I kissed my daughter on the forehead, told her goodbye, and sent her down for a nap, and then I walked into my office and hit record.
John Ballenger introduced himself, and then he introduced his family: two boys, and a daughter between them who died three months after she was born.
I had not read his story beforehand, so it arrived cold, on a man who had been holding his own little girl ninety seconds earlier.
I have seen a great deal of death, between the years in investigations, a steady diet of terror, and a long education in what people are willing to do to one another, and none of it prepares you for this conversation, because your children occupy an entirely different category. A story like that does not inform you so much as it takes you apart for a minute, which is precisely what it ought to do.
I asked him to tell it because the audience needed to hear it, and because I needed a minute to recover my composure.
Their faith got bolder as the odds got worse
No complications were expected, but she was born without a pulse at their duty station on Oahu and was rushed to the only neonatal intensive care unit on the island while John stood there, having just cut the cord.
She never came home. Eighty six days, every one of them inside that hospital.
Around the second month they learned that only two comparable cases had ever been documented anywhere in the world, and that both of those children died within four months, which most of us would have interpreted as permission to begin grieving early. John says their faith did not contract when they heard it, it expanded, and he told the doctors he intended to walk out of that building with his daughter in his arms.
On the eighty sixth day they said goodbye.
A doctor had also told them that eighty three percent of families separate after the death of a child, a figure that circulates far more widely than the evidence justifies, though the arithmetic never mattered to John, because he heard catastrophic odds and concluded that somebody was surviving them, which made the only sensible response an investigation into what those survivors did differently.
The smallest true thing beats the best argument
His wife could not find her way back to her faith for a long time, could not sit inside a church, could not tolerate those rooms.
He did not debate her, and he did not arrive with a verse prepared. He told her two things. We lost our daughter, and I am not going to lose you. And then, if we have to begin again from nothing, let us begin here. I love you. God loves us. And we are together.
That was the entire inventory, three sentences a child could follow, offered by a man who had nothing more sophisticated available to him, and somehow they held.
The other half he got wrong initially, and concedes it without flinching. He grieved where she could not observe it, carrying a paddleboard far enough offshore that nobody could watch him shout at God and beat the water with his hands, and then coming home composed to a wife who was submerged in it with a two year old, reading that composure as a man who had finished grieving without her. What repaired it was not a better argument but a sentence: this is what I am carrying today.
He was not a broken man telling a sad story
My daughter woke from that nap partway through the conversation and wandered into the office, so I picked her up and held her on the air, minutes after he described the eighty sixth day.
I remember almost nothing about the minutes after we stopped recording, except that I gathered all three of my children held onto them considerably longer than necessary, and told them the part that has stayed with me since. John kept his faith, he kept his wife, and he came out of the worst thing that can happen to a father closer to her than he went in.
The Practical Side
Establish your order of priority before you need it. Mine is God, then my wife, then my children, then everything else, and everyone in my house can recite it, which is not decoration but infrastructure, because when something unsurvivable lands on your family you should not be ranking your loyalties in the middle of the wreckage.
When you cannot repair something, stop trying to repair it. John’s best moments with his wife were the ones where he had nothing useful to offer and simply sat with his arm around her while they both wept, which is not abandonment but frequently the entire assignment, and most of us are too proud to accept one that simple.
Let her witness some of the grief. Whatever your paddleboard is, go there, then come home and tell her you had a brutal day and explain why, because she is not asking you to collapse in front of her, only for evidence that the loss registered with you too.
Decide now that you intend to be among the seventeen percent. Long odds are a warning that something will demand serious work, not a verdict handed down in advance, and the men who survive are not lucky, they developed the habit of communicating before the catastrophe arrived rather than improvising it afterward.
Years ago the singer Steven Curtis Chapman lost his five year old daughter in his own driveway, with his seventeen year old son behind the wheel, and retains no memory of the minutes that followed. His brother had to describe them to him afterward, including the moment on the way to the hospital when Chapman rolled the window down and shouted, with everything he had remaining, “Will Franklin, your father loves you.”
I pray I never discover what I am made of that way. But if that day arrives, that is what I want coming out of my mouth. This is nobody’s fault. God loves you. And your father loves you.