"The Planning of the Memorial"

I knew that I wanted to have some sort of memorial for the boys but I wasn't sure how I wanted to go about it.  It was really important to me to have a ceremony to honor their lives and for our friends and family to have a time to come and pay their respects.  Even though no one got to meet our precious boys, they touched a lot of lives in the short time they were here with us.

I tried to think of who I wanted to lead the ceremony.  I was very hesitant in having the memorial in the Catholic church where Kevin and I got married in because I wasn't sure how the Priest was going to view our situation.  There were a few sayings that people say that I absolutely did not want to hear.  'It was God's plan', 'It was meant to be' and 'Everything happens for a reason' were some of them.  That's bullshit.  I am sorry, but it is.  You can not tell a mother who had her child die in her arms, TWICE, that it was meant to be.  You just can't.  Colin and Nathan were meant to come home with us.  They were meant to be spunky little boys, drive their mom and dad crazy with all the crying and screaming, and grow up to be perfect little gentleman.  They weren't meant to be born 3 months early and have that short of life.  I can't believe that.  So you can imagine my hesitation going to a man of God and worry about the fact that he might say that.  To be honest, I was mad at God for taking my babies away so early and I was scared the Priest was going to tell me that even though it sucks, this is what God had planned for Colin and Nathan.  

I was talking to my friend Sarah one day about everything and she told me her outlook on what had just happened and I still think to this day that it is one of the best ones I had heard so far and it made me feel good.  She said that God knew that Colin and Nathan were not going to live long so he wanted to give them to parents who would love them unconditionally and would do anything for them.  God knew that Kevin and I were the best fit.  He knew that Colin and Nathan would get to know what pure love felt like and that they would get more love in the short time they were here than most kids get in an entire lifetime.  That is the best reasoning yet.  Although it was, hands down, the hardest thing I will probably ever go through, I am so glad that we were able to give Colin and Nathan the love that they deserved.

But how to do the memorial was still in question.  To rent a room at the funeral parlor was going to be hundreds of dollars and I would still need to find someone to lead the ceremony.  My mom suggested a pastor friend of theirs that had been following our situation from the beginning.  I thought that was a good idea because it wouldn't be someone random and I could tell them what I wanted said and didn't want said.  But to coordinate the Pastors schedule with a time that worked for us and the funeral home was appearing to be a bit more difficult than I thought.  After further consideration and conversations with Kevin, we decided to meet with the Priest at the Catholic Church and talk about it.

Friday, January 31st was our first meeting with Reverend Hoover.  He was not the same guy who married Kevin and I and I was soon to find out that we made the right decision by doing the memorial in the church.  Reverend Hoover was a very kind man and very easy to talk to.  The Priest that married us wasn't very warm and kind of intimated me so I was glad that for this situation, we had someone that I felt comfortable opening up to.  

When I told him that I didn't want to hear that "It was God's plan" he responded very well to that.  He told me that God was the God of life and that he didn't pick Colin and Nathan to die so soon but that he would take care of them up in Heaven.  That was nice to hear.  Rev. Hoover said that if there was anyone close to the family that would speak at the memorial, that we could have someone besides just him.  Now I would have loved to stand up there and talk about our boys but I knew that I wouldn't be able to stand up there and not cry so we decided that the best person to do that would be my dad.  He was pretty much there through everything and got to see us experience it and not to mention he is an absolutely fantastic speaker.  It was a no brainer for Kevin and I.

That following Wednesday, we had a meeting with a lady at a funeral home that was not far from the church.  We were going to pick out the boys prayer cards.  We were going to choose what we wanted said on the back of each one of them.  I knew that for one of them, I wanted a poem that a friend had given me after the boys passed.  Cat Inkrott was a fellow member of the Columbus Mothers of Twins Club and she was also a NICU nurse at St. Ann's Hospital so she had a pretty good insight on what I had just gone through from the nurses perspective.  Anyway, she sent me this poem and it of course made me cry.  For months, I could not read it without crying.  It read:

God Saw You Getting Tired

- Anonymous

God saw you getting tired,

And a cure was not to be.

So He wrapped His arms around you,

And whispered, "Come to me."

With tearful eyes we watched you

And saw you pass away

And although we love you dearly

We could not make you stay.

A Golden heart stopped beating

When He gave you rest.

God's garden must be beautiful

He only takes the best.

When we arrived at the church, we met with a woman named Barb.  We went into her office and she pulled out a couple of binders to show us examples of pictures we could have on the front and different sayings we could have on the back of the prayer cards.  I had told her about the  God Saw You Getting Tired poem so we just needed to pick out one more.  She suggested certain ones that would pertain to the loss of a child and as Kevin and I were reading them, the tears started to form.  We were doing yet another thing that I never thought we would be doing for our children.  Since I had picked out the one poem, I told Kevin that he could make the final decision on the second one.  I was very happy with his decision.  The second poem read:

When God Calls Little Children

When God calls little children,

To dwell with Him above,

we mortals often question

The wisdom of His Love.

For no heartache compares

with the death of one small child,

who does so much to make this world

seem wonderful and mild. 

Perhaps God tires of calling the aged to His fold;

and so He picks a rosebud, before it can grow old. 

God knows how much we need them, and so He takes a few,

to make the land of heaven more beautiful to view. 

Believing this is difficult, but somehow We must try. 

The saddest word that mankind knows will always be good-bye.  

And so when little ones depart, we who are left behind,

must realize how much God loves little children,

for Angels are hard to find.

My whole thing, ever since we found out we were having identical twins, was that I wanted people to treat them as individuals.  They were already sharing so much in terms of looks, I wanted to make sure that people always viewed them as two separate human beings with two different personalities.  Even in death I wanted them to know so thats why I wanted to different poems instead of the same poem on each.  God Saw You Getting Tired made me think of Nathan.  He tried so hard to fight everything that came his way but towards the end, he was getting tired of the fighting and needed to rest and go be with his brother.  So that is why I put that poem on his card and Colin got the other one.

Nathan's Prayer card - Front and Back

Colin's Prayer Card - Front and Back

The planning was pretty much done other than one more meeting that we had with Rev. Hoover.  We met with him to finalize all the readings that were going to be read and how the ceremony would go.  Now we just had to wait a few more days.  I became very anxious because I knew that the day of the memorial would be yet another extremely difficult day for me. But I was going to get through it...maybe not with dry eyes, but with the love and support of my family and friends, I knew I would prevail and that it would be a lovely ceremony.