---
title: Truitt
subtitle: Miracle among miracles
---
Dear Truitt,

	My dear baby boy, miracle among miracles, and youngest currently of the pack. Your birth is no less than a miracle from God, as you will one day know. I was rendered useless by my own hand at the age of twenty-five, unable to have children. It was a regrettable mistake I thought I would live with for the rest of my days, yet here you are and I am thirty-nine, soon to be forty. Your mother and I decided together we would try despite all odds to bring you into this world, and it is no surprise yet simultaneously surprising that again I have asked God for the impossible, and again he has responded with a yes.

	When I say impossible, I need you to understand I am not being facetious. I was eleven years sterile when I had a reversal done. It took four years for your mother to even get pregnant after that, and our first child before you miscarried. Your mother, devastated by loss, had to have surgery to remove a large growth in order to try again. This was shortly after a previous surgery she had already had, and while this new surgery was being done, unbeknownst to us, you were already in her womb! The doctor cut right into where you were, barely the size of a grain of sand, removed a large growth, and you were left whole and unscathed. This should not have worked out this way, but God is good.

	You had a July 4th due date, but because of her surgery your mother had to have a C-section in order to have you, so you were born almost a month early on June 8th. You had lung issues because of your early birth and had to be taken to the NICU, where we stayed with you for nine days, watching your O2 monitor as if we could will it to stay stable. I will never forget leaving your mother as she was being stitched up. We had discussed before the surgery that if something was wrong with you I would go with you. I didn't imagine it would happen, but it did. I was filled with dread and worry as we walked down the white-walled hallways. I could only watch as you tried desperately to breathe and could not draw breath. All I could do was pray. We often say that as if it is nothing, but you are proof that prayer is everything. They had to lubricate your lungs. I don't even remember the name of the procedure, but I joked nervously and said, "The boy's a quart low, needs oil." I joke when I am scared. You will come to know that. It is the only thing that keeps me from going into a blind rage.

	Right now as I write this you are drinking a bottle, and you are only just over twelve pounds. You are happy and ready for bed, and I am listening to you coo in your mother's arms. One day when you have children you will understand just what this moment, and all moments, mean to me, but until then you will have this letter, your story, and the stories I share here of your siblings. As much as those letters are for them, they are for you too. They knew me as a young man; you will know me as an old one. Your letters are for them just as much. When I am gone it is God and your siblings you must cling to. Even this website and all its contents will fade away beyond my control to make sure they withstand time. Nothing is permanent outside God and what he has said is permanent. That is true for all things; most importantly it is true for sadness, pain, worry, and grief. If I teach you anything at all in the time we have, I want it to be to fear no sorrow. There is a song I wrote for your brother about that, so give it a listen.

	I intend to write many more letters before I go. This is your first, and most important. It is a letter to you before your innocence gets challenged by the world, so if you are old enough to understand that, read this one more time with the baby blue eyes of Truitt the baby, then contemplate it with the weathered blue eyes of Truitt the man.

Love, Dad