The Missing Dash

It has been said that a person’s tombstone marks three things: the beginning of life, the end of life, and a dash to represent everything in between. As we go through life cramming as much as we can into our dash, other people have dashes that cross over into ours as well. Regardless of the length of our dash, we can always assign a value to each data point in it. After all, isn’t a dash just a line composed of an infinite number of individual points?

March 30, 2005 marked the day of the beginning of one of the most significant lives that has ever crossed my own dash. The resting place for Rachael’s marker doesn’t have a visible dash because she left this world on the same day she arrived. The firstborn of my daughter and son-in-law was born with a condition known as Trisomy-18 with a life expectancy that could be only a few years or a few minutes. Heartbroken, our family dealt with this loss and tried to find some understanding of this tragedy. We hold life to be precious and need to find some meaning in the things that seem to happen without reason.

As we had waited for this birth everyone knew that the prognosis was not good, but hope was alive and some who had forgotten how to pray remembered during that time. It was not to be. The tiny heart that had beat so strongly for nine months and one week stopped that day. Does that mean that her life really has a missing dash? Rachael was a very special soul even though she never grew to talk, run, play, or laugh. She has touched more lives than some people who muddle through their much longer dashes. She inspires everyone to reflect on the true meaning of life and to dedicate themselves to some positive endeavor in her memory.

It may be difficult for others to understand, but that day was a turning point for me. Oh, I never really thought it was all about me and I could not even imagine the grief of a mother and father losing a child. But, as Rachael entered my own dash she changed my life forever. Her life had meaning. For months I had prayed that she be allowed to live and that my life be taken instead. I’m still here, so maybe my life has meaning too. Maybe we all should be more aware of the impact of our dash on others as we go about living and working.

Go forth and be dashful today!