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story. Even in our darkest moments, God is faithful. I have often said to my children, “If you can accomplish for our Lord what your brother Gabriel inspired with his life, you will be a great warrior for Christ.”
    My experience with Gabriel taught me to try and live, not as the world tells me to, in the here and now, but in the here and there, as well as the now and then. Gabriel’s death helped me live fully in the moment, but with my mind’s eye focused on the eternal—trusting in God to help me navigate through the shoals.

    Bella was small for her age, so late in pregnancy we were referred to a perinatologist, a specialist in dealing with high-risk pregnancies. At our ages, Karen and I were the definition of high risk. A battery of tests showed just enough to keep us on edge, but not enough to have us really worried—suspicions, but nothing definitive. After Gabriel, the hope for “happy and healthy” had become the hope simply for “alive,” and we would fight it out from there.
    As all three-plus pounds of Bella were fighting for her life and she was hooked up to so many contraptions that you could only see her hands, I was praying one prayer: “Not again, Lord, please, not again.” But her hands told a different story. Her pinkie and index fingers were ever so slightly curved in toward each other. That was it—a marker for Trisomy 18. Of all the possible conditions, this was the one the doctors were most concerned about, so this was the one we researched the most intently.
    Statistics. I didn’t like them when I earned my MBA at Pitt. I’ve seen them twisted for political advantage and used to validate lies, but I hated this one the most. Of all Trisomy 18 children diagnosed in the womb, 90 percent don’t survive birth, and of the 10 percent that survive, 90 percent don’t live to see their first birthdays. This condition had a 1 percentsurvival rate. I was never a dad who pushed his kids to be a 1 percenter—you know, the top 1 percent of income earners that the radical left likes to rail against—but I had always believed they were capable of reaching whatever goal they set their minds to. Now I looked at that 1 percent as the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest.
    How would I handle telling Karen and the kids what I had discovered? Should I even tell them? If I don’t, how should I prepare them ? How can anyone be prepared to hear that the child you think is perfect is going to die, and soon? Most T18 children die within the first few weeks after birth.
    I could have been wrong, so I contacted the pediatrician and told him of my discovery. His response was the predictable: “Let’s wait until we get the test back. No use speculating when we will know for sure in a few days.” Of course, he was right, so I decided to take the same approach with Karen and the kids. No use jumping the gun, particularly when, in spite of all the evidence, Karen was holding firmly to the hope that Bella was going to be okay. But I also was determined to do my best to begin to lay the groundwork for what was likely to come.
    Karen and I both were voraciously reading as much information as we could on T18 to find some light in the impending darkness. The more we read, the more hopeless it seemed. As I prayed about how to handle this, I just kept coming back to my experience with Gabriel—when I’d learn to trust in God and believe, as the great hymn says, it is well with my soul. In fact, I don’t recall ever being so alive in the Spirit as I was during those few days. I realized that was the only way I could hold my family and myself together as the waves were about to crash down.
    When the day came to receive the test results, I was convinced Bella had T18. But that was only part of the story. I had learned that, as with almost every condition, there are degrees or ranges of severity. In the case of Trisomy 18, there was “full” and “partial.” Children with partial T18, while still severely challenged,