Loss

One of our well respected, and well liked surgeons, lost his young daughter to a fluke virus over the weekend. The people who have children seem to be taking it much harder, as one would expect. I sense the enormity of it, knowing no words are of any use at all. Grief overwhelms, the loss engulfs even the peripheral observers. It's not my grief, but my tears swell in sympathy. Every death elicits tears from me, always has. Not exactly for those gone, absolutely for those left to mourn.

All of my experience has been with death in adults, I know what to say when someone has lost a grandparent, or even a spouse. But a young child, there is no comfort, no solace. I think about granny, born herself in 1890, who bore ten children, with only six reaching adulthood. A single child dead, the twins dead, all in their first year. Another died within a week. Then the oldest, a son, drowned at 16. She was expected to get over it and get on with it. I don't know if that's good, or helpful, or cruel. Certainly her fervent religious beliefs provided her reasons and consolations. If I'd been her, and believed in a god that had taken those children, I'd've taken it personally, and as proof this was no god worth the trouble.

But to even consider the function of justice in the death of children seems to me a gross affront to how life works. There is no injustice in viruses, or bacteria, causing death. Fairness doesn't enter into it. Goodness is a poor weapon against septic shock, even with proper medical care. No one past the age of twenty should ever whine "but it's not fair!" No, it's not, so? Crying over rain when I wanted to play outdoors didn't get me anything but a red nose and a headache. A high school friend of mine got in touch a number of years back. After a while she told me about her young son, who died because of a car accident, her fault, and he was not in a seatbelt. No tidy moral will make a damn bit of difference there, won't revive the dead or assuage the remorse. No murdered child lives again once the killer is caught, or executed. Any more than 90 years wasted gets another shot at it. One lifetime, that's it, a day or a century, same thing.

We want to see causes, cures, solutions. There are none here. There is only the love we keep alive, the life we continue with - once the worst of the shock passes. Only the laughter will break up the thick concrete grief that will never be gone, only cracked and covered with leaves.