Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (15 page)

J
en called back. She’d confirmed through trails of mutual friends that it was Becca Bingham. And I had confirmed she had died.

My heart broke wide open, tore open as if being ripped from my chest, at the thought of one of our own being killed on the street. Jen, who really did know everyone, started filling me in on Becca’s details. Becca had only come to MOPS a handful of times that fall. She brought two-year-old Garrison with her. But her four-year-old daughter, Macie, was in preschool on Friday mornings. Becca was friends with Cindy. They were nurses at the Children’s Hospital together. They had gone to the same church years earlier. Cindy ran into her at the pool over the summer and invited her to MOPS. I was starting to remember there were emails over the summer. She’d asked about coming and I’d replied. But why couldn’t I recall her face?

I quickly shifted into action mode. I wanted to do something. Plan something. Fix this. Make things right. Make it better. I thought of the moms in our group. I wanted to protect them somehow. The grief. The fear. She was one of us. If it could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. Questions that would come up. Jen and I
made a plan for a phone tree; it was better for moms to hear from each other than to see the story on the news. We had no idea what the next few hours or days would hold, but having a plan would make us feel better, like we could control something.

“I love you,” Jen said as she hung up. It was the beginning of saying things we didn’t want to go unsaid.

As I hung up, the sobs came out.
Oh, God, why? Why did this have to happen? Why would you let this happen? Hold me up, Lord, because I’m already falling. Collapsing. God, where are you?

I walked upstairs to the kitchen and called the church. I needed my husband home.

That night our family of four packed into the minivan and went to Kristi and Jeff’s for dinner as planned, but everything was different. I walked in their house from the dark November night to the smell of Kristi’s chili percolating on the stove. There were candles lit on their dining room table, and from the front door I could see into the kitchen and hear familiar voices. The tears turned on again. I was uncontrollably grateful for a warm house, friends who understood, and my husband and children safely with me.

Walking into the kitchen, I greeted each friend with a hug. A gripping, clinging embrace that lasted longer than my usual half pat on the back. I didn’t want to let go. Of anyone. It felt as though God had turned the world upside down like a salt shaker and shaken it up, leaving some things as they’d been only hours earlier and letting other things, like the sense of security in crossing the street, fall out and disappear forever.

Later that night, I sat on the edge of Gabi’s toddler bed and picked up my sleeping girl. I draped her body across mine and felt the weight and warmth of it press down on me. Her breathing, in and out, in and out, seemed so miraculous. So precious. I sat in the dark with the light from the hall spilling on the floor near my feet, held my daughter in my arms, and cried for what felt like
the thousandth time that day. I prayed,
God, please. Please don’t separate me from my babies. Ever.

The next week was a blur of tears. Our church held a prayer service for our moms and the community. Every cover of the
Denver Post
that week was splashed with pictures of Becca and Macie and Garrison. Giving daily updates of apprehending the suspects. Retracing their bar-hopping night and the miracle of the dropped license plate at the scene of the accident. Showing photos of strangers placing flowers at the downtown intersection. Giving descriptions of the princess and Superman Halloween costumes worn by the kids as they sat in the double stroller. And quotes from Becca’s neighbors about her sweet nature and her reputation for rescuing stray animals.

Denver was caught in communal grief as everyone placed themselves in the scene.
What if that was my wife? My kids? Me, crossing that street?
As a result, any detail that could be discovered by the media was. It was impossible to escape the story. Turn on the television, walk into the coffee shop, and their three faces were there. And I felt like I was in the eye of the storm. That I had a personal connection to her. That she was one of us. One of this group that I led.

I sat at a funeral of hundreds surrounded by a dozen women from my MOPS group and watched three caskets carried down the center aisle to the front of the church. One big one and two little ones. A princess cape draped over one and a Superman cape over another. Followed by a man with hunched shoulders and his arm in a sling. The closest he would get to walking his daughter down the aisle.

Every thought about Becca’s husband became a thought about Derek. Picturing him suddenly alone in the world. The unimaginable had become real in front of me. Her funeral could just as easily have been my funeral. Why was I spared yesterday, today, and she wasn’t? There was a disconnect between how I thought
God should work and sitting at this funeral, watching a home video of two-year-old Garrison following his dad around the yard with a toy lawn mower.

I canceled our MOPS speaker for the next week and had a counselor, a friend of Carol’s, come in to lead our first meeting after the accident. We passed the microphone around our group, giving everyone a chance to share, with permission to say and feel anything. Some moms remembered Becca’s last time at MOPS only two weeks earlier. How she talked about what she was planning to buy her kids for Christmas, the red shoes she wore, her new haircut. Many in her discussion group remembered the craft collage she’d made a few meetings earlier. Pictures cut out of magazines and glued onto a sheet of paper as a self-depiction of who she was. At the center of the collage, she’d drawn a cross, “because Jesus is the center of my life,” she’d said.

“She was so peaceful when she said it,” a mom from her group commented, “and so confident.” We all wondered what that meant about where she was now, only weeks later.

The counselor suggested we find a project we could work on together as a way to collectively process Becca’s death. Remembering how her husband asked that children’s books be donated at the funeral, we offered to organize the books. A few awkward phone calls with Becca’s husband, Frank, and we found ourselves sorting through boxes of books in a basement storage room in a Denver elementary school, organizing thousands of books by grade-reading levels. Every time I talked to Frank, I forced back the tears and felt guilty that my grief might be making more work for him. The last thing I wanted was to burden him with a bunch of weepy women he’d never met. And yet I wanted to convey that our hearts were breaking alongside his.

In twos and threes we worked. Getting to know each other and processing unexpected circumstances and grief. We prayed for the kids who would receive and read the books. Prayed for
ourselves and for Frank. It was a tangible action that allowed us to be together. To know we weren’t alone.

Outside of our MOPS group, people didn’t always get it. My jaw dropped as she said it—another mom making a flippant comment with an unintended sting: “I don’t know why you’re so upset. You didn’t even know her.”

A slap in the face. A judgment of my emotional reaction to the whole thing.

This other mom who wasn’t part of our MOPS group looked at me and asked, “Why are you crying about this again?” Her question hurt, and I resolved she obviously didn’t get the importance of this group. How precious each woman was.

Though I felt defensive, even weeks later I couldn’t shake her question. Why
was
I so upset? She was right, I hadn’t known Becca. Why was this shaking me to my core?

A
s I write this five years later, I think about the question of why Becca’s death shook me so deeply. I’m surprised that even now I grieve this woman I didn’t know. My pastor, Steve Garcia, spoke at my new MOPS group recently. A different group than the one Becca had been part of. One that I felt compelled to help start because of the growth I experienced through her loss. One of those unexpected places where the ripples of her death are still felt.

We asked Steve to speak on the spiritual development of kids and how we as moms influence our children. Perched on a stool in his shorts and KEEN shoes, he was right to start the morning by saying, “We can apply these principles to our kids, but really this information is for us. For you. Because what you teach your kids about God will flow out of your own experience with him.”

His brown skin and Spanish surname hinted at his Mexican heritage. But it didn’t tell his story of growing up in East L.A., one of six kids, his childhood marked by the loss of two siblings. I looked forward to his time with us that morning because his words always conveyed a message of God’s pursuit of his people.

Steve handed a stack of purple papers to a mom in the front row. As she passed them out, I looked down at a hand-scribbled diagram with the words “The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith” written at the top. Steve held up a book and read the title by the same name.
[4]

“I don’t really like the word
stages
,” Steve told us. “It implies chronological order, and these don’t have to happen in this order. For me, a lot of things happened out of sequence. I faced tragic loss at age fourteen, so pain preceded my discovery of God. But it was that very loss that helped draw me to him.”

I thought of my fourteen-year-old self. I knew my introduction to God’s love had been preceded by a life that pointed to my need for a heavenly Father. I’ve always been grateful that my path to age fourteen made it easier to accept God’s hope when I heard it.

Steve began reviewing the stages of our spiritual journey outlined in our handouts. First, the wonder of God—recognizing that he is who he says he is and all the amazement that goes with that. Then the learning phase—often called discipleship—where we learn from others. And finally, service—wanting to put our faith into action, discovering our gifts, and realizing the world needs our contribution. That’s where I was when Becca was killed. I was growing, learning, and serving.

“For many Christians, that is where their journey stops,” Steve said.

Glancing down at the handout again, I saw that there were three more stages outlined.

“And that can be fine,” he continued. “There could be much worse than knowing, learning about, and serving God. But for many, a crisis hits, often around a loss, and they have a crisis of faith.”

I looked down again at the violet-colored paper in my hand and saw that the fourth step had a subheading. “The Wall” was written in parentheses on the diagram.

I thought of Becca and the accident. It had been a stopping place for me. Something that knocked my very breath away. I couldn’t grasp how God would allow a woman who was creating beauty in the world, loving her husband and her kids, and telling people about Jesus, to be done here. There were so many people making destructive decisions for others or themselves. She was living clean. By the rules. Doing things the right way. And she was not spared.

Pastor Steve went on. “We can get stuck in this stage and stay here forever. Walk away from God. Or we can push through it until we are transformed.”

I had to push through that following winter and spring with tiny steps of trust. Figuring out how to help our group process the tragedy gave me purpose in those steps. A reason to get up each day and face the reality that God had allowed this to happen.

While sitting on our guest bed in the basement, holding the phone, feeling as though I’d been punched in the stomach, I’d had an overwhelming sense of a call that I was the person God intended to lead our MOPS group through the tragedy. It feels strange to write that even now, because it could be taken as arrogance, saying that God placed me in that group at that time as the coordinator. Despite my not wanting the responsibility, I knew it was true. I was transformed through leading when I didn’t think I could lead. In every task I relied on God to guide my hands and words because I was empty. Rather than
Change me
, my prayer was,
Fill me, Lord. With discernment. With love. With you.
I had to trust he would provide what I needed to lead.

“Once we push through, we are never the same again. We walk with a limp, but the limp becomes part of who we are.” As Pastor Steve went through the final step, I looked down at the diagram, and I saw scribbled in his handwriting the final step, titled “The Life of Love.”

“You may not care what people think about you as much here,” Steve continued. “You’ve been transformed.”

It was true. I had a new sense of God’s presence.

For many days after the accident, I thought of Becca every hour. Of what she would be doing if she was still living. If we would have been friends by then. What heaven was like, wondering what she was experiencing. I even talked to her out loud, feeling ridiculous as I did it. “Becca, I didn’t know you, but from what I’ve heard, I would have loved to.”

And Steve was right. Though I’d never thought about it in those terms before, I cared much less about appearances. It’s as though my priorities were rearranged, and I was grateful for every day my children woke up healthy. Even when I locked my keys in the car. When I had a screaming toddler at a restaurant. When Derek left his dirty socks on the living room floor. None of it mattered. We were alive and together.

And though I could have hit that “wall” and stayed there, questioning God’s love for me or any of us, I didn’t. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I figured the alternative was bitterness. I knew God was there. I knew he was there when Becca was killed. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t today. I probably never will. But as my Young Life leader Michelle told me as I was first beginning my faith journey, faith is believing when you still have questions.

H
ow are you?” Elisa asked as we walked out of a meeting. I looked at her, and her gaze was sincere. She wanted to know, and I couldn’t blow her off, lie, and pretend like life was easy-breezy.

“I’m letting fear have too much control,” I answered. It had been months since Becca’s accident, and although life was returning to normal by all outward appearances, I knew the details of my decisions were centered in fear. I would call Lindsay from work and ask, “How is everything?” afraid Gabi had pulled boiling water on herself or Genevieve had been run over in the driveway. Every thought went to the worst-possible scenario. I figured if I imagined the worst, especially around my children’s safety, I would somehow be more prepared for it.

“Let me pray for you,” Elisa said as she followed me to my cubicle. I was grateful for a workplace where prayer was a natural response from a co-worker.

I sat in my office chair, and she put her hand on my shoulder. I don’t remember her exact words, but I remember the peace that followed. The rest of that day and then into the next and even the
next, I felt a sense of God’s presence with me and with my children. Even if I wasn’t with them, I knew God was.

The mystery of prayer together. It’s sometimes easier, safer, to pray alone in silence. Saying the words out loud commits you to your desires. And articulating them in front of another person is even more vulnerable. What if God doesn’t answer them? What does that say about what I want? That it’s selfish? Out of God’s plan? And yet to have another soul approach God for his mercy on my behalf, as Elisa did in my cubicle, I start to believe it might be possible. Possible that God sees us. Hears us. Knows us. That despite the billions of people he needs to attend to, we each uniquely matter. My brain can’t make sense of it, and yet my soul feels it.

I knew it with my girls too. We’d been waiting for days for the tooth to come out. It was hanging and could be twisted in almost any direction, but it was still attached to Gabi’s upper gum. The minivan was parked near the front steps of the house, and despite my pregnant belly, I unloaded the grocery bags into the house two at a time. Gabi and Genevieve were wild with energy. It was summer, and they couldn’t help themselves—they flung the flip-flops from their feet and ran across the cool lawn from the driveway. Back and forth across the grass, a little bit of country in the middle of their city. Genevieve, who is happiest when her major muscles are moving, threw her head back and laughed as she ran. Her bony legs moved her at rapid speed despite the hot air that surrounded her.

Then the collision. One sister’s body parts hit the other’s. A whack. A scream. Gabi’s hand went up to her mouth. She pulled her hand from her lips and saw blood dripping from her fingers. She quickly looked at me. To see what? That I was close by? That she would be okay? That I saw she was bleeding? Some affirmation of her affliction and some confirmation that she would survive this? She put her hand back up to her mouth.

The tooth—gone.

“My tooth!” Her eyes darted to the grass, searching with desperation. How would she ever find her grain-of-rice-sized tooth amid the jungle of our lawn that, like always, needed to be mowed?

The amount of blood was starting to concern me a little. “Come inside, let’s wash you off, and we’ll come back out and look for the tooth,” I said.

She was now wailing. I couldn’t understand what the big deal was, then remembered someone once telling me that during potty training, children can get scared when they poop because they feel like they are actually losing a piece of their body. Maybe the same was true of a tooth for a six-year-old. I tried to be sympathetic.

Gabi turned on the bathroom sink faucet, put her hands under the cool water, and splashed it on her face. As she scrubbed her mouth and chin, her breathing slowed and her sobs turned to whimpers. Little sister Genevieve, who had followed us into the house, stood in the bathroom doorway, not sure if she was welcome to step in.

“We can go back out and look for it. Just get cleaned up.” I tried to make my voice sound reassuring, patient, even though I was anxious to get the rest of the groceries out of the hot car.

“I’ll help look!” Genevieve’s voice sounded hopeful that her sister was ready to forgive.

Gabi lowered the towel from her face and gave her sister a look that said forgiveness wasn’t available yet. She turned to me. “Will you pray for my tooth?”

I could feel the pride filling my chest. I really must be a good mom, if this was my child’s response to her stress. I gave her my best reassuring smile.

“Yes, of course I will.” I sat down on the cool bathroom floor, the weight of my pregnant belly pleading me to sit whenever possible. Genevieve still stood in the doorway, watching, absorbing.

My pride shifted to panic.
Oh no! They really think this is going to work. They think asking God for something will get them what they
want. They are believing what I’ve told them! Do I believe what I’ve told them?!
I felt I needed to warn them that prayer doesn’t always equal desired end results.

Was I really ready to pass on my faith to these girls? Did I believe God enough, trust him enough, to lead my precious babies to him with their heartache, knowing he may not answer their prayers the way they hoped? Did I really believe he heard?

I prayed silently:
God, I’m trusting you on this one
. And then out loud: “Jesus, you know where Gabi’s tooth is, and you know how important it is to her that she finds it. We know you want us to ask you, to come to you, with the things that are important to us. Please help us find her tooth.” I couldn’t believe I was praying for a tooth with such sincerity. I couldn’t have cared less about the tooth, but I cared about what this prayer represented to them. To me.

I pushed myself up and walked back out to the front lawn with my expectant girls. They circled the spot we’d left only minutes earlier. Back and forth, much slower now, they walked across the lawn, their bodies bent toward the grass their eyes were dissecting.

“I found it!” Genevieve bent down to the grass and snapped her body back up, her hand above her head like an Olympic champion, holding the lost tooth for us all to see. Confident her big sister would have to forgive her now.

Thank you, Lord
, I prayed. I watched Gabi run to her sister, who cradled the precious tooth in her hand. I knew their prayers wouldn’t always be answered the way they wanted. My doubts about God hearing and answering made me hesitant to pass on this faith that often felt like it could slip through my fingers. And yet I still believed more than I didn’t. In fact, I believed more than ever. I had to trust with them that God heard our every utter. Theirs and mine.