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January/February 2007
Issue
Ordinary Miracles
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On an ordinary street
that runs east into the sunrise and west into the sunset
lives an ordinary family. A mother named Jen, a father
named Joe, an older brother named Joey and a younger
brother named Isaiah.
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Jen makes handcrafted jewelry. Joe is a lawyer.
Joey likes video games. Isaiah loves trains.
Jen also is adept at signing to communicate
with Isaiah. Joe at inserting a feeding tube into Isaiah’s
stomach. Isaiah at living with a condition that has no name.
And Joey with going with the flow.
To some, it may be a miracle that Isaiah –
indeed, the entire Voss Armstrong family – has survived
the last four years. But this is a family who believes in
ordinary miracles. Simple things, like their sons playing
together. Isaiah being able to eat through the “miracle
of modern medicine.” And Joey liking just about every
kind of food that is put on his plate.
“To me, it’s a miracle that a
child can grow, that any child can grow – that is a
miracle,” Jen said. “Life itself is a miracle.”
It is this simple, peaceful, honest outlook
that gets them through.
The Voss Armstrongs do not want to be heralded
as different or “champions of an arduous journey,”
for their journey continues indefinitely. The sun rises, the
sun sets, the sun rises again.
An ordinary beginning
Jen Armstrong and Joe Voss were high school sweethearts just
a dozen carefree years ago. Joe was something of an activist,
speaking out against policies he felt were wrong and even
evoking the ire of the school board at East Kentwood High.
“I remember thinking, ‘This guy
is amazing,’” Jen said.
In Jen, Joe saw a young woman who was different
than others. “Jen and I, we didn’t ‘run
in the same circles.’ She was unique – that’s
what attracted me to her,” Joe said.
College took them in separate directions –
Jen studied English at Michigan State and Joe, after undergraduate
school in New York, pursued a law degree at DePaul in Chicago.
But post-college volunteer work was eerily similar for the
couple. Jen worked in Texas for Americorps, a branch of the
Peace Corps in the United States, and studied in Zimbabwe
during college. Joe went to Haiti to work in economic development.
Both worked to help the poor and disadvantaged. Through the
years, they wrote letters to each other as friends.
“Joe and Jen are altruistic, and they
always have been – their observations and sensitivities
to people who have been bowed down by poverty and oppressed
by class inequalities have given them both a wider view of
a Christian attitude,” said Jan Voss, Joe’s mother.
One day, Joe’s parents were giving Jen
a ride to O’Hare for a return trip to Texas. They also
were to be picking up their son from the airport, as he was
moving back home from Haiti. Jen and Joe of course saw each
other on the concourse.
“Six months later, we were engaged;
within a year, we were married,” said Joe, who, for
a time period, had considered the monastic life. “To
me, reconnecting with Jen was like going back home. I knew
it was right.”
Their wedding “went against the grain,”
Joe said. It included the ringing of a wooden bell from Haiti
signifying the cry of the poor that so often goes unheard
and tithing 10 percent of their wedding money to the poor
in Haiti.
Father Lou Anderson married them. Joe and
Jen also had a good friend, an Evangelical Covenant pastor,
co-preside at the ceremony. “It was kind of like a ‘preach
off,’” Joe joked.
But in the months leading up to the wedding
ceremony, Father Lou, a diocesan priest now retired, put the
young couple to the test: “Over the years, I’ve
intentionally challenged couples in the marriage preparation
process. I ask them, ‘Who are you as a person of faith?
How does your marriage express this faith? How does marriage
affect your faith journey with and through each other?’
Joe and Jen were a couple most intently responsive to those
challenges, so it does not surprise me that faith would be
so overwhelmingly a factor as a couple and in their future
role as Joey’s and Isaiah’s parents.”
The couple settled in Chicago where Joe had
a job with a downtown law firm. Son Joey was born there –
a normal pregnancy and birth, a healthy boy.
With Jen’s second pregnancy, an ultrasound
in the second trimester did not detect all of the chambers
of the baby’s heart. “We were told things seemed
fine, but they could not guarantee everything was perfect
if we didn’t do a second ultrasound. We didn’t
think they could guarantee perfection either way, so we declined,”
Jen said.
Isaiah was born in January 2002, six weeks
early. He was small, and he looked fine, but a heart murmur
was detected. Four days later, an echocardiogram performed
at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago showed complex
congenital heart defects.
“They [the doctors at Children’s]
basically said that we’d become really good friends
because we were going to be there a lot,” Joe said.
Isaiah was immediately admitted and did not
go home again for almost a year. Jen stayed by his side as
much as possible; Joe, when he could, but he also had to work
to support the family. Extended family members and friends
traveled to Chicago to help care for Joey at home.
Jen and Joe waited for a definitive diagnosis
that would never come. Isaiah’s condition, it turns
out, has no name and no precise known cause. It is not a genetic
abnormality or a syndrome. The doctors deemed it a “random
occurrence,” probably resulting from lack of blood flow
to the fetus sometime in the fourth to sixth week of Jen’s
pregnancy.
The doctors wouldn’t give the Voss Armstrongs
a rate for Isaiah’s chances of survival. “They
didn’t want to, and they still don’t,” Jen
said. He has so many different systemic problems, and not
too many kids have this many things wrong.
“A lot of parents in our situation get
angry – they want absolute answers – but doctors
are fallible; they don’t know everything. We know, for
us, they’re doing everything they can.”
This random occurrence – this seeming
“luck of the draw” – has resulted in a little
boy with a host of medical problems and a heart that will
never function normally despite multiple surgeries.
When he first came home from the hospital,
he was on a ventilator and required in-home nursing care almost
around the clock. Even after the heart surgeries, which occurred
in 2002 and 2006, Jen and Joe continue to administer medicines
to Isaiah to keep his heart rhythm in time. He can take some
food and drink by mouth, but the bulk of his nutrition comes
through a feeding tube inserted into his stomach.
Isaiah had his tracheotomy tube removed one
year ago, but, because he had a tracheotomy for three years,
it is hard for him to communicate orally. Nighttime is a struggle
as Isaiah experiences sleeplessness due to reflux, medications
and the trauma of multiple surgeries.
The result has been many long days and sleepless
nights for Joe and Jen. They also strive to treat Isaiah normally
and make sure both sons are challenged and loved. Outside
the home, it can be difficult as the well-meaning attentions
of others tend to focus on Isaiah, failing to recognize that
both Joey and Isaiah are miracles, regardless of illness.
The family moved to Michigan – to Holland
– just over a year ago. It has been a blessing to have
their extended families and friends and parish family close
by to offer help and support.
“What I have seen in Joe and Jen is
a remarkable ability to balance each other’s needs,”
said Father Charlie Brown, pastor at St. Francis de Sales
in Holland where the Voss Armstrongs are parishioners. “It
is easy to forget about each other in such an intense crisis.
The fact that they look out for each other is a sign of their
faithfulness.”
Faith in the face of struggle
Over the years, there have been emotional struggles for the
couple, times of raw honesty.
“One of the moments that defined how
we were going to be with each other in this crisis was when
Joe said, ‘It’s okay to think it would be easier
if Isaiah died.’ Instead of closing off from one another,
we have allowed ourselves to share our honest thoughts, and
we don’t judge one another,” Jen said. “It
was a tough thing to say, but it was also an honest thing.
We decided right there that we would be honest with each other
about our feelings – the good and the bad – and
it is this honesty that has helped us through the past four
years. We can say the most difficult things and accept each
other.”
Jen is rooted in nature and seeks solace in
the beauty of the ocean, in a weekend away, in time alone.
Joe grew up with a strong Catholic faith background and in
the traditions of the Church. In addition to Scripture, his
parents exposed him to the writings of Thomas Merton, a Trappist
monk in the 20th century. He finds himself turning to Merton
for perspective.
“Merton had an expansive view of what
Jesus is about and what faith is about,” Joe explained.
“He wrote about how all organized religions try to solve
for the problem of death – that death is what unites
us. It is liberating that each one of us, ultimately, will
die – it puts all of us on common ground, equalizes
us, and frees us, no matter who we are.”
The natural and the spiritual unite in their
marriage, in their home, where they have learned it is best
and most peaceful to play to one’s strengths. Jen handles,
for example, more of the day-to-day care-giving; Joe deals
with the insurance issues. Jen is more private; Joe keeps
family and friends current on Isaiah’s condition.
Joe and Jen find common ground in laughter.
“In life together, laughter is the common language,”
Jen said.
Another way that they cope is by talking before
crisis erupts. And listening. Always listening.
And finally, by having faith.
“There is a saying, ‘When God
closes a door, He opens a window,’” said Joseph
Voss, Joe’s father. “That saying is so true of
Joe and Jen and the way they have reacted to all that has
come their way. I see the hand of the Lord in their beautiful
children, and I believe that being their parents is a grace-filled
gift from God to Joe and Jen.”
The sun rises through the open window.
Book to read: Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
by Thomas Merton
Some food for thought from the Catechism of
the Roman Catholic Church:
• Faith is a human’s response
to God
• Faith is a grace
• Faith is a human act
To help organizations that help children like
Isaiah and families like the Vosses:
• Children’s Memorial Hospital
of Chicago
• Ronald McDonald Charities
Diocesan call to action:
• (Local ministries that others could
get involved in that tie in with this article – we are
still working on identifying best diocesan organizations to
list)
A wall-hanging in the Vosses dining room offers
these welcoming words:
Come
Gather ’round this table.
Share with us the journey
Of your day
And we will tell you of ours.
For we come from many
And diverse places
And varied are our experiences.
Then let us celebrate
Together
In the presence of the one
Spirit
By Molly Klimas
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