures were the only proof that Rachel had ever existed.
After a week, she couldn’t manage to spend another night at home alone. The silence was too eerie and devastating. She couldn’t breathe. Unable to live under the heavy cloud of hopelessness, she finally gathered some of her clothes and essential belongings and within hours had driven over to her mom and dad’s. She poured out her pain to her parents and finally collapsed in a pile of tears on the floor of her childhood bedroom.
The fact of Rachel’s death seemed surreal, and yet ... it was so very, painfully true. And Stephanie had no idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life without her.
Ever since the divorce, when Rachel was only five years old, it had been just the two of them, the dream team as Stephanie used to say. Rachel was the center of her universe. Thomas, Stephanie’s ex-husband and Rachel’s father, had minimal involvement in her life; only seeing her at holidays and occasionally for a weekend here and there. For Rachel, home was wherever Stephanie happened to be, and everybody knew it.
But now she would never come home again, and her future memories of Rachel would only be those of the recent past. Stephanie cried out to God, pleading for some reasonable explanation for her daughter’s tragedy. But only the nighttime silence answered her as she cried herself to sleep.
***
The day of Rachel’s funeral was beautiful, the sun beaming down from the bright blue dome of a cloudless sky. Stephanie stood numbly at the head of the visitation room, gazing at the light streaming in through the uncovered windows. She couldn’t bear to look to the left and see her daughter’s lifeless face framed by the satin lining of her coffin, her pretty hair done up in ringlets. The sweet smell of flowers overpowered her nose. Her heart began to pound as adrenaline coursed through her body. Her legs desperately wanted to run, to carry her some place far away from the gut-wrenching torture she was about to face.
People began to filter through the doors at the other end of the room. They took memorial cards, printed with Rachel’s last school picture, signed the condolence book, and made their way slowly toward Stephanie, speaking in hushed tones. She gave a lot of hugs that day, offered as many tissues as she accepted and shed enough tears to last a lifetime.
There were laughs too and smiles, but not enough. It broke her heart to see Rachel’s friends balk as they peered into the coffin; even the boys struggled against tears. An hour into the viewing, with an hour left to go, Stephanie desperately needed a break. She told her mother that she was going to the bathroom and slipped out into the hall, narrowly escaping the clutches of a gaggle of well-meaning church ladies, who surely would have smothered her with their sympathies if she had let them.
In the restroom, she reapplied some of her makeup, staring emotionlessly at the pallid, worn face in the mirror. Was that her? It was certainly the face of someone bereaved, a mother who had lost a child. She paused in the application of her mascara. Yes, that was her. That was her identity now, this great, defining tragedy. Had she decided to not have a child with Thomas, she might have been spared from the devastation she was now going through. But in her mind, she knew that would have never happened. She loved Rachel more than anything else, and she couldn’t imagine a life without her at its core. And if that meant she’d grieve for the rest of her days, so be it. She would always be a mother.
On her way back to the crowded room, a deep voice stopped her in her tracks, one she’d been expecting and dreading at the same time.
“Steph?” She looked up to see Thomas standing just outside the doors with a bouquet of flowers in his hand. He looked like he’d been crying.
“Thomas,” she answered, in a much softer tone than she had thought herself capable of using with him. She walked up and touched his arm, noticing that he had gotten a new suit, that he’d shaved and combed his hair. She was almost proud of him, or she would’ve been if it hadn’t taken his daughter’s funeral to force him to clean up. “How are you?”
“Not great.” He pressed his lips together in a thin line. “Is she ... is she in there?” He paused to swallow. “Can I see her?”
Stephanie nodded. Her ex-husband looked as broken as she felt, and it made her feel cruel for doubting the depth of his fatherly love. Their separation had been anything but cordial, and she recalled for the first time in years how bitterly he had fought her for custody of Rachel, and now she wondered if it was because he had really loved her as much as she did. “Will you be okay?” she asked as she placed her hand on his arm.
“I don’t know.” Thomas rubbed his face. “I mean ... good Lord.” He gave her a sad, crooked smile that was a tragic caricature of the one that had made her fall in love with him. “I guess I thought that once you’re a parent, you stay that way forever.”
Stephanie stayed quiet. She didn’t trust herself to speak at that moment without dissolving into sobs. Instead, she just took him by the arm, and they walked into the viewing room together. Thomas stiffened at the sight of the coffin. His face was a map of every emotion she’d been feeling for the week since Rachel had died: fear, anger, sadness, love. She could see the same debate raging in his eyes. He didn’t want to see her; not like this. And yet, he knew he had to.
She stood back to give him privacy as he approached the coffin. For a moment, Thomas simply stood, gazing down at Rachel’s face. Then, he did something Stephanie had never seen, not once in their entire tumultuous relationship. Thomas Knight got down on his knees in front of his daughter’s body and prayed.
Stephanie thought about that for a long time afterward, especially at the cemetery after everyone had left, and she stood alone at Rachel’s graveside, unable to bear the pain of leaving her behind. She took the bobby pins out of her hair and sat down on the grass, looking down on the tops of the white lilies they had tossed onto the casket. She was at once impressed by and envious of Thomas’s show of faith, even though part of her doubted that it was anything more than regrets and the spur of the moment. He hadn’t ever expressed any interest in going to church or teaching his only child the ways of the faithful—that had all fallen on her and her parents. Stephanie would have gone so far as to say he had no right to speak about God to Rachel because she knew Thomas was estranged from the Lord.
But now, she was angry with God. Yes, he had taken Rachel home, and yes, that was sometimes comforting. More often, Stephanie was furious. Why now? Why Rachel? And God, why like this? It was all so far beyond her understanding that she couldn’t imagine what the bigger picture might be. A world without her daughter, where she was doomed to a lonely, miserable life? It wasn’t fair.
Then again, she had had the divorce.
Maybe that was it. A well of ancient guilt bubbled up inside of her, giving way to a geyser of fresh sorrow. Maybe the destruction of her marriage vows, the breaking of the promises she had made before God, had cost her Rachel’s precious life. Maybe she and Thomas together had doomed their innocent baby to a fate she never deserved.
A sigh escaped Stephanie’s lips as she tried to draw upon her memory of God’s promises and quell the tentacles of doubt trying to suffocate her. In spite of her pain and lack of understanding, she wasn’t ready to give up on God yet. There was so much God had done in her life to simply ignore as pure luck. She hoped in time, God would reveal His divine purpose for Rachel’s tragedy. And if not in her lifetime, then when she stood before Him in heaven.
Stephanie kissed the tips of her fingers, then reached out and touched the edge of Rachel’s grave. “I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered through her tears. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Ten minutes later, she walked into the church across the street from the graveyard. It was small inside, but lovely, with waterfalls of color spilling from the stained glass windows along the walls and above the altar. Tucked away next the entrance was the door to the pastor’s office. Stephanie headed towards the front of the sanctuary and knelt before a life-size replica of the crude wooden cross Jesus had carried on his journey to Golgotha. She bowed her head and recited a silent prayer in her head. Then she slid into a pew in the back and took up a Bible and bowed her head.
God, she felt, was lost to her, at least in this particular moment. But the reverent hush of the church was all-encompassing; it quieted her mind. Whether God was there with her or not, Stephanie found herself guided toward a purpose. She opened her eyes.
At the end of the sanctuary, against the wall to the right of the altar, stood a baptismal. It was the kind Stephanie remembered from her childhood, with a large glass pane so churchgoers could witness a new believer’s public profession of faith. Before she had become a believer, she had often watched with curiosity and conviction as the unsaved gave their life to God and professed their faith by washing their old life away in the cleansing water of the baptismal.
As Sundays went by, Stephanie could feel the Holy Spirit knocking at the door to her heart, but she would often resist, refusing to completely surrender her independent will to God. It wasn’t until she and Thomas started having marital troubles and the future of their relationship hung in the balance that she surrendered her life to God, letting Him take control of her life.
She could still recall the day she committed her life to God. The pastor had preached a message about how God wanted his flock to cast all their cares upon Him, and that He would take care of his sheep. The message touched her, like an arrow piercing through the center of her heart. It was a day she would never forget.
An elderly woman with grey hair entered the sanctuary, wearing an old-fashioned beige dress with a wool sweater. Stephanie gave the woman a smile and watched as she walked with a purpose, as if she had done it so many times in the past, and sat in the first pew, bowing her head to pray. Stephanie rose to her feet and headed back towards the entrance of the church. She needed someone to talk to, someone to listen to her doubts and frustrations about God.
In her mind, there was only one qualified person who could maybe help her understand what God was allowing to happen in her life. Someone with a listening ear who could soothe the gaping wound inside, a wound that felt like someone had taken a butcher knife to her heart. Stephanie stopped in front of the wooden door with a brass sign that said Pastor’s Office. She took a deep breath and knocked gently.
