End-of-year – Naptime Musings

July – a new month. The unbearable passage of time.

It’s been a month since I took these end-of-school-year pictures.

There’s so much to say, such sweetness in this season of slowness, watching the kids grow in stature and in personhood.

Over the last months, they’ve learned to help make meals, slicing cucumbers and fruit, making rice, assembling sandwiches. They’ve learned hymns and parts of the New City Catechism. They’ve read hundreds of books.

Zeke honed his skills with a new club soccer team, helped direct a musical at school. He was a leader at school, known for his kindness and his helpfulness and his loyalty to his friends. He was a loving Goh Goh to his siblings at home, bearing the burdens that come with being the oldest – carrying the most, doing the hardest chores, being most aware of needs and problems. He’s an encourager, always praising people and noticing what they’re doing well and asking others to see too. He joined a competition he was nervous about, and when he lost, he did so with courage and graciousness. He learned to flip on the trampoline, and perfected his underwater turn. He graduated from elementary school. Suddenly, he seems more adolescent than child.

Zane split the year between the public school and homeschool. He was dearly loved by his classmates, an enthusiastic player of all games, a funny guy, a sharp shooter in basketball despite his small stature. Despite thriving at public school, a free spirit, he begged to be homeschooled. And he loved the freedom to dive into his interests, raising butterflies and ladybugs, painting birds and building electrical circuits. (He does hate handwriting and piano practice, though.) He’s been the sweetest playmate to Zoe, and they can engage for hours on end in pretend play as animals, as warriors, as detectives. (We listened to Seabiscuit on audiobook and there were a lot of horse-races for a while.) He hates when I’m in a bad mood, and when he senses one coming on, with a sad, sad face, he’ll ask, “Can I have a hug?”

Zoe moved from being the oldest at daycare, to being homeschooled solo, to being homeschooled alongside a dear church friend, to being homeschooled with her brother. And there were different joys in each of those. She spent hours upon hours listening to audiobooks, going through all of E.B. White’s and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, churning through Story of the World, learning about Canadian and Japanese history that I never learned about (or never retained?). She’s picking up reading, but still loves being read to the most. She learned to write her name in Chinese (or Japanese kanji). So many beautiful spring days by the lake, at the community garden, in the backyard, doing crafts (she calls them “projects”), gathering flowers for bouquets, peering at dandelions or a feather or California poppy bloom (“calyx,” she likes to point out). She’s affectionate and cheery, and she loves love. Sometime she wants to be with her brothers more than they want to be with her, but she’s also quick to affirm that they’re “good Goh goh’s.” We’ve been trying to escape the SF fog and traveling south during the daytime, giving us opportunities to practice balancing on a bike. Maybe this is the year she’ll pick it up. Zoe shares a bit of my fearful temperament, and so my heart broke many times with pride this summer as she took big risks in the face of fear to learn how to swim.

And – this is the school year during which they lost their baby sister, just five days in.

They have all lost her. They have each lost her.

As their mother, with every moment and event of beauty and joy comes a proportional wave of sorrow, of longing. A stupendous ache.

“Zuri should be here” is not even a conscious thought, just a pervasive pulsing in every cell, in every situation. A morning going through reading lessons. Lunch in the backyard. A soccer game. A performance. A beautiful hike. Time with friends. Joy and sorrow, joy and sorrow, joy and sorrow – hand in hand, a baritone wailing alongside the tinkling melody.

The children who stood on our front steps in August 2022 for these milestone photos embodied an innocence they will never live with again. The next ones – June 2023. They all spent a full school year without Zuri. The first of a life-time of years without her. Three little ones, too little to bear so much grief. And I am helpless to undo the pain, helpless to shield them from the waves of pain that inevitably come.

I can fix nothing. I can only be here, limping alongside them, telling them, “I miss her too. I am so sad too.”

So continues this long, long road. The journey of living a life that doesn’t fit the script – the script I thought I was entitled to.

There will always be a missing child in our photos. A missing name on people’s lips, on holiday cards, on invitations, on the many applications I fill out. Zuri. Zuri. Zuri.

Their precious sister. Our sweet delight.

“…out of my stony griefs Bethel I’ll raise.”

I’ve wondered and prayed, “Lord, is this what deep, deep love is like? Is this a taste of what it costs you to love us? Do you hurt like this, only much more?”

“… so by my woes to be

nearer my God to Thee,

nearer to Thee.”

I’ve read in quite a few books about suffering, men and women who said that the sweetness and closeness with Jesus that came through their pain and trails, they would not trade for anything. That, in simple honesty, is not me. If I were given the choice right now, I would trade many, many things we’ve gained to have Zuri back. In a heartbeat.

Mercifully, He has never given me that choice. He has only given me this life, this road, none other.

I never thought of myself as someone who could bear a lot. Surely this much pain should have killed me. Yet, “surely, the Lord is here and I knew it not!” Pain. I didn’t think of our Savior, our Abba Father, as God in pain. I know better now.

This year, these children, our Bethel. By our woes to be nearer, nearer to our God, our suffering King.