When one person who has lost a child encounters another who has lost a child, they connect immediately. Finding another who has walked that valley of the shadow of death is both wonderful and terrible; wonderful because here is someone who understands and has been there, terrible because here is another who has lost a precious child and WHY God… This ought not be! Such is the connection I have with Matt and Ginny Mooney. We’ve never met in person, we haven’t even spoken on the phone. But we share a common experience – losing our first child, a common mode of communicating – writing, a common question – what does life look like now? and a common love of Jesus.

The Mooneys’ first child, a boy named Eliot (I mean, seriously – their son is Eliot, our daughter is Elli?!?!?), was born with Trisomy 18, a diagnosis that, as the doctors put it, is “not viable for life.” Eliot wasn’t supposed to survive the birth, but he did, for 99 days. Matt wrote about their experience in the just-released book “A Story Unfinished: 99 Days with Eliot” and I have to tell you – the parallels between our stories are uncanny.

They invited me to write a post for their book launch, and I was honored to accept. Here’s a short excerpt from my post.

My memory of the next eight years is fuzzy. When conversations turn to events or movies or the like from the decade of the 2000s, I rarely know or recall them. I can count on my fingers the number of times I slept through the night, especially after 2004, when Elli developed a seizure disorder right after we learned we were expecting a third child. In 2007, our fourth child was born with a serious medical condition of his own. I was past my capacity, in over my head, desperately trying to care for one child in a wheelchair who couldn’t walk or talk, two able-bodied children, and a newborn who needed two major surgeries his first year of life. I lived terrified that my sleep deprivation and chronic fatigue would cause me to forget something really important, and the consequences would be devastating.

Head over to The Atypical Life to read the rest of my Story Unfinished.

(Psst. Don’t forget to order your copy of their book!)