The end of innocence

Four years ago this week, I received a phone call from my mother while I was browsing in a local record store. She was calling to tell me that there had been a terrible accident, a drowning accident involving my adorable 2 year old cousin, W, and that he was being lifeflighted to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.

Within the hour, my sister and I were rushing from Knoxville down to Nashville, praying in a way I’ve never prayed before that when we arrived, the news would be better.

We spent most of the next 48 hours in a hospital waiting room with other assembled family members, holding vigil, holding each other, and trying to hold on to hope. Every few hours, I was able to go sit with W for a few minutes. He was on life support. His parents and grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins held his hand and read to him and played music for him.

He passed away two days after his accident.

Since that time, I have been blessed – and I mean that in the most powerful way I can say it – to observe the grace and love and dignity with which W’s parents have lived with, accepted and grown from the experience of losing a child, everyone’s worst fear. W’s mama has also been very generous in openly sharing her journey with other grieving parents, and in doing so, she’s helped so many people.

This is my little collection of W photos. It includes photos of him, as well as photos taken of family and friends at the annual release of balloons on his birthday at the playground built in his memory.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I look at these photos a lot, especially each year around this time. I especially love the one – the only one I have of all of them together – of W with all his cousins on my brother’s front porch. It was taken six years ago now, but so much has changed since that photo was taken that it seems like another time altogether. W is gone. My father and grandfather are gone. My grandmother is bedridden and dying. My brother no longer lives in that house, which had previously belonged to my parents. W’s family’s house burned down and they have a new house. I am remarried, and several new babies have joined our family (including 4 month old R, a new baby for W’s parents!). There have been surgeries and miscarriages for several family members. My eldest son has, since that photo, experienced some significant struggles and challenges, which – while I rarely discuss the matter beyond my circle of very close friends and family, because I want to preserve his privacy – have caused me the greatest pain and worry of my life thus far. But on that day, in that photo, he’s still a smiling, healthy, innocent 12 year old boy.

None of us knew what lay ahead – the good or the bad.

W’s death marked a sea change for me in how I see the world. I never clearly understood before how suddenly and permanently life could be permanently altered. I had never seen anyone close to me go through the kind of pain I watched his parents and grandparents endure. Now I have, and everything looks different.

The experience made me more grateful and yet, more wary. I see the world as more tenuous, less predictable and more raw. I look at my children now and realize that I actually have very little control over what may happen to them today, tomorrow, or three years from now. It’s a feeling of powerlessness that I’ve yet to come to terms with, because there was a time, not so many years ago, when I thought that love, combined with “good parenting” were like a talisman against everything bad in life. Well, I’m here to tell you that they aren’t.

Bad things happen to good families, to good parents, and to the children who are their world.

Life is indeed suffering. What do we do with that? How do we find joy in the midst of that suffering? How do we accept what we can’t change? How do we even KNOW which are the parts we can’t change? When do we cling for dear life and when do we let go out of love? These are some of the questions I’ve been wrestling with since W’s death, and as I’ve faced my own losses and hurts as a parent since that time.

Beautiful boy. We miss you.