Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [67]
Family and friends walked in slowly, so full of sorrow and yet full of support. They came up to the casket and wept with us.
None of us wanted to leave. Shaoey and Stevey Joy both had written letters to their sister, and now they put them in her “box,” as they called it. The others followed suit. (The letters were actually copies, as I wanted to keep the originals.)
We also tucked in some Tinker Bell wings, one of Maria’s favorite Tinker Bell dolls, and the tutu and ballet slippers that she would have worn in her upcoming recital. (Stevey Joy would, in fact, dance without her sister just six days later, in an auditorium right across the street from the emergency room where Maria was taken. Her teacher would award her with a flower at the end of the recital, for being the smallest – and the bravest – dancer there.)
My brother Jim is an art teacher. Whenever the kids were together, they would all line up for Sharpie marker tattoos from Uncle Jim. Steven always hated the girls getting them, because they took so long to wear off.
But today, when Jim pulled out his markers and asked to draw one last tattoo for Maria, Steven agreed. Maria loved it when Uncle Jim would give everyone Sharpie tattoos, especially her.
Jim took his markers and drew three ladybugs to represent Shaoey, Stevey Joy, and Maria. We all cried as he took his time, doing one last masterpiece on his niece.
Later, after the memorial service, all the little ones waited patiently in line for Jim to draw the same tattoo on their arms. (And even later than that, my six-foot-four-inch brother would get the same ladybug tattoo on his arm, but his was the real deal.)
Our pastor Scotty had a counselor lingering in the back of the viewing room, just in case Will Franklin needed someone. There was also a slide show being shown in the back so that the cousins could watch some of Maria’s funnier moments.
Then slowly, one by one, family and friends left. Then Steven and I were left alone to say a final goodbye to our little girl, whose face we would never see again until eternity. I gripped the side of the casket and fell to my knees as Steven held on to me. We cried and prayed, kissed her goodbye, and walked out of the room.
We had no sense of time. We continued to stay at the Ander-sons’ home, and they took such good care of us. But it was as if the chronological passage of minutes ceased to exist in our world; random, disjointed events were happening, but everything seemed out of order. In the midst of our grief and struggles, we were also living with an experience of special grace . . . a sense of God’s presence, as if the veil between the temporal and the eternal had been lifted.
I believe this is because of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who had heard about the accident and were lifting us up before God. We felt a supernatural sense of God holding us. We had a heightened awareness of what really mattered, a clearer vision of eternal things that we normally could not see. We were desperate for God. The Bible was like oxygen for us as we searched for comfort within its pages.
At one point, Caleb had been talking with a friend down at the Andersons’ dock, and he came running up to Steven, a fire blazing in his eyes.
“I see it, I get it,” he shouted. “God is real and Maria is with Him and we’re going to be there. . . . Satan doesn’t want us to be able to see it this clearly, because if we did we’d be so dangerous for God!”
As we planned Maria’s memorial service, I asked Steven if Matt Redman could be there and sing some of our favorite worship songs, “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord” and “Never Let Go.” Steven called Matt on the off chance he was in the U.S., since he lived in England at the time.