Christmas Miracles (22 page)

“Erik and Melissa seemed amazingly loving with one another during the service,” Sherry remembered. “Once I turned just in time to watch Erik remove his cherished Native American Star necklace and silently place it around his sister's neck. He was never without that necklace. It was his most treasured possession. And now, with a kiss on her cheek, he had bestowed it upon Melissa. In turn, Melissa removed her beloved linked chain with the ‘fish that wiggled' and placed it around Erik's neck, positioning the little fish just so.”

Sherry felt a strange reaction to the sweet scene of sibling affection. “My kids had performed what seemed to be a sacred act, vowing to one another their love,” she said, “yet I felt a rush of panic similar to the ones that I had felt at the school auditorium, at the children's Sunday school Christmas service, upon hearing about the van spinning on the ice, and upon viewing Erik's gift of the white horse puzzle.”

She had always been one to pay heed to signs seemingly sent by a higher power to communicate assistance and to ward off danger. Many times her premonitions had saved the very lives of her family and friends. She suddenly felt guilty, wondering if she had acted irresponsibly by not staying home in the safety of a warm farmhouse.

Sherry was mouthing the final liturgy of the service when she received a strong mental and physical picture of the jeep's door flying open on its own. A firm conviction took hold of her. She would not drive the jeep home.

During the customary shaking of hands with the congregants at the door, Sherry made her appeal to Paul. She told him that she had to take the jeep since the doors on her car were frozen shut. The jeep had no seatbelts, and its passenger door had kept flying open all the way to church, endangering the lives of the kids, who had to sit huddled next to her to keep from falling out.

“I am not taking it home,” Sherry said firmly. “I have a bad feeling about it. I'll leave it in the church parking lot and someone can pick it up later.”

Paul seemed to ignore her, concentrating on greeting the parishioners. When he did answer her, he completely astonished her by stating that she would have to get permission from the family who owned the jeep to leave it in the church parking lot.

As if trapped in some incredible drama of the absurd, Sherry spent the next ten minutes pleading with the individual members of the “jeep family” for permission to leave their makeshift vehicle in the parking lot so she and her children could ride home with Pastor Paul. Incredibly, they were all unwilling to grant her this favor. They had plans so none of them could drive their vehicle to their home, and they adamantly refused to allow it to sit unattended in the parking lot.

Then Paul told her that he could not take her and the kids with him in the van, because he had promised to take some of the elderly home, and then he had to return to the church for those who wished to sing Christmas carols.

With a growing sense of mounting doom, Sherry could no longer hold back tears of frustration. Speaking as firmly as her ebbing strength permitted, she said to Paul, “I feel so strongly about this. I insist that the children go with you. If I have to take the jeep without any seatbelts and a door that won't stay shut, fine. But Melissa and Erik are not going to be in it with me.”

At last, with obvious irritation, Pastor Paul agreed. He locked the church doors as Sherry made certain that Erik and Melissa were in the van.

As Paul hurriedly raced toward the van, Sherry rolled down the window of the jeep and asked that they stay close together because the weather was so bad. “I'll follow you,” she said. “Keep watching for me out your back window.”

He nodded agreement and climbed into the van, slamming the door behind him.

Sherry saw that the weather had become even worse. Visibility seemed zero as it continued to snow.

The van pulled to the edge of the parking lot, then suddenly and abruptly came to a halt. Shocked, Sherry saw Erik getting out. Then he was crying and running toward her.

“Erik!” she screamed, rolling down the window once again. “Get back in the van. What on earth are you doing?”

As she watched in disbelief, she saw the van pull out of the parking lot and turn right, leaving Erik behind with her. “No, no, no!” she screamed again and again.

When Erik crawled into the jeep, he was still crying. “What happened, honey?” Sherry asked. “Don't you know that you were supposed to ride with Dad?”

Erik shook his head. “I want to be with you, Mom. I want to be with you.”

It was now more than apparent that Paul was not returning with the van to pick up Erik. Sherry got out to check the doors of the church, hoping to find one unlocked. If need be, she and Erik would stay there until Paul returned for the caroling. But no doors had been left open and there was no one in sight.

As Sherry surveyed the grim situation, she came to the inevitable realization that she had no choice other than to embark in the makeshift jeep with Erik.

“Sweetie,” she told him, “sit as close to Mommy as possible. Hold on to the back of my seat or to me, just in case the door opens up again. And push down on the lock. Maybe that will help keep the door closed.”

The road was slicker than ever and the visibility was almost zero. Sherry could drive only about ten to fifteen miles per hour.

The silence of her concentration on her driving was suddenly broken by what seemed to be a strong mental message coming from Erik: “It's okay, Mom. I love you.” She wasn't sure if he didn't actually say it out loud.

At that very instant the jeep hit a bump and began to skid. First they slid to one side of the road, then back to the other. Then something seemed to catch at the right side of the jeep—and it flipped over in the snow.

“I was unable to open the door on the driver's side, so I rolled down the window and climbed out,” Sherry said. “I called out Erik's name as I brushed the snow from my long skirt and sweater. Because we had been going so slow, it never dawned on me that he could be injured.”

When she received no response from her son, she looked around and saw only the spinning wheels of the jeep, the snow, and the empty fields.

As she walked around to the other side of the vehicle, Sherry half-expected her pixie son to be playing a trick on her. Maybe he was hiding, and he was about to jump out and say, “Boo!”

But still there was no Erik. “I called out his name several times, but heard no answer,” Sherry said. “By now I was becoming worried that something must be very wrong.”

Then she saw Erik's little feet trapped under the mass of steel. “No!” she cried in a mother's deepest anguish.

Desperately she tried to lift the jeep while trying at the same time to call to her son. “Erik, can you hear me?” she screamed as she tried to move the jeep. Erik made no reply.

Again and again she attempted to lift the jeep off her beloved only son. For years she had read stories in which people under duress had accomplished such a miraculous feat, regardless of how impossible it may have seemed. For even more years, Sherry had worked at her faith. The words of Jesus raced through her mind and mouth: “If you just believe, you shall be healed . . . Nothing is impossible unto you if you so believe!”

She directed every exertion of life energy from every cell of her body and mind into each attempt to lift the jeep and free Erik. She knew that her faith was strong and she did believe.

But no matter how much she strained and pushed and tried, she could budge the jeep by only a few inches. She needed somehow to roll the vehicle over and off her son in order to pull him out. She tried desperately again and again. But she could not do it.

At last a truck that was passing by stopped to assist her. Inside the cab were three stocky men, one of whom was a member of Pastor Paul's church and an off-duty ambulance driver. The men had a CB unit in the truck, so they radioed for an ambulance, then proceeded to set about righting the jeep, shouting at Sherry to pull her son out from under the vehicle as they held it off his body.

In horror Sherry looked at Erik, who appeared not to be breathing. Her nurse's training told her that he should not be moved. “Just roll the jeep off him,” she shouted at the men. “He shouldn't be moved until medical help arrives.”

Although she shouted the same demand over and over, each time the men retorted, “Just do it! Pull him out, for God's sake!”

Mired once again in a feeling of helplessness, Sherry did as they ordered and pulled Erik out from under the jeep. As soon as he was free, she knelt beside him and placed her coat around his body. She cradled his head in her lap. When she saw the bubbles coming out of his nose, she knew his lungs were damaged.

Completely immersed in grief and despair, Sherry hardly noticed that the ambulance had finally arrived—forty-five minutes after it had been called. The drivers had gotten lost.

Once the paramedics were on the scene, though, they sprang into action. Sherry was dimly aware of shouts of confusion all around her, and she barely perceived that Paul's van was now present. Then she realized that the paramedics had put her on a stretcher and were monitoring her because they had been informed that she had a hole in her heart from a prior condition, and they feared the effects of the stress of the accident could provoke a cardiac incident. Erik was on the stretcher beside her in the ambulance.

Sherry remembered that she kept telling the personnel in the hospital emergency room to leave her alone and to give all their attention to Erik. “I was hooked up to all kinds of equipment, and I prayed aloud, ‘Oh, God, please take me and spare my son. Please, please, please! Take me, not Erik!' ”

A Catholic priest, a friend of Pastor Paul's, tried to calm her. “You don't know what you're saying,” he said. “You can't bargain with God. Only God knows if it is Erik's time and He is calling him home. That is not your decision. It is the Lord's.”

Sherry recalled that at that moment she felt very much betrayed by any higher power. “I was suffused only with the desire to sacrifice my life for that of my only son,” she said. “I continued to wail in anguish, and I didn't care who heard me.”

And then all at once, Sherry was completely silent. There was Erik standing at her bedside. She reached out and took his hand, and her cries of grief gave way to a smile. “Erik,” she asked him, “what are you doing up? Are you all right?”

Erik smiled and squeezed her hand. “I'm all right, Mommy. I'm okay. I love you very much, Mommy.”

Sherry was distracted by the priest at her side asking her what she was seeing.

“It's Erik,” she laughed. “He's all right.”

And then the image of her son was gone, and Sherry shrunk back in terror as she saw several doctors and a nurse trailed by Paul burst into the room. She saw the nurse fill another hypodermic needle, and she screamed out, “I don't want another shot! I don't want another—”

Sherry's trailing protest was met with the most dreaded words a mother can ever hear: “I'm sorry. We tried everything. We lost him. He's gone.”

The physician had said the awful words as tenderly and as gently as possible, but Sherry would not accept the pronouncement. “No, it can't be. Erik was just here. He told me that he was all right . . . and that he loved me,” she told the doctor and the others in the room.

The priest finally broke the silence that had fallen on the hospital room. He squeezed both of Sherry's hands, even more firmly than before. “You are truly blessed to have had Erik appear to you so vividly with such a confirmation,” he said. “Erik came to tell you that he is all right. He's with the Lord now, and he is truly at peace. God's will be done.”

Since that Christmas Day many years ago, Sherry has often reflected upon the sorrowful episode. “Why, during that last week of his life, did I not take to heart the omens that Erik had been giving me?” she has wondered. “Why could I not perceive the clues that he had been offering, that his time with me, as well as his gift of life, were coming to a close? Was Dr. Kubler-Ross correct about children knowing that they were about to die and that God was calling them home? I can see clearly now that Erik's soul was aware of another calling, one with which he seemed to be at peace.”

Sherry has also pondered the meaning of the white horse in the puzzle that Erik was so insistent should have meaning for her. Because she is of Chippewa heritage, as well as French and Swedish, and because she has spent a good deal of time with Native American shamans, Sherry was aware that for many Native American tribes, a vision of a white horse represents Death coming to accompany the spirit to the land of the grandparents. Since his earliest childhood, Erik was enthralled with so many of the mythological aspects of the native tribes, and he was buried with his cherished star necklace, put back on his chest by his sister and his mom. A white horse may also symbolize magic powers, and the enchanted animal may serve as a warrior's ally in transcending the trials and tribulations of Earth.

It is said that the most grievous loss to endure is that of losing a child. “Although the pain never entirely goes away, it brings with it a sort of mystical link to every mother or father who has ever lost a child—under any circumstances—to unfair and untimely death. Since it was Christmas Eve when Erik was buried, how could I not think of the meaning of Christmas of Jesus' birth, and the suffering that not only he would go through, but the suffering and agony of his mother, the Blessed Mother. She too, long before I would lose Erik, would have to endure and accept the death of her beloved son. And so too have many, many mothers and fathers lost their young ones at an all-too-early age, throughout the history of life on earth,” Sherry said.

Sherry Hansen Steiger has long been at peace with her son's death, and she has come to realize that she gained a much deeper meaning, design, and purpose to life because of the pain of her loss. She holds dear a poem that Erik gave her just before he died, and she regards it as her son's awareness of the transitory nature of life and his ability to see the act of physical death as being merely the changing of one life form to another. Here is that poem: