Losing Lucy…

Like the say on TV cop shows: the names have been changed to protect the innocent.  Lucy is the name I’m using for our twelfth child.  Lucy is a foster child who also has a terminal disease.  My second son (number seven) wrote a story for school about his dying sister titled “Losing Lucy”.  Seven is a cross country runner.  You would know that if you saw him because he doesn’t look like a football player at all.  Anyway, in the story he says he used to run to run away from the thought of losing Lucy but then he decided to run marathons to raise money for research for her rare disease.

We turned his story into a fundraiser called Laps4Lucy.  We didn’t care if we raised much money.  It was more important to show our kids that their ideas could become reality if they really wanted them to.

There’s another reason.  A terminal disease has a way of taking control of your life.  Doing Laps4Lucy was our way of taking back some of that control.

Lucy died on October 1, 2009. She went peacefully with Mom holding her hand. That day we gathered as a family. We voted to take her off life support. We cried, we prayed, we laughed and we said our good byes. By God’s grace we did it the right way.

Yes, we do have 12 kids.  Thirteen if you count one we lost in Mom’s fifth month and Lucy. We do believe we will have all thirteen throughout eternity. Some came to our family the old fashioned way – by birth.  Some were adopted.  And two are still foster children.  We have opened our home and our lives to some 75 foster children during our marriage.

I’ll be posting stories on this blog about the days of our lives. Some of the stories about life with 12 kids will be funny…at least I think so.  Some are sad.  Some will be life lessons that may be worth remembering.  Losing Lucy is my attempt to tell the stories about our family and about my perspective of life.

Hundreds of years ago it was important to be attached to a family. It was critical to ones survival. The same is true today but many of us don’t realize it. Our individual stories, woven together here, tell our family’s story. I want our family’s story to be chronicled for who we are today and for who will become our family in the future. I pray these days and my reflections won’t be lost for future generations.

My good friend Johann has been nagging me for years to write about my life with a dozen kids. This blog is a tribute to his nagging victory.  I’m thankful to Johann for not giving up on me.  Whether anybody ever reads this blog really isn’t important.  I just want to leave a record for the people in my life who really matter, who may enjoy a laugh or two, when they remember these incidents I call the Chronicles of hope in the face of calamity.