I’d been given the privilege of a private room in the hospital. It was a big room – easily meant for two beds – but there was only mine in the vast space. Was this the official “Miscarriage Room?” I wondered. The locale where all failed mothers spent their initial first moments of cruel reality. How many defeated, broken women had bided their time in this room in this very bed waiting until the doctors determined they were “strong enoughR...

Queen Elizabeth used the phrase ‘annus horribilis’ in reference to her “year of horrors” in 1992. For me it was 1998. In February of that year my twenty-eight year old sister Amy was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and began the process of chemo therapy and radiation. In March, I miscarried for the second time. And in August as we celebrated the end of my sister’s radiation regime my mother collapsed and was diagnosed with a brain tumor and immedia...

Because you are my helper,

I sing for joy in the shadow of your wings. (Psalm 63:7 NLT)

My younger sister died when I was fifteen. Born with the genetic disease Cystic Fibrosis, her death was not a shock; more like a reality I grew up with. I remember the church family praying for a miracle healing as her health deteriorated. She was eleven when she died, and hers was the first wake and funeral I attended. ...