Alumni & Friends
Bethel Focus
News for donors to bethel university
Small Mercies: Bethel People Help Each Other through Infant Loss and Prematurity
Candy and Steve
McVicar
by Barbara Wright Carlson
There can be no pain quite as sharp as the loss of a child. And no worry like that of parents whose baby clings to life from moment to moment. In an uncanny way, Bethel people have sustained one another through what might have been the unbearable hours of infant illness and loss.
Three years ago, Candy and Stephen McVicar '96 of Maple Grove, Minn., eagerly anticipated the arrival of their first child. But their joy was shattered with the stillbirth of their daughter Grace in December2001 at 33 weeks of pregnancy. Otherwise healthy, the baby could have survived if an umbilical cord complication had 
"The Grace Tree" where
Candy and Steve McVicar
buried daughter Grace been detected.
Candy began a personal journey to discover and share all she could about preventable stillbirth and appropriate monitoring. The McVicars founded an organization called Missing GRACE (www.missinggrace.org) and began an annual conference for health care providers, grieving parents, and others affected by stillbirth and fertility issues. The latest GRACE Conference took place April 23-24 in Minneapolis.
A flyer for the 2004 GRACE Conference landed in the hands of Bethel Anthropology Professor Jenell Williams Paris. She and her husband James had recently lost triplet boys born prematurely on September 5, 2003. Ian, Simon, and Gordon were too small to live.
Jenell Williams Paris
and her husband
James Williams Paris says while people were caring for her, it was rare to feel anyone intimately understood what she was going through. But at the GRACE Conference, they met other couples who, many years after their loss, were finally healing. She was also able to talk with a physician who patiently answered her many questions. "It gave me hope," relates Williams Paris. "Up until that time I hadn't found a way out of my pain."In another connection, the writing of English Professor Daniel Taylor helped Bethel alumni cope with a fragile "micro-preemie" last year. Heather (Stumbo) '95 Sams gave birth to tiny Iain on February 21, 2004. He was 15 weeks early. Iain spent more than four months in a St. Paul, Minn., hospital while Heather and Brian Sams '93, the parents of two preschoolers, drove four hours each day to see and hold him.
Iain Sams: at a few
weeks old and one
year
Before Their Time, co-authored by Taylor and neonatologist
Ronald
Hoekstra, describes the trials of six preemies and their families. It answered many of the Sams' medical questions, gave them hope, and taught them how to pray for specific steps in Iain's progress. Even though not every case portrayed ended happily, the book became a comforting gift from God for the young couple and had added meaning because Brian Sams had been a student of Taylor's at Bethel.
Baby Iain is now age one and, though he is the size of a six-month-old, he has no lasting effects from his many complications. God not only touched Iain with His healing hand, He blessed the Sams with a larger faith.