The Most Awful Week

The next few days were all a blur as we began what is undoubtedly the most awful thing any parent has even been through, the planning of and preparing for your child’s memorial and burial services. I was fortunate that I was allowed to go home from the hospital after only 2 days so I could be home with my husband and family during this time.

It is such an irony that during this time when all you want to do is crawl into your bed and disappear that you are busier than you have ever been, the appointments and planning never seemed to end. First of course we had to decide before we even left the hospital, which funeral home we were going to use. Then we had to have the initial meeting with them, and make decisions that were simply unbearable, cremation or burial, funeral or memorial, open or closed casket, which cemetery did we want to bury our son in? What color casket did we want, were we going to have pall bearers, did we want a memory book? Then of course we had to “tour” the cemeteries to decide where we wanted our precious boy to be buried. Once that was decided we had to meet with an attendant and plan the graveside service. The list goes on and on. It is my dearest wish that no parent will ever have to go through this torturous experience, it is not one I would wish on anyone, even my worst enemy.

One week and a day after the birth of our son we had his memorial service at our place of worship. I will be eternally grateful for our church family and friends. We got to meet with both our pastors ahead of time to help plan the service and pick out the music we wanted played that day.

 The music we picked was truly what helped me get through the service, it was so comforting. We chose 4 songs: “Amazing Grace/My Chains are gone”, “Savior Please”, “He Is” and “I Will Rise”. It was an absolutely beautiful service; the message was one of hope. That even though we were separated from our son now, we would see him again! That it was okay to be angry with God about what happened, but not to blame him. That we should go to him for comfort and love. He truly understands what it means to lose a son, an innocent, blameless one just like our little Ethan.

After the service the casket was opened again and anyone who wanted to had the opportunity to come and say their last goodbyes to Ethan and give us their condolences. It was very meaningful and touching to see all the people that came to honor our son. He truly touched hundreds if not thousands of lives, even though he lived for only a very short amount of time. There were over 200 people at the service, some of them were strangers to us. They had seen his obituary and were compelled to come and honor him and us. It was amazing.

After the service we had a reception that was put on by my church family and friends. We are truly blessed to have such wonderful caring people in our lives. Dave’s work donated the food for our reception, enough to feed 200 people! We were truly in awe of all that was done on our behalf and in honor of our son and we can never begin to thank everyone. We are truly humbled. We are so grateful that we were able to have such a beautiful service to honor our son, this was our one act as his parents that we could do for him while he was physically with us and we will always be thankful.

I think out of all the days so far, this was the hardest for me, physically anyway. Slowly our family and friends some of whom had traveled my hours to be here began to leave. One by one and group by group they said their goodbyes and began their travels back home. I was utterly exhausted when the service and reception were done and yet we were not yet finished. Because we had the memorial service on a Saturday afternoon we could not have the private graveside service until the following Monday.

Finally our family drove home and I collapsed once more into what had become “my chair” in the living room. We were proud, we had made it through the very public mourning of our son and were still standing at the end of the day. Now I just wanted to rest, to pass out and forget at least for a little while that my one and only child, my firstborn son had died. So finally after the rest of the family had left late into the evening we crawled into bed, crying and holding each other we cried out to our God asking him those tough questions that only he could possibly answer. After we were completely spent we finally fell asleep praying that the nightmares wouldn’t come and that we could actually get some much needed rest.