From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
Also in this article: I was walking through the orphanage filled with tiny children and came upon a girl about two months old. She was wailing, and I thought my eardrums would burst. It seemed she was crying from hunger, but as I picked her up and felt her heaviness, I wondered if something more was behind her tears, a sadness, maybe, at having been left there.
Looking at her, I thought, I know exactly how you feel.
As I held her tight to my heart, I felt compassion, something I hadn't felt since my 15-year-old son, Jantsen, died of an undetected heart ailment several months earlier. The sadness and anger I'd experienced had me believing that nobody could feel as bad as I did. I would walk the earth under a thick cloud for the rest of my life; I had the corner on suffering.
But as I began rocking the baby girl to sleep that November of 1999 in a remote orphanage in Phan Rang, Vietnam, I realized how much she and I had in common. Perhaps I wasn't the only one suffering in this world. I heard my husband, Randy, call me. "You've got to come here," he said. He had the strangest look on his face.
I put the girl down and followed Randy to an adjoining room. A little boy was sitting on a woven mat. He was wearing a blue suit and white crocheted booties. He was all alone.
As soon as I saw him, I knew.
He was about to change our life.
He was born Vinh Thien to a mother who couldn't afford to raise him. She already had three children who lived with her parents, chicken farmers in Phu Thanh, a rural, impoverished area in central Vietnam. When the young woman discovered she was pregnant again, her parents refused to take the child in. So, a few months after Vinh was born, she left him at the orphanage and vanished.
"Mom," I heard Crista, our daughter, say beside me as we stared at him, "can you believe this baby?"
He was beautiful, tiny and soft, with huge cheeks and meaty thighs, the only plump kid in a country of thin people. I picked him up, and immediately I was overwhelmed.
I had met at least 50 children that morning. Our friends Marvin and Carol Harlan, who supported this place and had adopted their daughter, Kylie, from Vietnam, had invited us to visit the orphanage with them. After Jantsen died, we'd established a memorial fund in his name, and donations totaling $25,000 had come in from people within our close-knit town of Neosho, Missouri. We'd been searching for the right way to use that money. We wanted to make our son proud.
Marvin and Carol thought we ought to see this place. It needed help.
I picked up most of the children that day and wanted to hold all of them. They were so alone; each was so interesting. But there was something about Vinh—I couldn't explain it. As he settled into me, resting his head on my shoulder, I looked up to see Randy and Crista watching me.
Tears began falling down my face, tears of hope, not misery. I felt I was exactly where I belonged. I had a sense of purpose I hadn't experienced in ages.
I took Vinh and went outside, down a stairwell, and into the courtyard. For the rest of the day, I carried him.
None of us could stay apart from him for the remainder of our three days in Phan Rang. Randy, Crista, and I would elbow one another out of the way so that we would each be the one to feed him his bottle or rock him to sleep. We were like bratty siblings wrestling over the TV remote.
"It's my turn," Randy would say as I held Vinh.
"Too bad," I'd say. "I was here first."
"Why do you still get to hold him?" Crista would say. "I found him!"
There was plenty to do, of course, when Vinh wasn't with me. I had experience as a hairdresser, so I bought a pair of scissors at a grocery store, and in the evenings, the older kids lined up so I could cut their hair.
As I looked at the children around me, I realized I would never have come to Vietnam if it weren't for the loss of my son. A day doesn't pass that I don't replay that moment in my mind as if it had happened yesterday. As if it were happening now.
And I think, all the time, about how much I love him.
"I am right here," I whisper to Jantsen. We're in a hospital room. It's cold and impersonal. It's June 16, 1999.
Pressing my body close to his, I lay my head on his chest and touch his face, feeling the soft stubble of hair on his 15-year-old cheeks. I will his chest to move, for his lungs to fill with air. But I sense nothing except a gaping emptiness and my deep, gnawing desire to change what is happening. I can't make sense of it.
My sister Cheryl had called me at the hair salon around 1 p.m. that day. "Come quick," she said. "It's Jantsen."
After football practice, Jantsen and Darius, Cheryl's son, were watching a movie at her house. She walked into the room at one point and said something to Jantsen. He didn't answer her.
He didn't even move.
She tried to shake him awake, but still he didn't move.
She and several others went into emergency mode. They gave him CPR and called an ambulance. He was taken to the hospital.
The minister from our church appears in front of me before I reach Jantsen. He takes my hands in his. I am screaming silently: Please, God, just let him be alive. Let him be brain-damaged if you need to, but just let him be alive. I will take care of him. Give him back to me!
Advertisement 
