I have this thing with
names. I’ve written about it once already. The thought of giving a
blessing or honoring someone or telling a story with your baby’s name is such a
precious concept to me. Many names are on my Love-It List, but as long as I can
remember, my favorite name of all has been Kate. Growing up, my most beautiful
Barbie was Kate. My favorite paper doll—yes, I played with paper dolls—was
Kate. Just last year, I asked on FaceBook what my pen-last-name should be if my
pen-first-name was Kate. It’s the perfect name—simple, elegant, and timeless.
So when I got pregnant
in July 2008, I was beside myself with excitement. I kept thinking, Kate’s here! She didn’t stay long enough
for me to know by way of scientific confirmation that she was a girl, but I
know anyway because moms just know. When I daydreamed about what the rest of
her name could be, a Buechner quote kept resurfacing: “Grace is something you
can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or
bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries…or bring
about your own birth.” Having for years worn that definition of grace like a
pair of contact lenses, I knew my daughter could have no other name. She was
something I could never deserve, something only God could give me. My
then-husband let me take the reins with naming, so I chose Anna Catherine. Anna means “grace,” and Catherine means “pure,” so my baby girl
would be named “pure grace.” Which is exactly what she was. But she’d go by “Kate,”
of course.
Unfortunately, Kate
faded from me on Sunday, 14 September. I cried steady, silent tears, sitting
with my back against the tub. I was a heartbroken mother whose daughter had
been taken in the night. I hadn’t protected her, hadn’t known how. I did the
only thing I could: I crawled back into bed and prayed. At first, I heard
nothing, but the tender presence of the Holy Spirit comforted my heart. Then I
had a powerful, inexplicable urge to look up Isaiah 49:16, a verse I did not
already know. Bewildered, I opened my Bible and read: “See, I have written your
name on the palms of my hands…” My name. Kate’s name. The tears came again, but
this time for an entirely different reason. The verse reminded me that I am so
precious to God that when he looks down at his hands—or, perhaps, Jesus’s—he
sees my name. And in a small way, I had the same thing going with my Kate. The
veins in my right wrist, I had noticed as a child, form an unmistakable K. After that night, it became a sweet
reminder. Kate was gone, but her name was written on my palm, so to speak, and God
makes all things new. God restores.
Over time, he has restored
my heart. Time, I believe, numbs pain, helps a wound scar over maybe, but God
actually heals. Certainly, sadness hits me unexpectedly sometimes, or with
unexpected force: it was the saddest and most unfair day of my life, being at
once Mother and Not-mother. But God has guided me through the process of
letting my daughter stay with him, of not begrudging the laws of nature that
sent her his way. For too long, I carried her as a millstone around my neck. I
feared that not thinking about her might mean she never existed. As her mother,
it seemed to fall on my shoulders to acknowledge her fleeting presence. But God
has taken my heart from that prison of grief into a position of grace. I do
think about her occasionally, but in a peaceful, heavenly way. I imagine her spinning
giddily in a white cotton dress in a field of lavender, so drunk with joy she
dissolves into giggles. I imagine her sitting on Jesus’s lap, enamored with
him, asking him questions with the ethereal wisdom that a heaven-born child
must possess. I imagine her smiling when she sees me, if you do that sort of
thing in heaven.
And tonight, when it
was time for a little earth-born girl to fall asleep, she wriggled onto the
couch next to me and settled into my
arms. She looked into my eyes with a beautiful face lit by a grin and laced her
fingers with mine. She and I do not share DNA. I do not have memories of her in
the womb. She does not belong to me in the way she belongs to her mother. But
she loves me, and I love her, and we both love her father more than we could
tell you. She and her brother have become a part of my heart, and as I look
forward to many years with the man I love, I feel doubly blessed to be their
friend as well. I never knew life could be this good, this full. But when God
restores life and fulfills promises, he doesn’t do a halfhearted job of it.
Speaking of promises, those letters the veins in my wrists so clearly form happen
to be their initials—hers and her brother’s. As someone who does not believe in
coincidence, only divine winks, you can imagine how this hits me. Especially
since her name is “pure grace,” too. And she goes by Kate.
If you ever wondered
whether God hears you cry out, whether he knows who you are…he does.
