Gone Home To Be With the Angels
Posted: Sunday, October 02, 2011
by Jessie I Snyder
TRUE INSPIRATIONS
There was a period in my life when I experienced a great number of loses, I’ve written several pieces about that period, yet the one that stands out the most in my mind is the death of my daughter, Deondra. During that same time I was battling a drug problem and I had just recently lost custody of my daughter, who was fighting a losing battle with AIDS.
My daughter was such a loving and caring child, she was an angel sent to me from heaven above. She was so kind hearted that even on her dying bed she brightened up the day of another dying child. It was this little boy who was in the hospital a lot when she was. They had become good friends. My daughter took all her strength to sit up in bed and color a picture for this little boy. Then she had me and a nurse carry her to the little boy’s room across the hall. She wanted to hand-deliver the picture to him so she could see him smile. She had a personality that would brighten any room, always smiling no matter how bad she felt. You wouldn’t expect that from a 12 year old. My daughter’s quality of life had become so poor that she wasn’t really living, just existing. She had lost control of all her bodily functions, and was wearing pampers again like when she was a newborn baby. Her body was so weak and frail, that she could barely sit up on her own. Yet here was this child showing more courage and strength than most of us had seen in a life time.
I woke up one morning with a sense of unexplained anticipation gnawing at the back of my mind; that this cold January day was going to bring some bad news. It was Wednesday, January 26, 2000 and the time was around 8:00AM, when all of a sudden the telephone rang. It was one of my daughter’s foster parents. She spoke in a trembling voice and said “It is time, your daughter is dying.” I knew this day was coming. I fought… Oh my God, how I had fought so hard to keep this day from happening. But in the end it had become too much. Her little body had had enough. And now the time was here, her breathing was slow and shallow. I jumped out of bed and threw some clothes, and ran down the stairs and out to front door. I ran to my neighbor’s house, and knocked on the door. I asked my neighbor if he could take me to where my daughter was at, because I didn’t have a car and the bus would take too long. He said, “Yes”, and told me to wait right there and he’d be right out. I stood there for what seemed like eternity, before he came out. Then he drove me there as fast as he could. But when we arrived it was already too late, the police and coroner were already there. My daughter had died in her sleep. So again I didn’t get to say goodbye to the one I loved. I cried out to God, “Why did she have to die so young?” Had I made the right decision? Was I a bad parent for signing the Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order? A lot of people thought so, including my husband. When I got there to the foster parents’ house it took me three times to go into the room where my daughter was lying. Each time I tried I collapsed in the hall in tears. When I finally made it into the room to see her, she was lying there looking up towards heaven with a smile on her face; her skin was pale, her lips were grey and she had her arms folded across her chest just like my mother’s. It was then I knew I Had made the right decision. After they took my daughter’s body away, I called my God-Sister Mai and told her that Dee Dee was dead. In what seemed like a matter of minutes my God-Sister was there. Then more and more people began to arrive. I just wanted to go home and be alone, but everyone said that wasn’t a good idea for me after all the losses I had experienced. So I went in the room where my daughter’s things were, and sat on the bed where she had died, holding one of her favorite teddy bears, when a feeling of sadness and despair overwhelmed me, how was I going to live without her? Could I possibly cry anymore? Were there any tears left? I felt as though a deep hollow gorge had opened up, never to be filled again. From within it flowed a pain like I had never known, and the tears came without any sign of an end. I already missed her so much.
Two days later we had my daughter’s funeral, well over a hundred people came. In the mist of all the pain and grief I was happy that my daughter had touched so many lives. It seemed everyone knew and loved my daughter. She had a trust fund that had been set up for her from a court case we had won, in the amount of $150,000, to be held until her 18th birthday. Despite the doctors telling the court she wasn’t going to make it that long, the courts wouldn’t change their mind. So I used the money and gave my daughter the biggest, fanciest funeral that her money could buy. She had a pink and white casket with 14K gold trim and it was laced with white satin. I bought her plenty of white and pink roses to put on the casket. She had 8 pallbearers and I played her favorite song “Thanks for my Child” by Cheryl Pepsi Riley. The song was so beautiful that it made everyone including all the men break down in tears. The words of the song sounded like they had been written about us. At the end of the song a little child says, “I love you mommy,” the child’s voice sounded just like my daughter’s. It was such a cold rainy day, yet all these people came to say goodbye to my daughter. You would have thought that somebody famous had died. Her funeral procession was over three city blocks long. Now here I was dealing with the grief of losing the person that meant more to me than life itself. I didn’t feel like I could go on living. But then I heard my mother’s voice in the back of my mind, as she always said, “God won’t put any more on you than you can bear.” It was that thought that gave me the strengthto endure the saddest time of my life.
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