Before:

Life with our three-year-old son was anything but normal.

You see, Zachariah Daniel was born with severe brain damage and accompanying physical problems.  Some of his problems included severe spastic cerebral palsy that affected his entire body, seizures, gastric reflux, blindness, absence of speech, profound deafness, and breathing problems that often landed him in the hospital with another raging case of pneumonia that threatened to take his life more than once. 

Zachariah would never be anything more than a living, breathing vegetable, doctors told us.  He would never be able to feed or dress himself, and he was profoundly mentally handicapped, with the mind of a six-to-nine- month-old baby.

In short, they had no hope of Zachariah ever having a viable life.  He would require twenty-four hour medical care.  The doctors told us he would be better off in a facility where proefessional medical people could care for his every need, but we were stubborn: we felt that Zachariah would fare better in a home environment; we would do anything possible to keep him healthy or happy.

Easier said than done.

Every two hours, Zachariah would have to be turned over because he couldn't do it himself: he was too weak.  He needed to have his medicines (or his foods) delivered via a tube in his nose or stomach; he couldn't chew or swallow on his own without risk of choking or getting food in his lungs, causing further problems.

He wasn't toilet trained: he wore diapers that needed to be changed upwards to six times a day ... and oftentimes more than that.

We had to wrestle with stiff limbs to get him dressed; we were terrified of hurting him.  Getting our son dressed was difficult at best.

We had to deal with his screaming or noises: he couldn't communicate like you or I could: his brain was too damaged.  His noises or his screams were his way of "communicating" and it drove us crazy when he'd do it in the middle of the night, interrupting precious sleep: ours.

We put up with this for over two and a half years.  It was getting to be so bad there was talk of possibly killing our son, just so we could keep our sanity or at least, put him out of his misery.  He was suffering needlessly, and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it.  Somehow we blamed one another for the way he ended up.  When he was born should have been the happiest day of our lives: instead it turned out to be one of the very worst.

We thought we loved Zachariah.  Maybe we did, but deep down, we also hated him.  We hated him for how he was, and we hated having to deal with yet another medical problem that cropped up or another new diagnosis, of which the news wasn't good.  We got tired of hearing bad news: all we wanted was a little light of hope, or at least some good news, to where he could at least have some chance in life.

We hated having to care for him, day in and day out.  Our marriage suffered, and our remaining children grew distant.  They hated their baby brother; they wished he had never been born, and they wished him dead.  They were embarrassed in having him as a brother because they couldn't do anything that they could do.  They knew their friends would probably say something about their "idiot brother" and/or tease them unmercifully, in which they often did.

Then came the sad day when we made the painful decision to have our youngest son placed in a home.  We were at the breaking point.  We couldn't afford to take care of him much longer.  Our expenses were eating us alive, especially Zachariah's medical bills, which seemed to be a never ending mountain that we were unable to climb.  My wife and I were working two to three jobs each in order to meet the payment of these bills.  We hardly talked to one another because either we were working, or else one of us were tied up with Zachariah on our days off (or when we were off the clock). 

We even had the older children helping out with Zachariah's care.  While they did a good job, we felt guilty that their childhood was being robbed because they had to "feed" their brother or play with him when they knew that he couldn't care less or know what was going on around him.  He was that damaged.

We looked for a home near us that could take Zachariah, but the closest one was over 100 miles away.  We were becoming frustrated.  It seemed that nobody even cared about what we were going through.  Even our friends abandoned us; we were left to deal with all of this alone.

After:

Suddenly, when all hope seemed lost, we got a call from a home in nearby Chattanooga (we lived in Knoxville).  They had an opening for our son.  We told them our story; the head of the home there said that they would be glad to take Zachariah in.  It seemed like a miracle.  They seemed to know what we were going through, even though we had never even met face to face.  They said that we weren't the first parents to feel the crushing demands of caring for a child who was severely disabled. 

The head director knew all too well what we were feeling because he had a daughter (now grown) who had been like our son; she was still thriving under the loving, gentle care of the medical staff there.  They would be happy to meet with us (and with Zachariah).

We made the long drive to Chattanooga, where Zachariah was evaluated and then placed into the home later that night.  They said that he would be well cared for and loved, and if anything came up, they would discuss it with us.  They knew we had our lives back home to get to and how important our jobs/children were to us.

At first, life was good.  We didn't miss the demands that our son put on us.  We actually had time to spend with our other children ... and with each other.  We threw ourselves into our work and into our lives off the clock.  We actually started doing things as a family again without worrying about Zachariah's needs bogging us down like a two-ton weight.

Then came the grieving part.  We grieved for our baby son, now three years old, who would never know what it was like to walk, run, throw a baseball, have friends, read a book, or grow up into adulthood.  We grieved for the things he would never accomplished in life.  We grieved because he was now in the care of strangers; we felt that we'd failed him as parents because we couldn't give him the proper life he deserved.

We grieved because we felt as if we threw him away, as though Zachariah were a piece of trash.  We felt guilty in passing on his burdens to total strangers who were probably more better equipped to deal with his mulitple disabilities.  It was one of the worst moments in our lives ever since he had been born, and also the day when we learned the extent of all of his medical problems.

We are still grieving.  We don't kow if we will ever fully get over our loss, but it still feels like we will never smile or enjoy life again.  Maybe it wasn't the best decision for our youngest child, but we felt that it was the only thing necessary in order to save our lives, our marriage, and our sanity, as well as the sanity of our other two children.

*To be continued.*