Sometime in the past month, our 16-week-old baby died. I'd had some symptoms that suggested something might be wrong, but we thought we'd heard a heartbeat and I was certain I had felt the baby move. So I just tried to rest.
But then we got an ultrasound, and the baby didn't move and there was no visible heartbeat.
We wandered in a haze through hours of waiting rooms, two more ultrasounds, kind doctors explaining our options, making appointments, and trying to remember to eat. We made an appointment to induce labor in the Gritman Hospital Birth Center.
We instead landed in the ER the night before the scheduled induction: I had begun to bleed. Labor was induced and we waited hours. We induced again and finally labor began, almost 24 hours after checking in to the ER. I labored for about 5 hours and then our baby was born.
He was a few weeks behind in his growth, but completely beautiful. There was no visible clue as to why he had died. His fontanels were perfect, he had the tiniest kneecaps I've ever seen, fingers, toes, and all the rest. And he was a boy.
When I finally got to hold my baby and we could consider his name, we had both been thinking the same thing: Benedict.
I want to explain why we named him Benedict.
Some background things:
The Latin means "good word". The traditional meaning of the name is "blessed".
Proverbs 25:11 says, "Like apples of gold in settings of silver, so is a word skillfully spoken."
When we've named our other children, we've considered things like the sounds of the syllables and prophetic intention for their lives and so on. Naming a dead baby is different. You have to name them based on who they've already been. This is hard, mostly because who they've been thus far is veiled.
Over the last year, we have gone through some mighty hard things, right through this pregnancy.
Over and over we have needed help. And over and over, we have always had it.
Everything from friends who stayed up until 2 am helping Brendan refinish floors, to people coming almost every day to wash dishes for us. Some of it was joyous —a new pregnancy, a new house. Some of it was damn hard—a miscarriage a year ago and another one now. We struggled to comfort our children and each other, trying to explain how a kind God who was so open-handed with us had, seemingly, closed those hands.
And sometimes we found ourselves comforting our generous friends and trying to reassure them that their small gifts of time or food or whatever, really were enough.
And they were.
In every casserole, clean load of laundry, or sinkful of dishes, in every hug and offer of prayer, in all the cards, and the watching of my children, there was an apple of gold in a setting of silver. These gifts were all good words brought to life. They were the words and sacrifice of Jesus in the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Now it might seem preposterous to compare a casserole to the crucifixion, but that's why the story of the widow's mite is so important. You give what you have and what is needed. And we needed casseroles.
We have been given a blessing, a Benediction. And that is why we named him Benedict.
