Susan Ann

I was on my way home when I was almost involved in a head-on collision with someone at an intersection. My view to the street at my right was blocked by a huge SUV, so when I saw that my light had turned green I started to go, not seeing the other driver run his red light. Both our brakes squealed and tires burned as we immediately pressed the brakes. We got to about less than 1-inch from hitting each other.

After coming to a complete stop, my thoughts did not immediately analyze the situation nor did my thoughts speculate about the quality of a person the other driver was, but rather I found myself thinking about a baby girl I read in the newspaper sometime last year. I waved at the other driver with a smile. He backed off then the rest of us on the right-of-way went on our intended destinations. Once I got to the highway, I tried to recount the details of the story that invaded my thoughts…

The story “concerned Susan Ann Catherine Torres, born 13 weeks premature on Aug. 2 and weighing less than two pounds.
Her mother, Susan Torres, 26, had suffered a brain aneurism from melanoma complications on May 7 and was pronounced brain-dead at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlingon. Husband Jason Torres decided to try to keep his wife alive until his daughter, then four months in utero, could live outside the womb.
For the next three months, it was nip and tuck as to whether Susan Ann would make it. When she was finally born, doctors pronounced her unusually healthy at a jubilant press conference.
Five weeks and five days later, she fell victim to a deadly intestinal infection. In the last hour of her life, she was removed from the respirator and placed in her father’s arms.
“The doctors expected her to die within a minute or two,” Mary Ann Kreitzer, a friend of the family, recently wrote in her Les Femmes newsletter. “She confounded their expectations. Like her mom, little Susan was a fighter, the spark of life like a hot ember.
“Lying in her daddy’s arms, she struggled for every breath, raising her oxygen level far above what the doctors thought she could do on her own.” “She wanted to live,” the child’s grandmother told Mrs. Kreitzer. “She wanted to stay with her daddy. She loved her daddy. ”

…I had to stop at the shoulder of the busy highway.
I couldn’t hold back the tears as I tried to imagine what Susan Ann’s father must have been feeling when he watched his daughter die in his arms.
I hunched forward to the steering wheel as my emotions poured out of me and I was powerless to do anything to stop it.

I don’t recall how long I sat there, but I thanked Susan Ann for the memory.
I then thought about how lucky I was to be blessed with 3 wonderful children; that fulfilling the promises I made to them seem to be an easy task all of a sudden.

I have to believe God orchestrated my steps in this direction. If I hadn’t made the decisions I made in the past, I wouldn’t be experiencing the events I am struggling with today. God has been the toymaker who made me, who wound me up, pointed me in the direction he wanted me to go, then turned me loose to my destiny and here I am…

I’ve heard it said people think the only thing that can tie any one person to another person is via flesh to flesh. However, I think it is so much more than that. I believe people can be connected together spiritually.
Something happens when you meet the one person with whom you sense your destiny is tied with and you suddenly find you are spending your life together with that person. All of a sudden, it becomes clear you would never be the individual you were meant to be without that person in your life – the person who completes you, who motivates you, with whom you would gladly sacrifice all to spend the rest of your life with.
But as Orpah left Naomi, when people can walk away from you, you just have to let them walk. It doesn’t mean Orpah was a bad person, it just means that her contribution to the story is over.
If we’re lucky, we find ourselves with our spiritual “Ruth” who tells us that “Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I die and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

…Somehow, I envision Susan Ann's struggle for every single breath she could muster was so she could comfort her father spiritually with Ruth’s words. And somehow, my problems don't seem as bad.

God Bless you.