Free One Light Still Shines: My Life Beyond the Shadow of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting by Marie Monville Page B

proved unsuccessful.
    Elise lived for twenty minutes, passing from my arms to the embrace of heaven in mere moments. My brain could not compute that an hour and a half earlier, this whole nightmare was just starting and my daughter was alive within me, her life still a possibility. Now she was gone, my womb was empty, our hearts were broken, and our dreams were shattered.
    Our immediate family didn’t even know yet that I had goneinto labor. Everything had happened so fast that morning that we hadn’t had time to call. Charlie and I were alone. I asked him to call our parents, as I couldn’t bear the thought of telling them. I was still holding Elise, knowing that the nurses were going to take her soon. I didn’t want to lose one second of precious time with her, because these moments were going to have to hold me until our reunion in heaven. It was going to be a long wait — a whole lifetime.
    I can only imagine how difficult that call was for Charlie. As he sat nearby, calling his parents, I could hear his mom sobbing over the phone, her cry piercing the air. Parents have an instinctual desire to love and protect their children, even when those children are adults, and I know our parents grieved to see our pain. As for Charlie and me, to lose Elise made us feel that we had failed to protect our daughter. We knew, logically, that we’d done all we could, but logic couldn’t dispel the emotions that flooded us.
    Our parents came to the hospital and tried to comfort us. The hospital staff asked about funeral arrangements and other decisions, but I couldn’t think. Thankfully, my mom came alongside Charlie, and the two of them took over, deciding to have a private funeral service and burial. I wasn’t even twenty years old — what did I know about such things? My progression into adulthood had been jolted in a way I had never anticipated. This beautiful canvas, this masterpiece we’d been creating, was covered in black paint, the beautiful brushstrokes completely hidden by loss and devastation.
    We spent one night at the hospital, in the postpartum unit. It was torture. Emanating from the hallway outside my door were the cries of newborn babies and the congratulations of family members filled with exclamations of happiness. But the air in ourroom was different. It felt devoid of life, dark, and hopeless. The hospital staff kept us at the quiet end of a hallway, but nevertheless we heard it all, and it inflicted agony on a level neither Charlie nor I had ever known before.
    We wept openly, trying to comfort one another not with words, but with a tender stroke, the squeeze of a hand, the wiping of a tear. Charlie was so gentle, so vigilant over my care. I could see how badly he wished he could have spared me this grief, yet how helpless he felt to take away my suffering, physical as well as emotional.
    There was one moment, however, when a beam of light from heaven broke through my darkness — in the form of my nurse. She was with us that whole day, and during her shift she spent a lot of time in my room. I was touched by her tenderness.
    Though not scheduled to work the following day, she came to see me anyway, before I left the hospital. “Marie, I brought something for you,” she said, gently handing me a small box. I opened it to find a necklace with a charm: an angel holding a topaz gem. “It’s the November birthstone,” she explained softly. The gem caught the light and sparkled.
    “Elise’s birthstone,” I whispered, fresh tears spilling over. “It’s beautiful. Thank you so much.” She fluffed my pillow and tucked the white hospital blanket securely around my legs.
    Her small gift spoke volumes of love. It offered me the freedom to celebrate my child, Elise Victoria, in the midst of mourning my loss. It was like a tangible kiss of Jesus, speaking something that I could not articulate. God’s light in my darkness.

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the canvas
    It felt like a lifetime since Charlie’s desperate call that morning.