Chapter 2:

A CANDLE EXTINGUISHED

 

January 19, 1984, eight and a half months into Theresa’s pregnancy, I got to go with her to one of her final doctor visits. I didn’t usually get to go because of my work schedule, but this time the schedules lined up well enough for me to accompany her. As the doctor performed all of his checks, I watched his face grow from confident to confused to concerned. Something wasn’t right.

“What’s wrong,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s not palpable.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t hear a heartbeat. I don’t know why—the baby might have turned or something—I just can’t get a good reading. I’m going to schedule you for an ultrasound to find out what’s going on.”

Theresa had not grown as large as women normally do when pregnant, but she was pretty small to begin with. We, along with the doctor, had just assumed the baby was small too. None of us wanted to find out that there was some horrible deformity. But we went through with the ultrasound, hoping for the best, and we went back to the doctor’s office to wait for the results.

“Mr. and Mrs. Walls,” he said, “I’m sorry. The fetus has expired.”

Worse than all our fears, reality crashed in. Our baby had died. We had lost our Jennifer Ann without ever knowing her. The story of her life was over; the end had come before the beginning. The comfort God had given us at Dan’s funeral, such a short time before, now remained the farthest thought from our minds.

We scheduled an induction for the next day in order to remove the fetus.

That night, we went over to my mom’s house, trying to find support to deal with our grief. Then the unexpected happened. Theresa started going into labor. We didn’t really know that was what it was; this was our first child, and we didn’t know what to expect. But we called the doctor and explained the symptoms to him, and he confirmed it. Theresa was beginning labor, and we needed to get her to the hospital quickly. He called the hospital, and they were ready for us when we arrived.

They wheeled Theresa into the birthing room and set her up as if it were a normal birth. Then she started getting sick.

No! I thought. This can’t be happening! This is all wrong! Lord, where is your miracle? I had fully expected a miracle. Everything had been perfect: this was our first child, our marriage was strong, I had a steady job, and we were serving the Lord at our church. Life could not have been better. And then the morning’s news had come. Yet I knew that it couldn’t have been accurate—God wouldn’t do that to me! The doctor had simply forgotten to clean the wax out of his ears that morning. Maybe the ultrasound machine had been on the fritz. Or perhaps the baby was dead; my God can raise the dead! Only, that wasn’t happening. God wasn’t showing up as a Savior. He wasn’t bringing a miraculous healing. He had taken my firstborn. Was He going to take my wife as well?

Theresa had started vomiting, all of the monitors were erratic, and nobody would tell me what was going on. I’m a person who likes to fix people. I have a passion for helping people put their lives back together, for working through tough emotions with them, for healing relationships. It crushed me to be so helpless! I stood by, watching things fall apart, unable to do anything. We had family showing up at the hospital. Pastor Jennings was there. All kinds of people were here to encourage and support us, and I had no idea what to tell them.

I remember walking out of that room before the delivery, when I couldn’t stand the thought that Theresa might see me crying. I walked through a fog, passing Pastor Jennings without even seeing him. I walked into the bathroom, grabbed the sink to hold myself up, and stared into the mirror. I can still see that image in my mind: my face, red and swollen with grief, tears streaming down my cheeks. Nothing made sense. Why was this happening?

After it was all said and done, the doctor filled me in on exactly what had happened during the delivery. It turned out that the dead fetus had caused a reaction in Theresa’s body. She had lost all the amniotic fluid, and the little body had been resting in her dry womb. This contact with the dead flesh had actually poisoned her bloodstream. She had been dying in that hospital room, but thankfully, the doctors had been able to stabilize her. There was my miracle, though I hadn’t seen it at the time.

In the bathroom, I splashed some water on my face and dried it. Then I walked back to the delivery room. Theresa had been stabilized, and the doctor informed me that the baby was coming out now.

When the baby came out, she only weighed one pound. I saw the obvious birth defects: clubbed hands and feet, a cleft palate, and skin that looked odd, sort of unfinished. Had she lived, the doctor said, it would have been a miserable, short existence.

The one miracle that we did experience right away had to do with vision. I saw all these defects. Theresa didn’t, nor did my mom, who came into the room soon after. The two of them saw the baby fully formed and perfect, even though they held her tiny body and looked closely. They saw no defects, and I think God granted them that small comfort: they saw her the way He did.

The doctor, who had been with us from near the beginning of the pregnancy, had left the room. One of the nurses soon reported that he was outside, face pressed against the wall, pounding his fist in anguish. And he did this for a living! I respected him all the more when I learned how he shared our grief.

The labor and delivery had taken us quite a few hours into January 20, and the doctors wanted to keep Theresa in the hospital for several days to make sure she recovered from the ordeal. In order to spare her any more grief than she already had, though, the hospital staff put her in a solitary room away from the maternity ward. But it wasn’t quite far enough. In the middle of the night, she could still hear the babies being wheeled in the Isolettes to their mothers for feeding.

I stayed with Theresa almost the entire time she was in the hospital. On the twenty-first I left briefly to pick up some personal effects and to get Theresa some flowers to help cheer her up. At the same time, I was trying to deal with my own emotions. Jennifer was supposed to have been my first child, but she had never even gotten a chance at life. I couldn’t express the grief that threatened to consume me. My head swam, and I became disoriented. Fortunately, I was able to distance myself enough from my emotions to remain focused enough to drive, but it wasn’t easy.

Then, about halfway back to the hospital, God showed up. I reached down to turn on the radio to focus my mind on something other than the pain of loss. Immediately, a new song began. I had never heard it before. The song, “After the Rain,” had just been released by the Bill Gaither Trio, and the chorus hit me like a warm blanket:

After the rain, there’ll be singing,
After the clouds are gone.
Sunshine will break its way through darkness.
Night only lasts so long.

As difficult as this journey was, I suddenly knew that God would faithfully lead us through it. He had been there with us the whole way, and He would not leave. We would have to go through the darkness, but it would be temporary—day would come again!

And then God spoke directly to me, not in an audible voice, but with these words that filled my mind with a certainty that could not have come from me: “I will never take another child of yours in that way again.”

I can’t say that instantly took all the pain away or put a spring back into my step, but it gave me hope. Yes, we would have to carry the pain for awhile, we would have to deal with it, but we would come through it. Somehow, God would bring good out of this situation. And He would not take us through this again. When I returned to the hospital, I shared God’s message with Theresa, and it brought comfort in the midst of her grief.

 

While Theresa recuperated in the hospital, I began to put things in order for our return to “normal” life. At one point soon after the delivery, a nurse had come in to ask us, “Do you want to bury your child, or would you like us to get rid of her for you?”

“Of course we’re going to bury our child!” I snapped. I was enraged, though I held most of it inside. What a thing to ask! How dare she imply that our child was no more than a piece of garbage! Was she going to simply drop the body down a chute to the furnace? What was this, The Giver? “Get rid of her”? How can you ask something like that to a grieving couple, whose dream of being parents has just been smashed in this tragedy?

Once I had calmed down, I had to make arrangements for the funeral. I had the task—one I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy—of going into the funeral home and picking out an eighteen-inch casket and an outfit of clothing. I picked a pretty wooden casket colored to look like marble and a tiny pink dress and bonnet.

As I made arrangements with the funeral director, a compassionate man, I asked, “Could I see Jennifer?”

He replied, “Mr. Walls, I don’t think it’s a good idea. She has had an autopsy, and she doesn’t look the same.”

But I insisted, and the director acquiesced. So he left to prepare the body for viewing and returned when he had finished. Pastor Jennings had come along to support me, which was a real bonding experience for the two of us, and he walked with me into the viewing room.

We hadn’t taken any pictures of Jennifer at the delivery, so I had brought my camera along in the hope of having something to remember her by. As the pastor and I walked in, I began taking pictures of the casket, the body, and the whole setup. Suddenly, I really looked through the viewfinder. The sight I saw horrified me. The camera slowly lowered. I looked into the casket.

Panic gripped me. “Where’s her face?! I can’t find her face!”

The pastor, confused, ran out of the room to get the funeral director. When the director arrived, he calmed me down, determined the cause of my panic, and compassionately explained, “Mr. Walls, I did try to tell you that she has had an autopsy. During that procedure, the face was essentially destroyed.”

Of course, I was upset, but I let the emotions bleed off. I knew there was nothing to be done. It wasn’t the director’s fault that my child had died. It wasn’t his fault that she had needed the autopsy. All he had done was show me compassion and treat me with respect. I thanked him, and since the arrangements had all been made, I returned to the hospital. I did not show Theresa those photos for years. I did not want to spoil the miraculous vision God had given her in that hospital: the vision of Jennifer, whole and complete.

The funeral took place soon after Theresa got out of the hospital. We began at the funeral home and then held the committal service at the graveside. Theresa’s brother Jack had agreed to be our sole pallbearer. He carried the casket out of the funeral home to the limo for the short ride to the cemetery.

The scene at the grave site could have come straight out of a movie. The overcast sky poured rain on us as if the angels themselves were crying. Many people from the church, holding black umbrellas, surrounded us, mourning with us as we mourned. The wind whipped our plastic chairs into the backs of our legs as we sang a hymn. Pastor Jennings delivered a wonderful, encouraging message. But then, when it was over, one by one, the people filed away. We were left alone. We looked at each other, and that’s when the sobbing really began. We stood for many minutes, holding each other, and finally we walked to our car and drove to my mother’s house, where she was holding a reception.

The reception was very difficult for Theresa. She was very much an introvert and didn’t want to deal with people in the midst of dealing with her grief. For much of the reception, she sat away from the crowd and talked with one other person. I reacted very differently. As an extrovert, I found it comforting to surround myself with people. Their company helped me to escape from my grief and to normalize it. By gathering friends around me, I could assure myself that life did indeed go on.

Our different personalities produced a strain in our relationship in the days to come. Personality conflicts can be a struggle in any marriage, but they can be deadly after such a tragedy. I would go to church and sit up front, talking and laughing with those around me. Theresa would go to church and sit in the balcony with one friend. She would look down at me and despise me in her heart. After church, I would want to go out with friends. She would want to go home. I would go out anyway.

The strain got so bad that our marriage might have ended if things hadn’t changed. It took me some time to figure out what was really going on, but at last I did see it. The solution wasn’t something that happened overnight. It took several weeks for me to realize how much she needed me and how I had abandoned her. As I realized that, I also came to realize that I needed her just as much. I had isolated myself as much as she had. Instead of connecting with the one person who was going through the same thing I was, I busied myself in a crowd. And let me tell you, you can be very alone in the midst of a crowd. I don’t think our friends realized what was going on, or they would have called us out—they knew how important a strong marriage was to your Christian testimony; divorce rates were on the rise even then.

But by surrounding myself with people, not even letting my emotions show, I wasn’t truly dealing with my emotions. Theresa, on the other hand, by keeping people out, was simply wallowing in hers. She didn’t really want to keep me out, but I had turned my back on her. Running from my emotions had kept me from seeing that she needed my help to deal with hers. I had put myself before my wife. The Lord had to remind me: while I had lost a little girl, I still had a wife to care for. She was still my responsibility. Once I realized this, I began to change my behavior. Even though communication wasn’t our strongest suit, Theresa and I needed to rely on each other; the only two people who could understand our grief were the two of us. In time, we were able to work things out.

I don’t know that we ever really got over it, though. To be honest, we just started to exist with it. Even though it looked like we were moving forward, I don’t think I truly dealt with the loss of my daughter for years. Her twenty-seventh birthday was—would have been—just a few months ago. Do you ever really get through the pain? Do you ever fully deal with it? We existed with it for years and found new ways to fill the void, but even though the screaming pain was gone, muffled by other things, we still felt a quiet, dull pain.

It still hurts.

 

Theresa had been unable to return to our apartment after she left the hospital; everything there reminded her of our lost child. It fell to me to clean the place out, including emptying the little nursery we had made, and get the place ready for new tenants. The two of us then moved into her parents’ house for a short time. Now, Theresa’s parents had been foster parents for many years, and Theresa had grown up having foster brothers and sisters. At this time, her parents were fostering two young boys who became very close to us.

The doctor had advised us not to wait too long before trying again to have children, but with such a short time since Jennifer’s passing, we didn’t feel we were ready quite yet. One thing we thought might help fill the void left by Jennifer was to become foster parents ourselves. And what better kids to start with than two boys who already liked us? So we went through the licensing process after moving into a new apartment in East Bremerton, and we worked it out with her parents and with the foster care system that these two boys would come to live with us.

We went from being a couple expecting their first newborn to being a couple with a toddler and a five-year-old. It was quite a transition, but it really helped. Those boys brought such joy to our lives for the time they were with us. They called us “Mom” and “Dad,” and hearing that brightened our day every time.

I still worked night security at the shipyard, commuting back to Bremerton every day. One day after getting home from work, I had to take the boys to visit their birth mother. So they hopped into my 1970 banana-yellow Mustang (I loved that car!), and we hit the road. After dropping them off in Poulsbo, about fifteen miles away, I drove home along the water through Tracyton, which is normally a lovely scenic drive on a winding rural road. Houses and fields turn to forested ravines that soon open up to a spectacular cliffside view of Dyes Inlet. That day, though, I couldn’t enjoy the scenery. My eyelids were heavy, but I needed to get home because we were hosting a youth group leadership meeting with Pastor Jennings and Pastor Bill. Then I saw a police cruiser coming toward me, and by instinct, I looked down at the speedometer. When I looked up again, drowsiness overwhelmed me. Though still awake, I didn’t realize the road was curving. The road went left, and my car went straight.

The car flipped onto its side and came to rest in a ditch. Jolted awake by adrenaline, I crawled out of the car, not thinking I might be hurt. I made my way up to a nearby house (this was long before cell phones), and I called a tow truck and Pastor Bill. Both said they would come help, so I went back out to the car. A man with a truck and tow rope saw me there as he drove by, and he stopped to pull the car out of the ditch and onto the side of the road. Then I noticed the miracle that had saved my life. Where my car had stopped, a low stump stuck out of the ground. It was this stump that had stopped my car. Beyond the stump, the ditch became a deep ravine, and I could only imagine what would have happened to me, had the car gone down there.

The tow truck brought the car to our place, and I figured now that everyone was here and I was safe, we might as well have our meeting. But during the meeting, I became ill. As I sat, I began getting chills and nausea. I let everyone know I wasn’t feeling well, but no one realized how bad the situation was. We all dismissed it as shakiness after the crash. But it kept getting worse. After the meeting, I found I couldn’t even stand up without vomiting. Theresa took me straight to the hospital. After a few tests in the ER, they admitted me right away. I had an enlarged spleen. Apparently, I had hit the steering wheel or something, and it had caused my spleen to react by expanding in size, resulting in all sorts of problems.

They weren’t quite sure what to do, but it would probably require surgery. So they kept me in the hospital overnight, while everyone I knew was praying. The next morning, the doctors checked again one last time before determining a course of action. Miraculously, my spleen had shrunk to normal size! I felt fine. After double-checking everything (again), they found I was perfectly healthy. It still amazes me to think that the car’s body took more to fix than my own.

While in the hospital, Theresa had called my boss to tell him about the accident and that I needed some time off. He seemed upset that I wanted to take time off to recuperate. That was the last straw. The commute was killing me, the hours didn’t let me sleep, I had gotten in an accident, and now he was getting mad that I needed to recover from what had looked to be a serious injury. I went to an employment agency to find a new job.

 

The agency connected me with R&K Market in the nearby town of Silverdale, a small retailer, not much more than a convenience store, that needed a cashier. I had done retail work before, so I had no problem running the till and taking care of the store. It appeared that the job would work out well, and we eventually moved to Silverdale so I wouldn’t have as far to go to get home. In the beginning, everything seemed right. I quickly took to my responsibilities as a cashier and stocker. At church, I served with Hillcrest Assembly’s music team as prepararation for my jump into ministry, to fulfill the call that the Lord had given me several years prior. What could go wrong? Little did I know, the enemy had a plan to sideline me.

For some reason, I hadn’t paid close attention to R&K’s magazine rack during the application process. Hidden there was a demon from my past, waiting to attack me again. While stocking one night, I received a shock: R&K sold pornographic magazines. This was a dilemma. Years earlier, long before my relationship with Theresa, I had developed a porn addiction. But I thought I had overcome it. I had thought this stronghold in my life was long gone, but as I unwrapped the packaging on these periodicals, they pulled at me. I was sure I had beaten this enemy, but all of a sudden, it was staring me in the face.

It began with a curiosity. One little peek surely wouldn’t hurt. Then I started to briefly skim the contents. It wasn’t long before reading these magazines became a nightly routine. Sure, the guilt was there, especially when I would go home to Theresa. It was like I walked into the house in a daze. I had all these images in my mind that I didn’t want there. I had this hidden sin that I could not even get up the courage to confess. But the desire to look seemed even stronger than my guilt. It was certainly stronger than my willpower.

Why me? I wondered. Why do I deal with this? Was it something wrong inside me? Was I somehow defective? Was God using this as a thorn in my flesh, to prove the sufficiency of His grace, or was this something He wanted me to break free from? Could He still work in my life, even while I had this problem? If no one born of God continues to sin (1 John 5:18), was I even truly saved? Did my intentions count for anything? Even from the start, I wanted to break this habit, but I could not resist.

Addictions are like that. I don’t pretend to be an expert on spiritual warfare, but I don’t use the word demon lightly. Whether it is truly a literal demon or merely some twisted aspect of our broken human nature, there is undeniably a spiritual component to many addictions (porn, alcohol, drugs, or whatever). There comes a point when that temptation is sitting there in front of you, and you don’t even want to give in. You know there will be consequences, you know the guilt you’ll carry, you know it has been so long since giving in has brought you any joy whatsoever, and you even know that Jesus Christ died so that you could be free from the addiction. But you give in anyway. If you’ve ever been there, you know there’s more than just your own will at work. You know what I mean when I talk about a demon.

Theresa was no fool, of course. She recognized that something had changed in me, especially in my attitude toward her. The time came when I couldn’t bear it anymore: I confessed to my wife. At first, it seemed like she was in a daze too. She was justifiably upset, of course; it was like I had been cheating on her every day for weeks. But she didn’t quite know how to react. She had thought that my porn problem had been a phase of adolescence (we had briefly talked about it before, after the Playboy incident in Juanita), but now she discovered there was more to it. She really struggled with the tension between her righteous anger and the need to forgive and encourage me in the battle.

On the other hand, I struggled between a desire not to hurt her and a desire to be open with her. I would not do it again, I promised. Surely now that the sin was in the open, my willpower would be stronger. But my willpower would never be strong enough. It might work for awhile, but eventually a new temptation would overwhelm it. But confession was hard, and her reactions would escalate, growing more and more volatile as the betrayals mounted. “Why would you let this happen? Why can’t you just say no? Why would you even open the cover?”

Finally, I told her I would get help. After all, my own willpower hadn’t been working. So I sought counsel from Pastor Bill and Pastor Jennings. If anyone could help me fight this darkness, surely my pastors could. But even then, I don’t believe any of us understood this sin and the hold it can have on a person. They basically gave me a slap on the wrist and told me not to do it anymore. We were all naïve.

As I look back, I believe we didn’t take the sin seriously enough. The church today seems to understand the devastating effect pornography can have on a person’s life, but back then it was not understood. We did not treat my sin as if I had committed adultery, but in retrospect that is exactly what I had done. Jesus tells us that to look at a woman lustfully is to commit adultery (Matthew 5:28), and if He views it that way, why should we take it any less seriously? The mental state is exactly the same: I want what I want—the gratification provided to me by that woman—and nothing else matters right now.

The pastors did provide accountability, though, and that helped. At the same time, I took encouragement from a new friend. A man named Brian walked into R&K one evening. As we chatted, we discovered that we were both Christians. Brian was involved in street ministry—ministering to the homeless, the addicted, and the downtrodden—and he soon began to minister to me. I quickly grew to trust him, and in that very first conversation, I found myself confessing to him about my pornography addiction. We prayed together, and I felt renewed.

The encouragement and accountability from Brian and my pastors gave me new strength to resist the temptations. More and more, I followed their counsel to refrain. I still struggled daily, but the battle seemed easier.

Soon, God began to open doors for me to answer His call into ministry, and that renewed vision helped more than anything. As Proverbs 29:18 says, “where there is no vision, the people perish” (KJV). God worked in me, and the bondage seemed to lift. The more I delved into His Word, the more easily self-control came. But I never did completely escape that demon while I worked at R&K, and it came back to haunt me later. Sometimes, fleeing from temptation is all it takes to escape, but this bondage would not be so easily broken.