6 mins
Jennifer’s Story
KAREN Palmer gave birth to her daughter, Jennifer, by caesarean section on August 3 1993, and held her as she died five hours later.
It’s an undeniably tragic story. But, as Karen tells it, it is also one that demonstrates how blessings can come out of tragedy, and how God shows His love for even the smallest of us, and gives us strength through the hardest times.
It also inspired a hymn by John Bell. Nearly 30 years on, Karen has published a book about the experience: Jennifer: a Life Precious to God. “It was something I’d wanted to write all that time,” she says, “Just because I thought it was an amazing story. There is no doubt that God was there with us and involved with us, and that has continued to give me strength at all sorts of other times in my life that have been difficult.” Karen is the wife of the Rev Gordon Palmer, now minister of Claremont Parish Church, East Kilbride; but at the time in his first charge at Ruchazie, part of the Greater Easterhouse area in the East End of Glasgow.
They had been married five years and this was to be their first baby, and all was well until Karen was 18 weeks pregnant, which happened to be Holy Week.
That Monday, Karen was concerned because the baby hadn’t moved (which turned out to be coincidental) so she and Gordon went to the hospital. There, the technician doing the scan ‘was a bit panicked’ and called for a doctor.
“The doctor said he couldn’t tell us what was wrong with our baby, but there were a lot of things wrong – a lot of wee things that added up to something really big.” Karen and Gordon were offered the chance to have a sample of the placenta taken which would give them a diagnosis, but that carried a risk of miscarriage. They were given a couple of days to discuss it.
“So we got home and were distraught, obviously, but the only place we wanted to be that evening was our church.” Gordon had divided up responsibility for the Holy Week services, and Karen had prepared that Monday’s with one of their volunteers. The theme was ‘Good News for the Unimportant’.
Among the congregation of the church at the time was a deaconess, Janet Anderson, who died in November 2018.
“Janet had spread the word so everybody at the service knew the situation. It was me that was supposed to be leading the service with the Careforce volunteer. Another volunteer led it with her, but everything was already scripted.
“There was a refrain through the service which was ‘how can I give you up, how can I abandon you, my heart will not let me do it, my love for you is too strong, for I am God and not man, I the holy one am with you’.
“The words of it were just astonishing, and even the hymns were amazing. We sang John Bell’s Take This Moment, and one of the verses is ‘Take this child in me/ Scared of growing old/ Help him here to find his worth/ Made in Christ’s own mould’.
“There were just so many things in that service that just blew our minds, and it’s the one time I remember in a service everyone’s jaws dropping, just how directly God was speaking to us, and the sense that He really loved this wee child. It was amazing.” By Maundy Thursday they had decided to continue with the pregnancy, come what may, and to refuse any test that carried a risk. “It wasn’t easy,” says Karen, “But we had a huge amount of support from our families and the church family, and from colleagues and friends. There were lots of people praying for us, people sending us cards – and not just one card, people sent multiple cards. They really cared for us.” Defying medical predictions, the pregnancy continued to full term. After Jennifer was born, it was three and a half hours before Karen could see her as she was on a morphine drip, and there was a cruel moment of hope when a doctor mistakenly told her that things weren’t as bad as they had been expecting, that they would get to take the baby home.
“But when we got up to the special care baby unit, the poor doctor up there had to tell us that wasn’t the case at all. She had no kidneys and barely any lung tissue, she was on a ventilator but they would have to turn it off because it would rupture her lungs, which would be a very traumatic and painful end for her.
“So we sat in a wee room and they handed her to us, and that was a precious time. She was beautiful – she had dark hair with reddish tints and a really sweet little face.
“We’d prayed during the pregnancy that she’d be peaceful and comfortable, and that was how she was.
“She lived for just a few minutes, but we were able to hold her and dress her and take photographs, and it was really lovely.”
Top: Rev Gordon Palmer and Karen with Jennifer in 1993 Bottom: Gordon and Karen today
When it came to planning the funeral, Gordon and Karen decided to adapt the words to one of John Bell’s songs. They didn’t have time to ask permission, but wrote to let him know.
However, unbeknownst to them, John had already heard Jennifer’s story from the Rev Doug Gay, now Principal of Trinity College, Glasgow, who was a member at Ruchazie at the time. The day after their meeting, John travelled to London, and on the way back he wrote a song for the Palmers, We Cannot Care For You the Way We Wanted. The tune came later, and was named Jennifer.
Jennifer’s short life touched a huge number of people, including Karen’s own mother. “I had a little brother who died when I was six, but when a child died all those years ago there was nothing done, people hushed it up and didn’t talk about it.
So mum carried that grief all that time, but when she was there at the hospital with us she was able to talk to the staff about my little brother, and you could see that helped her process that grief for her own wee boy.
“And there was an elderly lady at the church who had been really supportive, she wrote lots of letters and prayed for us every day, and because Jennifer died she was able to tell us about her own wee boy who’d died. We’d been in church for about six years and had never known that story.
“There were lots of instances of that, where people who’d been holding on to grief and not talked about it were able to talk about it.” For Karen, who went on to have two more daughters, Ruth and Sally (both now grown up), Jennifer’s story is a positive one of the love of God. “Obviously the diagnosis was devastating, losing her was devastating, but there was never a point where we couldn’t see good coming out of it.
“You know how Moses used to tell the people of Israel, ‘Remember, God brought you out of Egypt’? Well, this is the ‘brought you out of Egypt’ part of my story, that reminds me how good He is.
“There was a phrase that came into my head while I was in hospital, which I searched and searched for but could never find out where it came from – ‘everywhere she had been there grew flowers’.” ¤
‘Jennifer: A Life Precious to God’ is published by Instant Apostle
This article appears in the August 2020 Issue of Life and Work
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