He was a man that loved numbers, my husband David. He remembered the dates of births deaths and events almost in a creepy way. As a young wife, I recall feeling jealous when he would mention that it was the birthday of some long-ago female co-worker. On any given day of the year, he could tell you how many days until Christmas. He never met my sister Kathleen that died when I was 12, but he always remembered her birthdate and death date. It was simply how his mind worked.
On the one-year anniversary of my husband’s sudden death, we set the gravestone into place. God had bigger plans for that date. My daughter Heather lives about 45 minutes from the cemetery so I flew in and stayed with her. She was expecting twins and was at 28 weeks of her pregnancy. She and her family planned to attend the stone setting at 8:00 on Saturday morning, but at 3:30 am labor started and the entire house was mobilized. We summoned a friend to stay with the little boys (ages 2 and 1) and headed for the midwife’s birthing center.
This is in the deep woods of North Central Michigan, in the Amish communities. As a conservative Mennonite, I do drive a car but my Amish daughter does not. Having raised my children in that culture, I understood how things work; try the lowest impact solution first before reaching outside the community for help. And so we were off to the Amish midwife to try to stop the labor, and the contractions did indeed slow down. So I went to the cemetery as planned and left Heather at the birthing clinic. As we finished at the gravesite, my phone rang and it was the midwife (Amish midwives have phones in their birthing centers). The contractions returned and were intensifying, a two-hour trip to the nearest NICU was in order, would I take them?
Maybe it was the culture, or the remote location, or divine intervention, but we never considered an ambulance; there was not time to spare. I rushed back to the midwife’s and collected an actively laboring daughter and her husband. I drove with my lights flashing and horn honking, completely willing to catch the attention of a police officer. Not one did we see! I went over one hundred miles an hour several times and all this in a rental car! We arrived in an hour and a half powered by prayer, gas fumes, and God’s goodness.
Just like in the movies I squealed into the emergency OB triage in Grand Rapids. The midwife had called ahead with all the information and these people were READY for us. My daughter was fully dilated, there was no turning back. The babies were born by c-section within 10 minutes of our arrival. I was probably just arriving at the gas station!
It was a long walk for me from the parking garage to the front of the hospital, there was only one open entrance due to Covid. In that half-hour, I wondered if this date would also mark the death of my two grandbabies. Sad irony. Had they been born in my rental car they certainly could not have survived. The security guard looked up my daughter’s name and read ” Baby 1 and Baby 2″. At that moment I knew the Lord had given a sweet turn to a sad anniversary date. But it got even better.
Once Heather was awake and coherent, they gave the girls names. The firstborn at 2 lbs and 12 oz. was to be named after me, Elizabeth Heather. thirty seconds later, Edith Mary was born weighing 2 lbs. 10 oz.. Both girls breathed on their own and continue to grow and thrive,
I expected some closure on my husband’s sudden death that day, but I never could have asked or imagined how He would take that date and turn it into a sweet miracle of future life. What a fitting tribute to David, what an example of God’s mercy and provision!