What a beautiful book! This exploration of the experience and meaning of raising a disabled child will touch your heart, move your spirit, and challenge you to rethink many of your preconceptions about the emotional and spiritual significance of special needs children, both in our daily lives and in the life of our nation.
The book is co-written by former Senator Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, an attorney and neo-natal nurse. The two trade the pen from chapter to chapter in a structure that pays off immensely in several ways.
Karen’s sections are brim-full of moments: painful moments, joyous moments; scary moments. There is the moment she first held Bella, when the “piercing blue spheres” of Bella’s eyes locked with her own; the drive home from the hospital with the “hum of the engine” and the “sun warming my face”; the first hour at home with “smell of honeysuckle” in the garden as the family takes pictures with Bella. Karen lingers in description—sharing the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of the significant spots of time that have shaped her life with Bella. As the reader, you are right there with her. By her own report, Karen once struggled with pausing to take in the present. She says, “I had always struggled with living in the moment, and now it was just happening. We obviously had to plan the family schedule, but now we focused on constant awareness of the moment.” The intensity and beauty of her descriptions in Bella’s Gift attest just how well she has learned to live in the moment. Only someone with an intense awareness of the present could have crafted such vivid images.
Karen is honest about crisis junctures when she and her husband differed about Bella’s care, and it is inspiring to see the intentional way in which the two made small decisions that drew them back together despite these challenges. For example, after a particularly difficult experience, Karen reports, “In a chair on the other side, I felt there was much more than a twin-sized hospital bed between us”; but a few days later, “Rick and I started overlapping our days so we could have more time together.” The book is about Bella, but it is also an excellent study in what it takes to maintain a successful marriage, even under intense pressures.
Karen expresses frustration with doctors who wield “toxic words” and incompetent hospitals where cost concerns or failure to value the disabled lead to inferior care. But she is also full of praise and gratitude for caring doctors who learned Bella’s name and a hospital whose ambulance “came to care for Bella, but . . . rescued me too.” She gratefully acknowledges family and friends who served and supported her family, mentioning many of them by name and detailing the help they provided. Although caring for Bella is such a challenge, Karen’s chapters are a testament to the power of gratitude and the importance of community.
Finally, Karen’s own voice is strong and bracing, but she also invites other voices into her pages. The most frequent of these are the voice of Scripture and the voice of C.S. Lewis. Her quotations from each are well chosen and gracefully applied and add depth and power to her account
Where Karen gives the moment, Rick gives history. His chapters offer several different kinds of context that add dimensions to Bella’s story. He tells the story of his son Gabriel in a way that allows readers to understand the role Bella plays in her father’s spiritual life. He explains how his position on abortion developed from a scientific investigation of conception and human development, then reveals how Gabriel and Bella “transformed a policy position of defending the unborn to a passionate battle for the dignity of every human life.” By telling the history of his relationship with Karen, how “from the very beginning, Karen put her professional dreams on hold to put family first and help me pursue my calling,” and giving us the background of their lives – moves from house to house, home schooling, political campaigns – he adds breadth to Karen’s up-close portrait of life as Bella’s mother. While Karen’s pages dwell in description, Rick’s chapters chronicle events – political, familial, emotional, and spiritual. Her chapters give close-ups; his mostly panoramas. Finally, while Karen weaves Scriptural passages and brief quotations from Lewis throughout her writing, Rick delves deep into the work of Saint Thomas More, drawing inspiration from his letters.
In the chapters of both writers, there are passages that make you shiver, like Karen’s explanation of the significance of Bella’s birthday, and Rick’s story of learning the condition of his son Gabriel on a sonogram not a week after asking proponents of partial birth abortion, “What message are you sending to me in looking at that sonogram in a week or two, if the doctor says to us that our child isn’t what we want?” And there are details that particularly touch your heart, like Karen’s report that in the summer of 2008, “We had a ‘birthday’ party every week.”
The book succeeds grandly on a number of levels, and anyone who picks it up will find it well worth the read.
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