I finally got the Christmas decorations up this morning and have the Christmas music going. It’s snowing outside and I am overwhelmed by a feeling of melancholy. It has mostly to do with memories of a bitter sweet Christmas almost forty years ago when our fifth child, Richard, was born on this day (December 8), lived to the next day, and then died from the effects of Rh-Factor.
When Richard died, I put every tiny memento I had in a little scrapbook: birth certificate, death certificate, footprints, bills from the doctor and hospital, sympathy cards from friends, a wonderful poem my mother had written about him, the ribbon from his casket. The hospital took no photos of him at his birth, although I had begged them to remember to do so.
We were in graduate school at Indiana University, were extremely poor, and were unable to afford the trip home to Utah for his burial. We had his body shipped to Salt Lake City where my parents met the plane and had a sweet graveside service for him with family members. They took a couple of snapshots of him in his little blue suit in the tiny casket – those were our only photos of him, though we had held him for a long time after he died and I will never forget his face.
The little scrapbook meant everything to me – it was all I had. I would take it out every Christmas and remember him and pray for him and even talk or sing to him. But one Christmas, years after we
had moved back to Provo, Utah, I couldn’t find the scrapbook. I looked everywhere with no success. I also could not find it the next year and I felt sick about it. I prayed fervently to find it.
One day I received an unusual call from a young man who was obviously handicapped, saying, “Hi, I’m Mark and I work at Deseret Industries. Did your baby die?” I was shocked and told him that yes, our baby had died many years ago.
He said, “Well, I have something here that I think you will want to get back. It’s a little scrapbook about a baby named Richard, and I don’t think you meant to give it away.” I asked him how he had found our phone number because I hadn’t written my name in the book, and he said, “There is a tiny clipping from a newspaper in Indiana and it said that the baby’s parents were Douglas and Janice Perry, so I looked in the phonebook to see if you happened to live here in Provo, and there your number was. Do you want this scrapbook?”
With my heart pounding, I asked him please to not let it out of his hands until I got there. We drove right to Deseret Industries and asked the manager where Mark was. He pointed to the back of the store and said, “He’s waiting for you; he won’t let that scrapbook out of his hands until you get here.”
We hurried back to where Mark was and he presented the book to us with a huge grin on his face. I hugged him tight, kissed him on the cheek, and thanked him over and over. I think most workers there might have discarded the scrapbook as being useless to the store. I was overjoyed to have it back in my hands!
On our way home from the store, Doug said, “Do you know what day it is?” and I realized it was December 8, Richie’s birthday! It seemed more than coincidence to us and we thanked Heavenly Father over and over for that sweet little miracle in our lives.
Later we realized that when we had moved across town a few years earlier, we had put some things in a storage unit temporarily. Later, we had sorted through the boxes and thrown away what we could, and had sent the rest to Deseret Industries. The scrapbook was inadvertently sent there too.
