Chapter Seven: The Final Embrace—Entrusting in Grief, Hoping in Resurrection
Wednesday, August 21, 2024.
This was the final day of Little Wheat's earthly life.
That day, we were still keeping watch in his room at Riley Children's Hospital.
The equipment that had become so familiar over the previous thirteen days was still there.
The medical staff were still working.
We still had to put on isolation gowns.
And we were still the father and mother beside that hospital bed.
Only now, we understood more and more clearly:
we might have to face the moment we least wanted to face.
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Hymns in the Hospital Room
That day, we continued to sing hymns.
We had sung these songs many times before in church.
But beside the hospital bed, every line became different.
We sang:
“God Will Take Care of You.”
We also sang:
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
We sang:
“Let the Weak Say I Am Strong.”
And we sang:
“Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow.”
We sang not because we had no sorrow.
Quite the opposite.
We were singing in the midst of sorrow.
Sometimes our voices choked.
Sometimes we reached one line and began to cry.
Sometimes the people beside us carried the song forward.
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Christian worship does not happen only when things are going well.
That day, we came to understand more deeply:
Sometimes worship is not the triumphant song of a victor.
Sometimes it is simply a father and a mother who, when they no longer have the power to change their circumstances, still say to God:
“Lord, we are here.”
We did not have to hide our heartache in order to worship.
The Psalms themselves are filled with lament, questions, and tears.
So that day, our tears did not cancel our faith.
And our faith did not cancel our tears.
Both were present at the same time.
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4:44 p.m.
By afternoon, Little Wheat's life entered its final moments.
We stayed beside him.
At 4:44 p.m. on August 21, 2024,
Little Wheat's earthly life came to an end.
Nineteen months.
From 11:00 p.m. on January 17, 2023, to 4:44 p.m. on August 21, 2024.
These are the times we have confirmed and now locked.
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This moment cannot be turned into a literary device.
Nor can we make death seem no longer frightening simply because we believe in resurrection.
A child died.
Our son died.
Daddy and Mommy could no longer hope, as we had the day before, that we would carry him home.
His body would no longer respond to us as it once had.
Nineteen months of earthly life came to an end that afternoon.
This is the real face of death.
Christians do not need to deny it.
Scripture calls death an enemy.
Paul says:
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” —1 Corinthians 15:26, KJV
Therefore, we do not need to call death itself good.
Nor do we need to say:
“Because we have faith, this moment was not really sad.”
No.
This moment was deeply sad.
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The Final Embrace
I held Little Wheat.
Just as I had held him countless times during the previous nineteen months.
Only this time was completely different.
I looked at his face.
I touched his body.
I kissed his forehead.
These are things a father truly did.
On many nights afterward, I would return to this scene again and again in my memory.
As his daddy, I would also say to him in my heart:
“Little Wheat, Daddy loves you.”
“Thank you for coming into our lives.”
“Daddy does not want to let you go.”
In the earlier manuscript, I once used language such as “Daddy will go to heaven to find you someday” to express my grief and hope at the time.
In this public canonical edition, I want to say it more precisely:
I hope to meet again the child I love in the resurrection and renewal of all things promised by Christ.
I do not know every detail of how that day will unfold.
Nor does Scripture permit me to describe specifically what Little Wheat is doing now in the unseen world.
But I know that Christ has risen.
Therefore, my hope is not built on my own imagination.
It is built on the risen Lord.
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What We Saw, and What We Hope
In a loss like this, people naturally use tender images.
We may say:
“Angels came to receive him.”
“He went home to heaven.”
“He must be waiting for us now.”
“He must already be singing there.”
Such language can be very precious in the grief of parents.
I too have imagined such things.
These images can express love, longing, and hope.
But here I want to make an honest distinction:
These are not things we saw in the hospital.
What we saw was:
a child reaching the end of his earthly life in a hospital room.
Daddy and Mommy were beside him.
People wept.
Some prayed.
Some sang hymns.
Doctors and nurses completed the work they had to do.
These are witnessed events.
As for the unseen state after death, we can speak only within the boundaries of what Scripture reveals, leaving details beyond revelation to God.
This does not weaken our hope.
It makes our hope more secure.
Because we do not need to know what Little Wheat is “doing” at this moment in order to believe:
Christ has risen. The dead will be raised. Death will finally be destroyed. God will make all things new.
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A Farewell Prayer
After Little Wheat died, we remained in the hospital room.
Doctors.
Nurses.
Pastors.
Some family members and friends.
Everyone gathered together.
We prayed.
We cried.
It was not a gathering to celebrate death.
It was a family that had lost a child entrusting ourselves to God in the deepest grief.
Later, I often described that moment as a very sacred experience in my life.
By “sacred,” I do not mean that death itself was sacred.
I mean:
At our most powerless, we could still pray.
At our deepest pain, people could still support one another.
When words were almost useless, a group of people could still gather around us.
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A Small Casket
Later, we had to face a reality that parents can scarcely imagine:
making funeral arrangements for a nineteen-month-old child.
We contacted a funeral service provider.
In our earlier records, we noted that because there was no child-sized casket that fit, other possibilities were discussed for a time.
It was very difficult for me to hear those words.
So Little Wheat's American spiritual grandpa made a small casket for him with his own hands.
This later became one of our deepest memories.
An older man, with his own hands,
doing the last thing he could do
for a child he deeply loved.
That casket was not a symbol of “glorifying death.”
It was more like a labor of love.
When you cannot bring a child back to life, you still ask:
What can I still do for him?
Sometimes the last thing love can do is this concrete and this heavy.
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Leaving the Hospital Room
After Little Wheat died, we remained at the hospital for some time.
The medical staff completed the procedures they needed to complete, and the funeral service provider began taking over the arrangements that followed.
Much of that period remains fragmented in my memory.
I remember the room.
I remember people coming and going.
I remember us crying.
I remember looking at my son for the last time.
And I remember that we had to face the fact no parent wants to face:
Little Wheat would eventually leave that room, and we could not carry him home with us as we normally would.
As for the specific process by which his body was finally prepared, wrapped, and taken from the PICU by staff, the next chapter of this book preserves Pastor John's own first-person witness.
That experience belongs to him.
I do not need to turn someone else's memory into my own in order to show how heavy this moment was for our family.
For Daddy and Mommy, what could not be changed was this:
that day, we had to say goodbye to our son's body.
When he finally left the hospital, we knew that from then on, the way we went home would never be the same.
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“Let the Little Children Come unto Me”
At that moment, I thought of Jesus' words about children:
“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” —cf. Mark 10:14, KJV
This verse became an association of faith for me in the original story.
I am still willing to preserve it today.
But not as though it meant:
“I therefore saw with my own eyes exactly what had just happened after death.”
Rather, I preserve it as the way a father in overwhelming grief reached for Christ.
Facing a child I could no longer protect,
I could only entrust him, and entrust myself, to the Lord who said:
“Suffer the little children to come unto me.”
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Death Is Not the Gospel
There is something I need to say more clearly now than I did then.
Little Wheat's death is not the gospel.
The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the gospel.
Little Wheat's story can become a testimony.
His life can cause others to think about eternity.
His smile can cause people to remember love.
His departure may also cause people to ask questions again in the midst of pain.
But he cannot redeem anyone.
Nor does he need to become another “Christ.”
Salvation has only one center:
Jesus Christ.
Therefore, when we remember Little Wheat, we are not making a child sacred.
Rather, through his life and death, we turn our eyes once again toward the Lord who has truly conquered death.
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What Does “Goodbye” Mean?
For parents who have lost a child, saying “goodbye” is hard.
Because of course we hope:
this is not goodbye forever.
But true Christian hope is not merely that “the soul continues to exist after death.”
Scripture directs our eyes farther:
Christ will return.
The dead will be raised.
The body will be redeemed.
There will be a new heaven and a new earth.
So when I say:
“Little Wheat, I hope to see you again,”
I am not describing a scene I have already seen.
I am confessing the hope of resurrection.
Paul writes:
“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.” —1 Corinthians 15:19–20, KJV
This is the ground beneath my hope.
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When we finally left the hospital, home was no longer the same place we had left thirteen days earlier.
The rooms were still there.
His things were still there.
Memories were everywhere.
But Little Wheat did not come home with us.
From that day forward, we began learning a life we had never chosen:
to live with love,
to live with absence,
to live with grief,
and still to believe.
Death took from us something that cannot be replaced.
But death cannot make Christ unrisen.
It cannot cancel the promise of resurrection.
It cannot overturn God's final renewal of all things.
So Chapter Seven does not end with grief resolved.
Our grief was not resolved at 4:44 p.m.
It continued.
It changed shape.
It became part of us.
But another question also began to take shape:
If death does not have the final word, how should we now live?
The rest of this book grows out of that question.