Ep 21: Life After Loss of a Child

People would say to me, wow, look what God was doing. And my response was like, you know what? He could have just not let my daughter die. Like, thanks for that, God. Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Run to the Hard podcast. This podcast was produced because my late wife, Michael, gave us the mantra of run to the hard, run to the hurt, for it's in the greatest hard that God wants to do some of the greatest work. Today's guest, I've known for a very long time, but Tristan Borland is no stranger to tragedy. And we've been chatting now for a couple of weeks. I really wanted to get him on the program and just have him share his story. And so Tristan, without further ado, tell our folks a little bit about how we know each other and then let's just dive right in. Well, man, we go way back, but it's just been a big gap in our talk. It's been good to kind of get reconnected and hear each other's stories. But yeah, I played basketball for a couple of years in college for you. That was a long time ago. I'd like to say, Curtis, that I've lost my giant leaping ability, but let's be honest, I never had that, right? I would like to say I jumped quickly. I could get back to the ground much quicker than most people. But yeah, no, it's so years ago, basketball in college, and then here we are 20 plus years later. And yeah, it's been fun to get reconnected. Yeah, more than 20. I think 24, maybe pushing 25. It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a few years. Yeah, a lot of life has happened between now and now. But I grew up in Ohio. Most of my family's still back in Ohio. After college, I worked at the college for a year, and then a friend of mine was doing missionary work down in Brazil and I was young and single and trying to figure out what to do with my life so I moved to Brazil for six months to just kind of teach English and serve down there. So I met my wife Jill in Brazil on my way to Minnesota and we got married about a year and a half later and have spent most of our married life up in central Minnesota. So Jill and I have been married over 20 years now, and we've had seven children. Yeah, so I was the associate pastor for three years up here. I finished seminary then, took a break from up here, and served in the church in Michigan for a few years, and then came back and I was the lead pastor in this community for about 12 years. And so, yeah, so that's a little bit of our story in a nutshell. Well Tristan, you get married, you're now in ministry, you're pastoring, you start having kids, you tend to have the same kind of kid over and over and over. Tell us about your family. So I grew up in Eastern Ohio with two brothers, so it was a family of all boys. And so just, you know, grew up in a very like sports, masculine kind of reality. And so our first child was a big girl. Her name's Jovi. She's 16 now. So she's, uh, she's doing great. Uh, then we, two years later, we had another baby and it was another girl. And her name is Tana. And then we had a third daughter, uh, two years after that. And her name is Maria. And then 17 months after that, we had a fourth daughter whose name is Sadie. And then we were expecting baby girl number five in March of 2016. And so, you know, I've heard all of the jokes, you know, everybody picks on the guy with all the girls and, but like, man, I will tell you what, Curtis, I would take a dozen girls. They're the best like girls. Like when I'm an old man, they are going to take care of me. So well, you know what I mean boys like I have brothers We are totally neglectful of our parents generation So I'm gonna have a good so all you people who make fun of me like it's amazing girls are fantastic But yeah, so our story and the reason why the podcast is we were expecting our fifth daughter and at the time our oldest would Have been almost eight years old, almost six years old. Maria was almost four years old. Sadie was like, two and a half or something like that. We're expecting our fifth baby. And we're about a week or two out from the due date. And so all the all the little girls are getting excited to bring in sister number five into the house. And some friends of Jill threw a baby shower for her. You know, it's a fifth kid, so how many baby showers do you actually get? But just some of her friends got together. And so I took a couple of my older daughters down to dance class. They were in the little girls dance thing. And I ended up sitting at that night by a friend from our community. She's a teacher in this community. And she and her husband lost their oldest son when he was in kindergarten. It was a public tragedy. I won't tell too many details, but it was horrific and awful. And I didn't live in this community at the time. We were in Michigan, but we heard about it. We didn't know this family, but it was just a thing. The word traveled. And I had known this couple for now four or five years. And I said, Hey, you know, there's that 5k that everybody that we do every spring in honor of your son. I'm like, is that still on? And I had been to that a couple of times. I started asking her about it. And here we are at a dance class. And this friend of mine just started talking about her son. And I said, she said, you know, Tristan, that I love that our community does this big 5k, but man, that's a hard day. You know, it's just hard. You just, you see everybody, what do you say? I said, well, tell me what that's like. And she said, you know, I'll tell you what, Tristan, it's, it's really hard because we are not the same people we used to be. Like, we used to be different. And, and when we lost our son, we're just not the same people. And that's okay. Like, it's okay that we're different. And we're actually okay being different. She said, what's difficult is the people who want us to go back to who we were before. And here I am, I'm just, you know, local pastor, just like inquisitive. And I'm like, wow, that's, tell me about that. So we're having this deep conversation at dance class. And she begins to cry and I'm just, she's telling me about her son, and it's been, I think it was five or six years at the time since they lost him And I said to her I'm like look I don't want to be weird like I don't want to make you cry I mean, we're at dance class and here I am just like probing this really You know heartfelt Yeah, you wanna I'm just like tell me about this and I will never forget what she said to me. She said Tristan I cry all the time. So people don't ask that much anymore. And I, like, here I am, I'm a pastor, I've sat by plenty of people who are dying, I've walked with people in tragedy. And for the first time, I was like, I've never asked her about her son before. I've known her for five years. But I was always like, oh yeah, I know her and I know about the tragedy, but I don't know, I don't want to make her sad. And she's like, I'm sad. Thanks for asking. And I felt like both were grateful, but I just, how would it never occurred to me? And she said, I love my son. I love to talk about him. It's other people who feel awkward. And I thought, man, it just blew my mind. Sure. That was a Tuesday night. Later that night, our daughter Maria, our third born, came down with a fever, you know, childhood illness, was sick. And we just kind of stayed home, watched her, she was sick for a couple days, and then by Friday morning, she started to, kind of, you know, she'd gotten over the fever, but she was just kind of lethargic. We weren't sure, like, you know, it's just typical, right, kids get sick, but she just wasn't bouncing back like normal. You know, this is a Tuesday night to Friday morning. So I ran to, um, I was mentoring a guy, teen challenge at the time. I ran to the kind of the town, went and picked up some things for the church. I visited this mentee of mine. I just like, it was just laying on the couch. And my wife, she said, you know, she's just not bouncing back. And so we had a neighbor friend of ours who's a physician. So I said, well, he's out. It was snowing because it always snows in Minnesota. And so I walked down, he was out like snowboeing. He came over, he's like, yeah, hey, we're all family here. And he kind of checked her out. And he's like, you know, she just seems a little dehydrated or whatever. And so we're thankful for him to come over and just look her over. And our older two girls and my wife and I were sitting at the kitchen table playing a game, Maria's still kind of recovering, laying on the couch. And she called out to me and she's like, Daddy, I want to go to bed. And so I went over and I picked her up, carried her. She was sleeping in our bedroom at the time because we had a baby expecting another baby. That's kind of how we roll I Was I was laying Maria? into her bed and she gasped and Her eyes rolled back and so I yelled for my wife and my wife came and called 9-1-1 and My wife's her CPR and I our CPR. And I won't go into any other details of that night. Sure. But it was the most normal day. And our daughter died just suddenly, like just no sign, no idea. And she was healthy, no like chronic illnesses. And so that was three days after this conversation with our friends who had lost a child. Just to give the listeners an understanding, what she died of, she got a typical virus, nothing unusual, it was influenza. But for whatever reason, for her, it attacked her heart and it became myocarditis. And at that point, what happens is basically your heart is shutting down, but there's nothing you can do when it gets to that stage. So for whatever reason, it's kind of like the one in 100,000 case scenario, right? It's like, just doesn't happen. And yet for us, it was one in one. And so, you know, you never know. Like one of the things I said is like, man, you never know when the worst day of your life is going to show up. For me, it was just like so normal. Everything was normal. And you wake up in one world and by the time you're going to bed, like nothing is the same. That's where we share that commonality of Michael and I are at our second year anniversary and she gets sick and she's gone in four weeks from another rare, you know, and it's funny because it's a heart and it took her quick and there's there's no way to explain that to people. Some people have years to prepare and man, I remember, I remember when it happened. And obviously your college community was praying for you and your family. You know, I remember seeing your parents. I can't remember where it was. I might have even been to the church in Ohio visiting family. In fact, I think that's exactly where it was. I got a chance to hug your mom and tell her we're praying for them, praying for you. And so we remember that day very vividly and everybody's in shock. How can this happen? And nobody knows what to do. Yeah. The same thing that the lady's trying to tell you, what, four days before that? You know, three days before. What do we say? What do we do? How do we reach out? How do we help and one of the reasons we even started this podcast was to just tell people it's okay to be weird, it's okay to be awkward, it's okay to just keep trying in any way fashionable. Man, we learned of that tragedy and then I know you started writing, you started posting, you started, I mean honestly lamenting and our hearts were broken with you as you lamented and poured out what you were going through. And just share a little bit about that because I remember reading some of your stuff. And back then, I had never experienced a tragedy like this. And it was hard. It was rough. But you are my friend. You're one of our guys. And I remember like forcing myself to read this stuff, right? No, seriously. I'm very sympathetic. No, like I'm very sympathetic. No, I'm very sympathetic because in some ways, that was eight and a half years ago. And we're really healthy now. We're doing well. And I just look back on myself and I'm just so unbelievably broken and despairing. And the writing stuff was very difficult. So we eventually took... So one of the reasons we wrote, I was a pastor and we had hundreds and hundreds of people and it was a public situation. When you lose a four-year-old daughter, like everybody wants to know what's going on. So there was even a little bit of a panic of what happened because we didn't know. It takes a month for the autopsy to come back. So people were thinking like, this is meningitis. You know, people didn't know. One of our other daughters like got a fever the next day. And I, man, you're not going to make me cry, Curtis. No, I cry all the time, right? That's what we do. That's what we do. We rushed to the hospital in just such a panic and just like, and she got better. You know, it was fine. But how do you go through having a daughter die in your arms to another daughter getting sick and not knowing? It's just like, everything shattered. So we wrote and we wrote for, I think I started writing probably three, four weeks after she died, after the funeral. We can go back and talk about the funeral. But yeah, I was trying to write, like one, we had hundreds of people that wanted to communicate with us and I'm like, I can't do it. We took three months off from the church. The people of the church loved us so good, and we talked about that too, but we took time off. I just couldn't handle people. I didn't know how to respond. I didn't know how to respond. And yet people wanted to know, so one of our ways was to communicate.

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