No one can convince me words aren’t some of the most powerful things on earth.
December 2003 was the worst month of my whole life. My father was dying from terminal liver cancer. My daughter had been born ten weeks early three months earlier, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia wasn’t ready to release her from the neonatal intensive care unit. Specialists urged me to schedule follow-up visits about the health of my liver, which had failed before I gave birth to the baby – so I wasn’t well either.
I still remember shaking, tears rolling down my face as I sat beside my baby’s bed, reaching my hands through the clear plastic holes, my heart twisting because I couldn’t leave to see my father, who could die at any time. I grasped her teeny translucent fingers and thought, this is freaking barbaric.
I prayed and heard nothing.
I wanted instant miracles for my baby and my daddy. That didn’t happen.
What did happen is shortly before Christmas Eve, the hospital released my daughter with portable medical equipment and a feeding tube hooked up to a thin black backpack. And three days after Christmas, my friends and aunties took turns holding a bald, five-pound, three-month-old infant while I sat, numb, looking at my dad in the casket.
Barbaric.
For a full month afterward, I cycled through post-funeral tasks and cried every time I was alone. I cried because I’d never see my father again. I cried because several of my family members hurt my feelings so severely at the homegoing, I vowed never to speak to them again. I cried because my daughter was so tiny, and I was already tired of explaining why.
Then one day, the mailman arrived, delivering a sympathy card. I sat in the kitchen to read it, and a small yellow sheet of paper fell out. The information came from my father’s hospice workers, and on the paper was the poem He Maketh No Mistake by A.M. Overton.
With my baby daughter sleeping and my son at school, I remained in my kitchen and read that poem over and over again. Just a short poem. Words on a page. But after I saw them, I stopped crying.
That poem changed my life. It spoke directly to my heart, telling me the roads of life aren’t always pleasant. We pray for people who pass away. We give birth and hope for the best that doesn’t happen. We lose connections too quickly and too soon.
But God…
Some moments in life are so painful talking doesn’t help. So for the last 16 years, I’ve read that poem during times of grief. I’ll continue to read it as the years go on and accept that God sees me in and through the pain.
The poem is timeless: Through all the way, though dark to me. He made not one mistake…