Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [62]
At some point adrenaline kicked in. I went into the sanctuary and was able to thank people for coming. I vaguely remember seeing friends staring at me, stunned, as if they couldn’t conceive what we were going through. It scared me. I realized that we were at the very beginning of what was going to be a long, long journey.
Finally, I stood up in the front of the sanctuary and said, “It’s all true! It’s all true! The gospel is true. If we believe anything about our faith, we have to believe that we know where Maria is right now and that God didn’t make a mistake. He didn’t turn His head, He was in complete control. Maria’s days here were numbered. We don’t like it, but He will give us the strength and the hope to walk this journey.”
Did I really believe that in this moment? Or was I on autopilot and the right “Christianese” terms just popped out of my mouth?
Meanwhile, Steven was dealing with the authorities and their questions for Will. Since the police didn’t get their statement earlier at our house, they wanted to talk with him outside at the church, where it was a bit more quiet.
The good news is that the officer was not the same person who had tried to stop Steven in our driveway. This police officer was kind with Will, understood his anguish, asked him if they could pray together, and then gently asked him to tell what had happened and draw it out on graph paper.
My friend Karen became the mother hen for all of us. She could see our energy fading as we tried to encourage everyone who had come out to encourage us. She and her husband Reggie pulled us out of the crowd and drove us to their home.
Caleb, Julia, Emily, Tanner, Will, Ruthy, Melissa, Danny, Geoff and Jan, Karen’s son Dave, who is a great friend of Will’s, and Brandon, another friend, all headed out to the Andersons’ as well. We just huddled together in the living room, some on chairs and sofas, some on the floor, no one really saying anything. Eventually I may have dozed a little from time to time, and when I did I would have these thoughts, or mini-dreams, that the whole thing was just a bad, bad nightmare.
But it wasn’t.
The next morning I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t even take a shower. We just sort of got ourselves together and went to the funeral home and cemetery where little Erin Mullican was buried . . . it seemed like a good spot for Maria’s shell.
We had a million details to handle, and our friends were there to help us think. It was unbelievable, in the space of one day, to go from planning a wedding and a graduation to planning a funeral for our five-year-old.
The funeral director was a gentle man. He led us through the maze of decisions we needed to make. Somehow, together, we created an obituary and made plans for the private family ceremony that would be held at the funeral home.
“We don’t have as many children’s deaths,” the funeral director explained, “so we only have two caskets here to choose from. Or of course we have catalogs if you would like to order something. It can be here by tomorrow.”
Steven and I didn’t feel the need to look at casket catalogs. We walked down a hallway that seemed about five thousand feet long. The man opened a door and there were two little caskets, one white, the other gray.
I started backing up, just as I did in the hospital when they told me Maria was gone. I fell to my knees. “I don’t care!” I wept. “The white is fine. Whichever is more girly!”
I needed to breathe. I needed to get out of that room. Caskets that small should not exist.
It was like a bad movie with no end.
We decided to bury her in the dress she would have worn as a flower girl in Emily’s wedding. It was traditional Chinese silk covered in embroidered butterflies . . . beautiful, perfect.
“She needs lots of roses,” I told the director when he asked about flower arrangements. “I can’t stand carnations; they smell like the flower of death. I don’t like baby’s breath, and please, no yellow!”
Even in my grief,