Christmas without Angel

By this time in December I've usually packed a Dollar Store Christmas stocking with some pretty smelling lotion and body spray, a necklace or two, some socks, and a few home-baked Christmas cookies and sent it off to Angel. But not this year.

In September 2004, twelve year old Angel came to stay with us. We were her second foster care placement - she had been with another family a year before, then reunified with her birth mother only to be placed again. Angel had a strong, but unhealthy, relationship with her mother in which Angel took on the parental role of protecting her mom while her mom was buying, selling, and doing drugs.

Angel did not take well to structure or authority; she had academic and behavior problems in school because she did not care to follow the rules, she had only a few friends due to her tough-girl exterior, at home she quickly became acquainted with her bedroom until she became enlightened to the fact that certain attitudes and choices were not going to benefit her or our family. On one occasion our family attended the wedding of a family friend. Disposable cameras were placed on the tables at the reception for guests to snap candid photos for the bride and groom, but the camera at our table was missing and, even after much searching and questioning, was not found. About a week later we discovered that Angel, having lied her way through the reception, had hidden it in her clothing, taken it to school for her own use and tried to send it through the mail to be developed. It's kind of a comical story now, but at the time it only reinforced what we were realizing: Angel had been taught that the road to survival was paved with lies and deception.

Angel's mother did not help her child whether they were together or separated. We allowed Angel to call her mother several times a week, mostly in the evening to say good-night. Eventually we had to curtail the calls because mom would urge Angel to tell her all the horrible things we were doing in the name of discipline and then advise her daughter that she did not have to listen to us. There were also instances when we would hear her mother yelling and blaming Angel for their separation. Several times we, along with our agency and Philadelphia DHS, were threatened with a supposed law suit for mistreating Angel.

As can be imagined, all this emotional turmoil took it's toll on Angel and at least twice we made our way to a crisis center to seek counsel. Even though the crisis center was local to Angel's mother, she did not come to be with her daughter; she even went as far as to refuse to give verbal consent by telephone for Angel to receive treatment. On those nights Angel and I returned home where she would sack out on the recliner while I, with the aid of large amounts of coffee and the television, stayed awake through the night on suicide watch.

Despite birth mom's best efforts to prevent it, Angel did receive treatment but it meant that she needed to leave our home and be placed into a therapeutic foster home in Lancaster. Thankfully that family was also Christian and continued to model the love of Jesus to her. The move occurred in March, just after Angel turned thirteen. At that point we did not have regular contact with Angel, but heard from that foster family that she was again returned to the care of her mother in the summer of 2005.

When the phone rang on a winter afternoon in early 2006, I was shocked to hear Angel's voice. She called to say she was back at home with her mom and doing okay. After we chatted and I reminded her that I loved her, she promised to stay in touch, which surprisingly she did. Surprisingly because I knew that Angel's mom did not want her to be in contact with us, and because I didn't think that Angel would go against her mother's wishes. But the phone calls continued, and that Christmas I sent Angel a stocking full of Christmas goodies.

About every month or so we would hear from Angel. There were calls late at night when she was out on some street with no way home or when she and her mother had had a fight, but also phone calls to share good news - taking high school classes online, getting a drivers license and a part-time job. Most of these positive things happened when she moved out of the city to live with a relative in the suburbs in 2008. Angel had made a hard but good decision to put some distance between herself and her mother's lifestyle in hopes that she could rise above the despair and dead-ends she had witnessed. When she got a car, she visited with us twice at our home and continued to call; each phone call ended with us telling each other "I love you." She also continued to receive a Christmas stocking from us every year.

In early 2011, a distraught Angel called a few times: her relative was in some trouble and was incarcerated, so Angel was alone in the house and had lost a few jobs and her car; she told me that she also had been relying more on her mother and had been spending some time in the city and with her mom. In late February Angel called me from jail to tell me that she had been picked up for shop-lifting; she was upset because she was either going to have to lie in court to cover up for this relative or tell the truth and testify against her relative. I encouraged her to always do the right thing; that she knew in her heart what was right and that God would help her and honor righteousness. Court was scheduled the following week and I asked her to please call me afterward to let me know what happened. That phone call never came.

The next week, the second week in March 2011, I received a facebook message from a young friend who lives in Philadelphia. She wrote to ask if I had heard the news of Angel's death.

Angel died tragically during the first week of March. The details remain very sketchy, but we know that she died of a drug overdose and possibly alone. Her body was held in the county morgue for weeks after her death because her birth mother would not complete the necessary paperwork to have it released. This fact really upset me; that even in her death, Angel's mother did not care for or respect Angel.

The next week was a struggle. I had lost a child, Angel was MY child. Although she lived in our home for only six months, those months were very intense and filled with a determination to love and help this child. Stan and I were committed to showing and teaching her a better way. The fact that Angel reached out to us after being reunified with her mother was at first shocking, but not after I realized that we may have been the only true family she had ever had - bumps, lumps and all. All the desparate, late night, crying, sobbing phone calls were her connection to us; all the times she called to ask for advice, knowing full well what advice she would get, was what kept her grounded; all the stories she told about how hard things were, how good things were going, how much she hated or loved her mother, were us sharing as a family.

Some may have a hard time understanding why the grief I experienced was so intense; and at first I wondered, too why this loss was so devastating - after all, we hadn't seen Angel in several years. When you invest time, energy, love, and prayers into a person's life and then that person - Angel, a nineteen year old child - is gone suddenly and tragically, I am left to wonder if there was a point to it all. The grief is over the loss of Angel, first and foremost, but also over all of the seemingly wasted resources. Did what we had invested in Angel's life count for anything? Initially I decided that we were done with fostering; that after our current placement ended we would be finished - finished with a broken system full of broken people.

Since I tend to be a rather emotional thinker this first decision was replaced a few days later when God finally cut through all my selfish thinking. Who was I to call the shots? We have dedicated our family, our children, our lives, our home to God. He calls the shots and He reminded me, through some wonderful friends, that our efforts do matter and do make a difference. So instead of letting this situation discourage us from investing in and loving on these kids, we needed to be that much more open to God's love, peace and strength to be able to show and shower it on those God would bring to us.

I have hope that Angel knew in her heart the love of Jesus, that she had called out to Him for his saving grace, that in her final days or even final moments, she remembered His great love for her and cried out to Him. And that this Christmas Angel is celebrating the gift of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus among all the other angels in heaven.