The Painfully Real Club

I got the photos from Rachel's service back today.  Our friend Luke took them for us, and just like all his pictures, they are beautiful. (more coming soon) This photo was taken at the cemetery during Rachel's committal service... you would never know by looking at us, but this was the first time we ever met...

Ruth and her husband John have lost two boys to anencephaly.  She heard about Rachel and came to her service.  I was standing above Rachel's casket when Ruth approached me... and when she said "I know how hard this is for you"...  well, she really knew.  It's an "exclusive club", as they called it at the hospital.  Unless you have lost a child, it really is impossible to completely understand.  Today, she sent me an email and I wanted to share what she wrote. (you know how much I love analogies!)  Don't worry, I asked first.  You need not fear that if you send me an email, I'll blog it :o)  She wrote:

I remember reading the Velveteen Rabbit to my kids thinking how true the description was to what I was becoming;


"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him


Like the Velveteen Rabbit, becoming real for me has been a painful bittersweet process.... but I'll always love my boys.

What you have done for your girl Rachel is painful and yet you are becoming even more beautifully real - ( please pardon me for evaluating your growth after knowing you for such a short time - but you are beautiful in your sorrow). What you have done for your girl. Love, Ruth

Does "real" have to be so painful?