O My Sons
My first child was an unexpected gift. I’d never really thought about children, and it didn’t occur to me that I could be pregnant. I had no idea how that big watermelon-sized lump in my belly was going to get out. No one told me about birth, and I never asked. I was that ignorant. I was also completely unprepared for motherhood and totally surprised at the love I felt for my angel boy. He was so smart and sweet and good. I never thought God would allow me to keep my little Davey because he was so angelic.
And He didn’t.
I was drinking the day two-year-old Davey died. I was on the shore and he was with his father in a kayak, no life vests in sight. I and a young Navajo boy whose name I never knew gave my son CPR until the authorities got there. His body was gray and completely limp. I did the compressions with no training, and my young friend did the breathing. That was the last time I touched my son while he was alive. My husband’s body didn’t come out of the water until after I left in the ambulance with my son’s body.
They wouldn’t let me in the ER while they were trying to save his life, and after he died, I thought—mistakenly—that that it would be better for me not to see him. How I wish I had been the one to remove the tubes and needles, and wash his body. How I wish I had held him and dressed him and fixed his hair. To this day, my arms ache with the desire to cuddle and rock his body. I went to the mortuary the next day to hold him, but his body was cold, hard, and stiff. White. He wasn’t there. I just sobbed and my sister sat with me, her face covered with tears like my own.
I again was tortured by the need to touch my child’s still-warm body when my son James died. He died in the military, and we didn’t get his body for almost a week. The Marines accompanied him, treating every aspect of his funeral with the utmost respect and dignity. When I first went in to see him, I had a faint hope that it wouldn’t be him, that a mistake had been made. His face looked different, but I knew those hands. I took off the gloves and loved his hands.
In the days that followed I allowed myself and my family to be with his body. I showed my solemn little five-year-old her brother and taught her President Boyd K. Packer’s glove analogy about the resurrection. I made sure she knew his body was in the coffin, and this time my sister and I fixed his hair; after all these years it still bothered me that Davey’s hair wasn’t fixed right.
I tell my friends that, if they lose a child, they should hold their child’s body. Four years ago, a dear neighbor lost her daughter in a car accident; she told me she remembered what I had said. She took care of her child’s body after she died and held her. She thanked me.
Pearl Buck wrote a biography about her mother, Carie, called The Exile. Carie buried four children in China as she supported her husband’s often fanatical service to his God, and endured the insensitivity that many women married to “men of God” must endure from their husbands. In response to others’ platitudes urging her to find peace because her child was with God, Carie replied, “That doesn’t fill empty arms and heart. Is the body nothing? I loved my children’s bodies. I could never bear to see them laid into earth. I made their bodies and cared for them and washed them and clothed them and tended them. They were precious bodies.”
That is how I feel. When I remember my children, I remember their bodies. I remember Davey’s small little-boy softness and how James looked like his father, tall and lean with a crooked grin. He used to lean down to hug me. James is buried in Cedar City; Davey and his father were buried in Ely. James’s tall white military headstone is forged into a bigger stone made of black granite. On it are the words “O My Son,” King David’s lament at the death of his son Absalom. I know exactly how he felt.
Arlene is the mother of seven and grandmother of eight. She is the visiting teaching supervisor in her ward. She resides with her husband, Bill, in Cedar City, Utah.
