Finding faith to cope with young loss

They named the twins Emma and Noah. The Rev. Darren Catron has framed his children's footprints. But they're impossibly tiny, an inch, perhaps, toe to heel. In 1998, when she was 19 weeks pregnant, his wife, Kim, felt contractions. Rushed to the hospital, she delivered both twins stillborn.

''We were in shock," said Darren Catron, adding that he held his wife's hand as the lifeless babies were delivered. The Catrons, who had imagined cuddling their newborns, singing them to sleep, and changing their first diapers, could not bear to see or hold the little bodies.

Doctors tested the Haverhill couple and assured them that it was an accident, that they had no genetic impediments to a healthy birth. The following year, Kim was pregnant again. As the months passed without incident, they had a baby shower, painted Winnie the Pooh figures on the nursery wall, and bought a coming-home outfit for their son, Bailey. In the pregnancy's 37th week, Bailey suffered a massive hemorrhage and died in his mother's womb.

Afterward, the Catrons kept the photo: a baby with a full head of hair and eyes closed in death in the arms of his father, whose own eyelids are lowered in somber grief as his wife stares from her bed, her eyes glazed with sadness. The night before the hospital induced stillbirth, as he lay with his wife in bed, a man of faith found anger coursing alongside his sorrow.

Nationwide, the Walk to Remember program commemorates the 1 million pregnancies annually that end in miscarriage, stillbirth, or newborn death. Darren Catron, director of youth and family ministries at Community Covenant Church in West Peabody, will sing at a memorial service today as the first such Walk to Remember in the Saugus area begins at 10 at Breakheart Reservation. About 250 people are expected to take part.

Most couples who conceive after a stillbirth have a healthy follow-up pregnancy, according to the American College of Physicians. But the Catrons' ordeal stretched the bounds of medicine and faith. In 2000, Kim Catron miscarried a fourth baby at nine weeks. They named the child Little One, partly because they had exhausted their list of preferred names on their three stillborn children.

Then, a miracle: A daughter named Peyton entered their lives, alive and well, six days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Their son, Beckett , was born healthy two years later.

Shari McStay, a Danvers woman helping to organize today's walk, is Jewish and says her motivations were emotional rather than religious (her third child was stillborn). But she said she felt it was important to have chaplains at the memorial service. She met Darren Catron when her children attended a Bible school he directed.

''He and his wife reached out to me," she said, after she and her husband lost their child.

The decor of Catron's office, including a white Elvis suit -- he does impersonations of the singer -- camouflages the grief of its occupant. Wiping away tears as he told his story, Catron, 36, said that his faith has sustained him through his journey, even if it can't give him complete solace by answering the lingering question: Why?

''There are a million scenarios that go through your mind," he said. He says he pondered whether God was telling him that having children would distract him from his work.

As he wrestled with such questions, he drew comfort from his faith community. Another minister came to the hospital after Bailey died and baptized him, ''a validation that . . . this life was a life."

Whenever a member of his congregation has a child, the church places a red rose on a table as an announcement and celebration. After Bailey died, the congregation put out a white rose, acknowledging the life and mourning the death.

Catron came to appreciate some value in his suffering, linking him to people who didn't share his religion. At today's walk, he will be with people of other faiths or of no faith. ''The one thing that will connect us is loss, is death," he said. ''God is really what has made me experience the pain and the reality of our life."

He still does not know why that pain had to be, a fact reflected in his song choice for today's walk. Asked by McStay to sing something nondenominational in deference to the diverse crowd, he settled on ''Over The Rainbow," which refuses to sugarcoat suffering in its haunting, concluding question: ''If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh, why can't I?"

''Why" is the question Darren Catron will take to his grave. ''I don't feel I will know until I can ask God," he said. ''I guess that's the big question: Can you be OK with that." As he sings today, the father of Emma, Noah, Bailey, and Little One will be OK with that.

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