It is just one moment that destroys her entire life. But
just one year later not one, but three miracles happen.
Little
Kyle was celebrating his 5th birthday. Together with his sisters (4-year-old
Emma and 2-year-old Katie), his mother Lori, and grandma Cindy, they all drove
to the fair. Kyle especially enjoyed the ferris wheel and the petting zoo. They
were all having a terrific time. As it became time for their afternoon nap,
they were all loaded into the minivan so that they could make their way home.
But they hit a traffic jam. Lori turned around to her youngest daughter and
tickled her tenderly on her foot. It’d be the last time that she saw her
daughter laugh.
Suddenly
their minivan is rammed by a truck. Without braking, he speeds into the car.
Mother and grandmother are immediately knocked out. The children in the
backseat are so badly hurt that they must immediately be rushed to the
hospital.
When
Chris, the father, receives the call he rushes to the hospital. But he arrives
too late. Both of his little daughters are dead. The parents still hold hope
for Kyle. But he is so badly injured that he has no chance of survival.
Heavy-heartedly, they must turn off his life-support machine. Together with his
wife, Chris sits on his son’s bed until Kyle breathes his last breath. “I held
my hand on his chest until his heart stopped beating,” tells Chris. “Then he
was gone.”
Their
loss only becomes readily apparent when they see Kyle, Katie, and Emma one last
time before the funeral. They lay the 3 little ones in children’s coffins.
he pain
is almost unbearable. Lori and Chris live in a neighborhood with many children.
Every time that they hear their cheerful laughing, they close the windows and
crawl into the back part of their house. On Halloween they go out of town so
that they do not have to see all the children that ring their doorbell. It
breaks their heart.
But the
parents make a pact together: they will not kill themselves. Even if it seems
like a viable alternative on some days. “At a certain point you just want to
break through the grief. You want to take your life because you think that
you’ll be with your kids again,” confesses Chris. “But we promised to never
leave each other.”
And they
decided on much more: 3 months after the accident Chris and Lori decided that
they wanted to have more children. “We always described ourselves at that point
as parents without children,” tells Chris. They did not want to live that way
any longer. So they undertook an artificial fertilization. Two girls and one
boy were the result. Just like Emma, Katie, and Kyle. They actually wanted just
one child, but they saw the fertilized egg cells and immediately recognized it
as a sign.
Almost
a year later, after they had lost Kyle, Emma, and Katie, they gave birth to
triplets: Ashley, Elie and Jake. “They will never replace Kyle, Emma, and
Katie,” Lori says. “But there is joy in the house again. There is joy in our
hearts again. They fill our lives with love, happiness and laughter again.”
The
triplets know that before they were born they had 3 other siblings. Their
pictures hang everywhere in the house and their parents talk about them often.
They even go to the cemetery together to have picnics. Here the entire family
is together. Because Kyle, Emma, and Katie should never be forgotten.
The tragic story of these three siblings really reduces one
to tears. The wounds that the parents bear in their hearts will never
completely heal. But thanks to the birth of their triplets their lives are
worth living again. Share this story when the Coble family’s loss and their
triplet miracle has touched you just as much as it did me.
