I sit here at my desk, tears stinging my eyes, my heart broken.
And I’m at a complete loss for words.
So forgive me if my post today seems a bit bumbling, a bit disconnected, a bit scattered.  I’m feeling much the same way right now.
The family of one of Crisana’s preschool classmates is suffering a tremendous tragedy right now. In February they welcomed their third child, a little boy: pink and round and chubby with bright eyes and a cute button nose.
Now, less than four months later, they are preparing to say their final goodbyes to this precious little angel. I received word when I arrived to pick Crisana up this afternoon that the doctors had given him about 2 hours to live. The grandmother had come and gotten the older sister just a little while prior to take her to the hospital to see him one last time.
And the rest of us moms – who watched this baby grow in his mother’s tummy, who celebrated his birth and welcomed him joyfully – stood on the playground as our healthy, active children played around us…and cringed at the irony, the seeming cruelty, the unimaginable heartbreak of it all. We held back the tears as we relived the last few months: the news that this family was expecting…the fun of watching the baby grow in the womb…the sharing of pregnancy stories and birth experiences and life with little boys…hearing the news of his arrival…seeing his picture for the first time…then getting to meet him and hold him and ooh and ahh over his perfect little features…witnessing the pride of his big sister as she introduced him to us all…and then came the hospitalizations: the croup…the cough that wouldn’t go away…the eating problems…the lack of weight gain…the failure to thrive.
The official diagnosis does little to comfort our hearts. The knowledge that his quality of life was not expected to be very good, or that his long-term prognosis was debilitating doesn’t stop the hard questions from coming, from hitting at every angle. As we stood there, every one of us took a shot:
Why?
How?
Why them? Why him?Â
How does a parent – whose body has barely had time to recover from carrying this child, from giving birth to this child – now say goodbye?
How do you go home to an empty nursery? To baby clothes that have never been worn – and will never be worn? To toys that will never be played with, books that will never be read? How…..?
This family has already experienced the death of their dreams with the original diagnosis. Dreams of their son walking and talking. Dreams of teaching him to run and play catch. Dreams of sports and backyard adventures. Now, they prepare for a second death as their son prepares to breathe his last.
Suddenly, playground chit-chat seems inconsequential. Suddenly, my healthy children are more precious, more special, more to be cherished. Suddenly, all those things I get uptight about – those infuriating, maddening things about my children that drive me crazy, those things I complain about – don’t seem all that important. What is important is that my children are healthy, my children are whole. My children are alive. I have them with me. May I make these moments count, for I never know when it will be my last opportunity to do so.