Nine years ago today, our 12-year-old daughter died of renal failure. The way the parents in this video handled their son’s birth, catastrophic diagnosis, and death seems very beautiful to me. I wanted to share it as an expression of how we too feel about our daughter’s short but blessed life.

This is for you, honey. I miss you and love you, carry you in my heart, and always thank God for you.

cheat (v.):

1. to defraud; swindle. 2. to deceive; influence by fraud. 3. to elude; deprive of something expected. 

This year I have spent a substantial part of the year experiencing being cheated. In a written agreement with other adults, my husband and I have been defrauded. We kept our end of the deal, which was struck among fellow Christians, witnessed, and came with all the trappings of civic and religious ceremonies. Then, after we had spent years keeping our end of the bargain, our partners in covenant reneged on their end of the deal.

I, in particular, paid a high price to keep my end of the covenant, spending countless hours doing healing work at the expense of my substantially-sized family. The price I paid within myself is one of the highest I can ever recall expending. With my husband I made a choice out of fear and trembling intermingled with great hope, knowing that the rewards for success would be as substantial as the deprivations of failure. In spite of the risk, and true to my often naively hopeful character, I chose the leap of faith. I have always thought that anyone–yes, anyone–can be healed, restored, and redeemed. I’ve been willing to serve as a conduit of grace as God called and enabled me. And He did call. I am as certain of that as I can be certain of anything in my life.

But still I was cheated.

My husband and I made the decision to enter into covenant with these other adults in spite of the fact that several of our most trustworthy, wise, and sane confidantes and adult children advised against it. My parents, too, warned against it and my father stated that he would not participate until the people with whom we had covenanted proved themselves. “You don’t enter into a deal with someone before they’ve proved themselves,” he said. We countered with the evidence of many years’ worth of relationship, but his retort was that it was obvious who was getting the better end of the deal. “When you come out of this deal as happy and well situated as they are,” he said, “then I’ll consider changing my opinion.”

We have come out of the deal and we are not happy or well situated. In this win-lose deal we struck while hoping for win-win, we are the losers. I’ve been waiting for some six months now to see if the loss I see is, in fact, what I see. I’ve talked with our partners and told them that my husband and I not only feel cheated, but according to our five-page written agreement, actually have been cheated, our covenant broken. “You can’t break a covenant,” our partners have glibly replied, citing Biblical teachings on the irrefutable character of God-made covenants and ignoring the obligation of Christians to be people of their word, to go the extra mile, to apologize when they hurt others, or to do a great many other things that Christians are told we should do.

Maybe they felt we let them down first, I thought. So I went to our partners again and asked whether they thought we had kept our end of the deal. “You kept your end of the deal,” they said. “We have no complaints we haven’t voiced.” But still our partners have not budged. Still we are cheated.

Some years ago, my husband’s grandfather died, leaving his heirs land and other property worth millions of dollars. Before his death, my husband and his granddad had walked this land that had been in the family since the Land Run, and his sweet old granddad told him, “this part will all be yours, the home place, your great-granddad’s homestead too, because I know you’ll care for it.” He put his property into a trust and retained his two most trustworthy sons to administer it.

About a year after the trust was established, my husband’s grandfather went into a nursing home. While he was there and still in his right mind, one of his two trustee sons was murdered by vagrants passing through the area. Now only one son was left, the son who later developed Alzheimer’s and could not be relied upon in any way. And then my husband’s granddad died, and the remaining sons took charge and cheated my husband out of his inheritance as we sat by helplessly, in spite of having hired attorneys and gone to court and spent four years trying to litigate our ways out of being cheated.

It was easier to watch my husband go through being cheated out of his inheritance than it has been to be cheated myself. Being cheated has left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth, so much sorrow and humiliation in my heart. As King David said in Psalm 55, it doesn’t bother you as much when it’s an enemy who cheats you, but when it’s someone you trust, someone you’ve gone to church with, someone who has lived under your roof and with whom you’ve been intimate–oh, my. Oh my, oh my. When one you broke bread with cheats you, one who “dips his bread with me” at the table as Judas did with Jesus, then you know you’ve been cheated. Then you know you’re moving into God territory, for who has been more defrauded than God?

Everyone has been cheated. Everyone has had someone else make a promise they later broke. Everyone has been on the switch end of the old bait-and-switch cheat. You marry someone you thought you knew, and six years later you discover he’s had an affair. You raise your children with every value you can muster, and when you finally have an empty nest and can look forward to a comfortable retirement with your spouse, your oldest child is diagnosed with schizophrenia. You have to raise your grandchild. You get cancer. You finally retire and go on the world cruise you both always dreamed of, and your husband dies in Ireland, on the first leg of your journey. Your child is born handicapped and you learn you will always have to take care of her. Or, as actually happened to a friend of ours, the healthy kidney is mistakenly removed and the diseased one left. “You’ll have to be on dialysis unless a donor is found,” they said. At some point or another in life, everyone is cheated.

Even when they haven’t actually been cheated, everyone feels cheated from time to time due to expectations. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney wrote at length about expectations, which she called “claims,” and their use by wounded folks. She said that we often have unspoken expectations and go through life imposing them on others without getting enough reality checks to discover whether or not our claims or dues are, in fact, reasonable. What is owed is the stuff of psychology and religion.

What do you owe me? What do I owe you? What did I give you, and what must you give me in return? How do the laws of reciprocity, of sowing and reaping, apply?  Is an outcome, a hope, a dream, an expectation, a contract, a covenant something I should be attached to? Or does all attachment lead to suffering, as Buddha taught?

Can a person ever be truly free of expectations? Ought we be? Is being free of expectations a worthy goal? What do we do when we’re feeling cheated, or when we have, in fact, been cheated? What can we do with our feelings of sorrow, humiliation, shame, astonishment, and anger?

These are all feelings and ideas I’ve been grappling with for most of this year, and now I’m going to grapple with them in a most public way.

They have devoured lives; they have taken treasure and precious things. Ezekiel 22:25

Sometimes I am so unhappy. Sometimes I am full of despair. Sometimes I feel I’m under it, under a burden too heavy for me to bear. It is the weight of the abandonment of my orphaned children, the weight of their years of abandonment, neglect, abuse, and absconding by their birth parents, their first parents, their so-called original parents, the ones who gave them birth. Parents who are not parents at all, except that they’ve produced offspring, which even animals do. And they act like animals, these parents, because when they have children they do not want, and they have children they treat as objects and non-people, children whose lives they devour and then pass on to others to try to repair: that is what they are. They haven’t acted human. They have not been humane.

They have devoured lives; they have taken treasure and precious things. Ezekiel 22:25

It doesn’t matter to me in this moment whether my children’s parents meant to do it or not, because they did it. And every parent between that first parent and me, the last one, did it too. I have children who were rejected more than once by adults who signed on to do the job of a parent and then thought better of it. Parents who quit their jobs. Parents who were fired as parents. And every single time a parent took off, something inside that child was devoured. Some precious thing lost.

This morning on the way to school, one of my children whose wounds I have worked at healing for six years now showed us all, once again, just how wounded she is. Just how orphaned. Just how she carries around this goneness of the treasure and this spiritual and emotional bankruptcy. And my beloved, always wanted, always cherished daughters watched it all, wide-eyed. And their family is not middle-class American normal. Their family is not Normal Rockwell normal. Their mother is in tears as she pulls up in front of the school. Their mother wants to bash in the faces of the asshole parents who did this to them. This mother wants to tear her hair. I want to tear my hair and wail, and roll on the ground with grief and horror over what has been done to my children.

They get out of the vehicle. They wear their plaid skirts into their private school but they are not like the other girls and boys, whose mothers are merely burdened with the regular, tedious, predictable passing of time marked by paying bills, buying groceries, taking the children to school, vacuuming, walking the dog.

Where are my children’s precious things? I want to demand. Where is their treasure? Who gave you the right to take their lives like that?

You might have done something different. But you didn’t. Instead, you were like those ancient peoples who put their children through the fire, who sacrificed their own offspring to pagan gods, your nostrils filled with the smell of your own child burning. And you turned away and went on with your life. What did you think? That she would bounce back? That she would recover, given enough time and peanut butter sandwiches and trips to the mall with her Adoptive Mother?

Well, she didn’t. She didn’t recover. She isn’t recovered at all. And I carry the weight of her devoured life every single day. We all do. Everyone in our family. And because our family has many children whose lives were devoured, whose precious things were taken, it’s a heavy burden. Sometimes I stagger under the load. Sometimes my heart breaks (it breaks every day).

And I wonder. I wonder about myself. I wonder what kind of a fool and idiot I must be, to think I can do this. Who do you think you are?

I wonder if I will be able to stand before God and give a good account of my life, some day, when I explain why I was just like my children’s first parents, because I too put my children through the fire. I sacrificed them to a pagan god whose name I cannot recall. I put the children I birthed through the fire, and their childhoods were consumed by my trying to heal and save their siblings.

Am I so different, then, from their first parents? Today, I’m not so sure. Today, as I sit here with a heavy heart and my eyes filled with tears, I really am not so sure. I am not sure at all that I’ve done a good thing, not sure at all that anyone besides God is ever able to help anyone else, to heal, to soften the blows, to bathe the wounds and dress them.

One of my dearest friends lost her 28-year-old son-in-law to cancer yesterday. He and his wife, her daughter, celebrated their three year wedding anniversary only four months ago. These two kids spent almost half their marriage dealing with cancer. Imagine that.

I don’t mind telling you that my husband and I conducted their wedding and did their pre-marital counseling. They were one of the most attentive couples we’ve ever counseled. And they loved each other. They never even had time to get to that middle-aged phase when you hate each other, either. All they ever had was that heady, youthful love and friendship, and then his sickness. I feel so sorry. 

My friend called me yesterday afternoon to tell me her son-in-law was going downhill, but I didn’t listen to my messages until 7:00 this morning. Of course I intended to go up to the hospital after dropping my girls off at school. But when I called my friend, she said that her son-in-law had already died. And she told me how it went. And we cried and said how unreal it seemed and was.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you guys,” I said, after a time. And I truly was sorry. I felt terrible, because I know what it means to have your loved ones nearby during hardship. And my friend said, “That’s truly OK, I know you would have come. And the hospital was packed. You’ve never seen so many people there for one person—relatives, his fellow National Guardsmen, friends. It was incredible. We had the family room just packed. It’s truly OK.”

I knew she meant it, and wasn’t suffering from lack of support. I thought what a way to go: surrounded by loved ones wishing you godspeed on your journey.

I thought, too, about my friend’s daughter and how untimely this is. How she will be the only 27- or 28-year-old in her circle of friends to have suffered and lost so much at such a young age. Already. Imagine that. When you’re supposed to be young and naive, stupid and foolishly invulnerable and immortal in your own head. And that’s been taken from her.

I talked to my other friend today, too, my friend who has just had a new baby over the weekend. A new baby who came with flashing lights and EMTs, for my friend didn’t even know she was in labor until the baby decided to pretty much fall out and be born at home in the bathroom, as her daddy dialed 9-1-1 and tried to catch her with a free hand. Exciting stuff, all right. And all turned out well.

So my friend’s parents and brothers and in-laws all crowded into her small house, so that when her darling toddler son woke up the next morning, he was greeted by all those adoring fans, who promptly whisked him up and fed him, and then took him away to granny and grampa’s house to spoil him for a week while mom and dad recovered and fell in love with new baby sister.

I asked how she was doing, and she said, “Oh, it’s wonderful. I’m glorious! I am so enjoying this new baby. I feel so warm and enclosed and loved, and it’s been so great. Everyone is helping, and all I have to do is nurse the baby.”

This friend of mine has always been surrounded by love and has available, loving parents. She’s always had supportive siblings. Though their family has had some very tough times, they have stuck together and grown as human beings. My friend has also always had good friends, because she herself is a wonderful person. She believes and speaks the best of people. She’s enthusiastic about life and about loving other people. She is so filled up within herself that she has an abundance to give to others, and give she does. She’s someone who really never meets a stranger. The worst she ever does is to become cross. That’s what she says, “I felt so cross.”

She’s charming, really. Cross? Cross?! I wax absolutely bitchy on people, but she is merely cross. And she really is that way. Just a good, warm, kind-hearted human being. I don’t know anyone who knows her and doesn’t say that they feel enriched by knowing her. She is that sort of a human being.

So I started thinking about sorts of human beings. I thought about how my friend’s son-in-law died surrounded by love, and about how my other friend had her baby surrounded by love.  I thought about how this love wasn’t just hanging in the air, because it came from people. And then I suddenly realized just how much I’ve dealt with in my life without a mother and father nearby, or a brother or any family member there for me. I thought about the hours I’ve spent sitting in a hospital by myself, and how only my husband or the children we were raising sat with us, and sometimes a friend from church. I remembered how none of our parents had the time or compassion or—what is it that you have when you will just sit with people, and help them by just sitting and loving on them, and being there? oh… is it love?—whatever it was we needed (it was love we needed). Didn’t have something to give. And really haven’t. And still don’t.

And I thought about all I handled as a young parent, when I could have used help but had none. The one time when my sixth or eighth child was born and I had an infection, and was in a lot of pain, and had to drive 45 minutes to a hospital to see a specialist and how I had to take my newborn and five or seven little children with me, because I had no help. And I did that myself. And didn’t even think about it ’til later, when I realized how I have so often just plodded on and pushed through and taken care of myself.

I realized then that people who have never had that sort of love or support just do it anyway, survive. Live. We do it and we don’t know any better until we get a vision and put into motion the ways and means that lead to that place of Family. Love. Being-there-ness. Then we realize one day that we are giving our children, and they are giving to us and to one another and to others, exactly what we didn’t have, but knew we needed. We’re pioneers in our own families of origin. It’s rough. But we’re making it because we know love is real.

I thought for the zillionth time about how my friend sat with me as Olivia died, and once again I couldn’t get over what that has meant to me. I can’t stop crying as I am sitting here right now. I want to just weep and die over my keyboard at times like this, because a part of my heart breaks all over again. I want to ask, “Why don’t you love me?” And then another part of me sees the family my husband and I have created, and the grownup children who would drop anything at all that they were doing (and have), and will be there for us, and who know how to be there for their friends (and have)… and I know we did good. I know that we had so many fewer love resources and so many big wounds, and yet by God—yes, by the grace of God—somehow we did it. By God’s grace and psychology and yes, by self help and professional help and school, and education.

And my kids, some of them, don’t understand why I’m so big on education. I’ll tell you why, my child: BECAUSE KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION CAN SAVE AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

I mean that. It can. It has saved me and changed the sort of person I am.

And so my friend—the one who had the baby—she told me that her own mother had also tearfully expressed to her how she, as a young mother, didn’t have the family support that she herself has been able to give to her own children. And I thought about how the Bible says “and women shall be saved through the bearing of children.” I thought about how we carry our own selves as we give our children what we know we should have gotten from our parents, but didn’t.

I thought about all those people whose parents or spouses or children die out of time, people like Crazymumma who are not finished growing up themselves and absolutely have to go through hell before they are half ready (and who ever is ready? and yet… go we must). And about my friend’s daughter, who just lost her husband… and how wrong that is. And there was no free pass for her. I know she’s strong, though. And she has a good mom.

I don’t have a conclusion. I do know that it’s hard being a parent. It’s hard being a human being. It’s hard being someone’s child. Life is difficult. Life is suffering. There’s beauty in it, too, but it can be fleeting and sometimes the sun is gone for a long time.

The only thing that really compensates for the way life is, is other people. God is a big help, and I’m not being weird about it when I write that. I love God and I can hardly wait to die, sometimes. I sometimes am just ready to move on, because it ain’t gonna get easier. I am such a spiritual and mental work horse that death seems like a vacation to me, sometimes.

But God is not really my own personal reason for sticking around. My own personal reason is people. That’s right: people. I stick around because it means something, loving others. It means something to hold someone’s hand. It means something to sit in a crowded waiting room and to take turns sitting with a dying young man. It means something to call and tearfully say “I’m sorry.” It means something to show up at the funeral or memorial, tissues in hand. It means something to go to weddings and births, sicknesses, recoveries, anniversaries, drunken dancing parties and christenings, and deaths.

It means a lot. It means a lot to be there for someone. And so I thank God that there has always been someone there for me, a person or even more. How lucky and blessed I am. It reminds me of a verse in Isaiah, I think, where it says, “If even my mother and father abandon me, the LORD will take me up.”