It goes against nature for parents to outlive their children. So for mothers whose children have died, Mother's Day is an uneasy holiday.
Grieving mothers know all too well the awkward silence that descends in the months and years after a child's death. Says Linda Ruibal of Dallas, whose daughter died in 1994: "There's a constant fear that the world will forget Maggie, that people won't know about her. [But] this was my child, and she will always exist in my heart."
That fierce mother-love provided much of the impetus for "The Children' s Garden." Designed as a retreat for meditation, the garden will be dedicated on Sunday, Mother's Day, at 11:15 a.m. at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School, Abrams at Kenwood in East Dallas.
The Children's Garden began its life with Rachel Elena Sedeno, who lived for just 51/2 months. Rachel, the youngest of David and Ellen Sedeno's four children, was born May 8, 1997. She weighed 2 pounds and had a major heart defect and Down's syndrome. (double check)
After she died from complications of cardiac surgery, her parents wanted to create a place where Rachel and other "little angels" could be remembered by the community of faith that had sustained the family with its prayers. As other families joined in the planning and design work, the Children's Garden project grew beyond all expectations.
The completed garden will feature a Wall of Angels, with children' s names on memorial stones; two bronze sculptures, called "Children of Peace," by Utah artist Gary Price; a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes; a 16-foot Mediterranean-style fountain, hand-carved in Mexico; meditation benches; and a dedicatory plaque telling how little Rachel inspired the garden.
Rachel's father is assistant international editor for The Dallas Morning News; her mother is a public-relations executive for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. Planning the Children's Garden gave the family a way to grieve constructively, Mrs. Sedeno says. "It's something to do besides crying all the time."
And the dedication on Sunday will have a special meaning for all the families involved. "Moms get really anxious about Mother's Day coming up," says nurse Ginny Robinson, coordinator of Healing Matters, a support group for bereaved parents of infants at the Medical Center of Plano. "They still feel they should be remembered on Mother's Day. But often, society doesn't recognize that."
Ms. Robinson, who has worked with some of the families involved in the project, thinks such a garden has the seeds of healing in it. "When you have a garden, you have to nurture and care for it," she says. "And that's what mothers do best."
Maggie Ruibal
Maggie Ruibal died in 1994, when she was 17 years old. But, as a special-needs child, she never lost her childhood innocence.
Husband Mike "would always say he wished the kids could stay little, " Linda Ruibal says. "Well, Maggie stayed 3." So, in Maggie's world, love remained a pure thing.
The Ruibal family owns a landscaping and nursery business. Maggie loved flowers, especially pink ones. But, her mother says, "She liked books better" - in particular, Arnold Lobel's classic Frog and Toad Are Friends.
"We wore out probably 100 copies of that book," Mrs. Ruibal says fondly. That is why the Ruibals, besides contributing much of the landscaping and labor in the Children's Garden, also built the fountain with a hand-carved Frog and Toad at its base.
Maggie "probably would be totally unimpressed [by the garden]," says her mother. "But she would like the Frog and Toad part."
If you were Maggie's friend, she would give you hugs and kisses. She was fascinated by thumbs, and she liked to hold onto the thumbs of people she loved, such as her three brothers.
"She saw everyone as equals," Mrs. Ruibal says. "She taught all of us that love is unconditional. She brought out the best in everybody, because she made you want to help her."
Patrick Lanham
In May 1994, Carol Cirulli Lanham was 40 weeks pregnant with her first child, expecting a normal full-term delivery any day. Then the baby stopped moving inside her.
Mrs. Lanham had an emergency Cesarean section, but Patrick had died in utero, and nothing could bring him back. Sean and Carol Lanham were devastated. Nothing had prepared them to come home from the hospital with empty arms.
"I wish I'd known then what I know now," Mrs. Lanham says, "But I wasn't prepared." Groggy from anesthesia, sick with grief, she did hold Patrick for a while. "I'm grateful Sean and I got to spend some time with him. But if I could only go back and be lucid, and have more time with him. . ."
Mr. and Mrs. Lanham run their own business-writing company, and she is a former reporter for the Irving Daily News and San Antonio Light. The Lanhams, who are parishioners at All Saints Catholic Church in North Dallas, got involved in St. Thomas Aquinas' garden project through their friends, the Sedenos.
Unlike many reporters, Mrs. Lanham never had ambitions to write a book. But after Patrick's death, she found few self-help resources to assist in a decision to have another child. She says she "wanted to help other women not to feel alone . . . to give women hope."
She interviewed some 100 women (most from the North Texas area) and worked on a manuscript, while her family grew to include Andrew and Michael, now almost 4 and 2. Mrs. Lanham's book, Pregnancy After a Loss, will be published Oct. 1 by the Berkley Publishing Group's Penguin-Putnam imprint.
When Mrs. Lanham sees her two young sons, she remembers her first one. "For the rest of my life," she says, "I'll think about Patrick and wonder how our family would have been if he had lived."
Rachel Vandeven
Shelly Vandeven spent nearly two months in Presbyterian Hospital, waiting for her third child to be born. But after Rachel arrived prematurely on Nov. 12, 1996, only eight days passed before she went in for gastrointestinal surgery that could not save her.
"You always want to create something positive" out of grief, says Mrs. Vandeven, a marketing executive at Haggar. She and her husband, David, a medical-supply distributor, spearheaded a project to renovate the room at Presbyterian where Rachel was baptized just before her death.
Now, decorated in soft white-cloud and angel motifs and with comfortable sofas and a big-screen TV, "Rachel's Room" gives families at Presbyterian' s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit a place to be together for private moments.
Rachel's Room has brought the Vandevens a degree of comfort, knowing that it helps other families in similar straits. Like other St. Thomas parishioners, they also look forward to the Children's Garden dedication on Sunday.
Thirty months after their daughter's death, "it's still difficult, " Mrs. Vandeven says. "Ellen [Sedeno] and I say it's like we're part of this club that we don't want to belong to." But, with another daughter to be born in July, Mrs. Vandeven rates herself as "cautiously optimistic" about the future.
The two Vandeven sons, 7-year-old Ryan and 4-year-old Reid, often help their parents tidy up Rachel's headstone at the cemetery. The boys call the green lawns of Restland a "thinking-about-you place, " and Mrs. Vandeven says that the Children's Garden will be another one.
Jennifer Stabile
"In our school, we teach the children that life goes on in a different way when we go to heaven," says Dr. Carole "Cindy" Stabile, principal of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School. "In the garden, they can understand that life goes on. That these babies are a blessing to us, although we don't have them with us any more."
Dr. Stabile speaks from experience, not only as an educator but as a mother of five. Her first daughter, Jennifer, died as a newborn in 1963. In the custom of the time, she says, "My mother, with the best intentions, came to my house while I was still in the hospital, and she hid the bassinet and baby things, so I wouldn't be reminded.
"The truth is, you never do forget," Dr. Stabile says. "And another child can't replace the child who dies.
"After a while, it's just the family who carries that baby in their hearts. Your friends go on with their lives." Just as before the birth, "You are the sole carrier of this child. Only now, it's in your heart."
Dr. Stabile is retiring this spring, after five years at St. Thomas Aquinas School, to move near her mother and one of her daughters inFairfax County, Va. She will take with her the memory of the Children's Garden, where Jennifer's name and that of Charles, a grandson who was born prematurely, will remain.
Being involved with the garden has made it easier for her to think and speak of Jennifer, and its planning has been "like giving her a gift." For each loved one who enters it, the garden "validates that child's existence," Dr. Stabile says. "It reminds us that there is continuation in the Spirit."
John and Kimberly Reith
In 1973, Tangie and Edward Reith's third child, John, died in his crib at the age of one month and three days. The medical examiner' s verdict was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. And for several years, the Reiths accepted that conclusion.
But after daughter Kimberly Angelique was born in 1979, they discovered that she had cystic fibrosis (CF), and that both Tangie and Ed carried the recessive gene for the disease. Mrs. Reith now believes that John also died of CF, undiagnosed but evidenced by his failure to gain weight, plus the characteristic mucus that a post-mortem revealed in his lungs.
Son Michael, now 22, also was diagnosed with CF in 1983, but subsequent DNA tests show that he neither has CF nor carries the gene for it. Two older Reith daughters have not been DNA-tested.
Kimberly was "a great kid, a happy little girl" with lots of friends, Mrs. Reith says. "She had beautiful, big brown eyes, blond hair, a turned-up nose and a great big smile. She was very thin. She never weighed 50 pounds."
Kimberly loved to read and was a straight-A student at Richland Elementary in Richardson. She was thrilled when Michael would dance with her, swing her up and hold her like a flying bird over his head, just like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. And though CF kept her from many activities, Kimberly played goalie on her kindergarten soccer team and attended camps for CF kids.
She "hated injustice," her mother says, and with good reason. There wasn't much justice in the fact that Kimberly had to spend hours of every day having "treatments" to clear her lungs of that suffocating mucus, or that she spent the last six months of her life with an oxygen tank.
But Kimberly, at 10, was braver at the end than most of the adults around her. She even told weeping family members in her hospital room that if they were going to cry, they would have to leave.
"She felt bad about scolding them," Mrs. Reith says. "She called herself "a little devil.' Then she said, "No, I'm a little angel!' And within 24 hours or so, she was one."
Mrs. Reith "will never stop loving or missing my kids. That hole in the heart will never heal," she says. "But that's OK.
"Death is something I'm not afraid of. And sure as I'm sitting here, I know there's an afterlife."
© 1999 The Dallas Morning News All Rights Reserved
Joyce Saenz Harris / Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News, Living Memories., 05-08-1999, pp 1C.