Asher has been gone four years

Warning: this post is not hopeful, not complete, it is broken. It might make you sad, though that is not it's purpose. I have tried so many times to write about the night Ashed died and sometimes I have put a great deal of words down on the page, other times only a few, always to be thrown away shortly after.

July 26th 2005

When Heather first found Asher not breathing and called me from the front room I was asleep. I woke up immediately and by the tone of her voice that something was very wrong. I pulled him out of his crib and started giving him cpr, shouting at Heather to call 911. I gave him cpr for 12 minutes before the ambulance arrived and the paramedic came in and took him in her arms and out of our little apartment.

The first hospital we went to was the wrong one, our little boy was not there. I was standing in an emergency room in the middle of the night with my crying wife and we did not know where our son was.

I remember when we finally found the right place a detective came in and asked us a bunch of questions, his tape recorder held out to catch our every choking word. He was doing his job, that night his job was to find out if we had something to do with what happened.

When they decided to transfer him to another hospital that specialized in infants I remember sitting in our car and watching as they put him back into the ambulance and started driving away. I watched as one of the guys who was standing outside noticed us waiting there, he tried to signal the ambulance driver to turn on his sirens, the driver didn't see him, I saw the concern in the other guys face, I understood he wanted them to turn on the lights and sirens, but only for our comfort, not because he thought our boy could be saved if they drove faster. We followed that ambulance through town, stopping at red lights from time to time.

I remember the doctors face when he told us that Asher had no brain activity, that when they removed his breathing tube he would not start breathing on his own. I remembered the moments after we had made the decision to remove Asher from life support. I went back into his room to ask the doctors if they could clean up the smear of what I assume was antiseptic around the tape that was holding his breathing tube in his mouth. I wanted him to look as much like our little boy as he could when Heather came in to say goodbye. They said they couldn't do it, they asked me to leave because the were taking a tissue sample from him so they could match him to possible recipients for his little organs that we had decided to donate. I asked my dad to pray over Asher before they took him away, dad cried, he prayed well, though for the first time in my life he did not seem to know what to say. I felt bad for asking him to do that. I remember being told after they took him away that his little organs were so damaged by lack of oxygen that none of them were usable for donating to others. I didn't understand. I don't understand.

If you take anything away from this at all let it be a commitment to learn cpr, I had not been certified for years and could hardly remember what to do, I always wonder if I could have made a difference, I wonder if I was doing it wrong.

Treasure your family, you never know how much longer you have. So many times as I watch my Avery and North play together I wonder what kind of little man Asher would have been. I can not help but imagine him being a wonderful brother to them both.

I am so blessed to know that Asher is with my Father in heaven now, I try and imagine it, I know I fall short, yet even in my limited imagination it is beautiful, I am blessed.

edit: Moments after I posted this my son North came up and started crawling all over me laughing and hugging and being silly, for a moment I tried to get him to go away because I was feeling sad and distracted, then I realized that he was there to remind me that I REALLY am blessed, so we wrestled and laughed. God is good.