Six years. This is how long it has been since my
youngest son Noah took his own life. As
I sit in what was his bedroom, which is now my office writing this, I have
mixed emotions. Part of me doesn’t want
to acknowledge this date in history because it is truly the worst day I have
ever experienced. And the other part of
me wants desperately to share with you the reader just how incredible my son
was.
Noah was a handful
from the very beginning. While Cheryl
was pregnant with him, she had more challenges than with our other two
kids. Kidney stones were the bane which
my bride endured for the many months she carried our third child. Two nephrostomy bags and more trips to the
emergency room than I can actually remember were part of the life we led during
those eight and a half months.
I remember Cheryl
was actually in the hospital because of the kidney stones and I had the other
two kids at home with me the morning Noah arrived. I got the call from Cheryl he was on the way,
and got the kids dressed and in the van to take to our friend’s house. After dropping them off, I called the
hospital to let Cheryl know I was on the way.
The nurse who
answered said, “Just a minute,” and laid the phone down on the counter. I heard another voice say, “Did you tell him?” and the first nurse replied, “No.” This is not a conversation you want to hear
as you are driving down the highway let me tell you. I had all kinds of thoughts racing through my
head before I heard Cheryl’s voice on the other end.
She told me we had
a baby, and I replied, “Yeah I know dear, we’re having a baby today.” She said, “No. We have a baby, Noah is here.” I was shocked to hear she had delivered him
naturally with no medicine of any kind.
Our other two kids had been born C-section, and we were told this is how
Noah would arrive too. But apparently
the night before he was born, Cheryl was passing a kidney stone, which also
caused her to go into labor. Since she had
never been in labor before, she didn’t know it was happening. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice
it to say, Noah was a handful from the beginning.
Noah was the most
adventurous of my three kids, always wanting to be outdoors and doing something
with his hands. I remember when the
television show “Survivor Man” first came on, the kids and I would watch each
week as Les Stroud would pit his knowledge against the elements in a different
local. One night, Noah got up from
watching the show, went into his room and came back out with a camping light
strapped to his forehead and a knife, and announced he was going to survive the
night out in our yard. About a half an
hour later he came in freezing, because it was cold and windy out there.
The boy was
hilarious, and not always because he was trying to be. He and Micah shared a room for a while, and
one day he called Micah to ask him how to tune the bass guitar Micah kept in
their room. He was determined to learn
how to play it, but before he started teaching himself, he needed to tune it
first. It didn’t matter that he knew
nothing about the bass; he just needed to tune it first.
One of the things
everyone always says they remember about Noah was his smile, and he did do this
often. But when Cheryl and I had to
discipline him, there weren’t many smiles from any of us. We spent more time disciplining him than
either Micah or April. I’m not sure it
was because he was such a bad kid, he just like to live life fully and it
caused him to cross the line more than the other two.
I remember the day
Cheryl told him she was going to do what God does, and give him grace instead
of spanking him. She said, “You deserve
a spanking, but I’m going to show you grace instead.” From that day forward, any time he was about
to get a spanking, he would plead, “Grace mommy, give me grace.” It’s hard to not laugh when he was pleading so
hard.
I miss my son very
much. He was a good kid, hard worker and
loved Jesus with a passion I’ve not seen in many kids his age, not to mention adults even. But just like any one of us, if we listen to
the wrong voice we can be tempted to do stupid stuff. And unfortunately for Noah on this day six
years ago, he listened to the wrong voice and took his own life.
People have asked
me if we saw any signs leading up to this, and my answer is always no. The morning he died, he was playing with
Micah and April, acting goofy, just another normal day in the life. There were some things going on in his life
at the time which allowed him to listen to the wrong voice and make a stupid
decision.
One thing about
Noah was he didn’t always think things through.
There was a time when a piece of one inch door trim on April’s bedroom
door had come loose. Noah thought, “I
can fix that.” So he went to the garage,
got a hammer and two six penny nails, nailing the trim back into place. One of the nails he couldn’t hammer all the
way in, so he just hammered it over so the door would shut. Everyone got hung up on that nail for many,
many years.
My son was an
awesome young man who loved Jesus and is with him now. I miss him, and realize I will one day get to
hug his neck once more. My family is
stronger today than we were before this happened. I wish it had never happened, but it did and
now we just have to live with it. We had
a choice six years ago to either fall apart or fall into the arms of Jesus and
we chose the latter. God carried us
through then, and He continues to do the same today. It’s not easy, it never will be, but we can
carry on and continue to live. We just
take it a step at a time staying as close to Jesus as we possibly can.
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