How Can I Help You to Say Goodbye

She said, “My heart is broken right now and it hurts so very much. I have never cried like this before, not even when I hurt my arm.”

It is true. When a kid came flying down from the top of a bounce house and landed on her arm, she cried hard. She cried even harder when I told her that I had never seen her cry like that and I was worried a bone might be broken and we might have to go to the hospital for an x-ray.

Last night, she cried even harder than that. She overheard my dad telling me Friday that someone in her dad’s family was sick in the hospital. They prayed for the baby. Last night she overheard me asking her dad what happened.

Her newest baby cousin had been taken off life support this weekend. Losing a baby is sad enough but how the child ended up on life support is even worse. She doesn’t know the second part. It may take some time but we may have to eventually talk about that, too. I hate that it is her family that makes it necessary to explain things kids shouldn’t have to learn at her age.

After I put her to bed, I heard her talking out loud. It seemed like she was praying. I stood outside her door and listened long enough to hear her say “why . . . take that baby.” So I went in and asked her if she heard me talking to daddy. She said she hadn’t but she was trying to figure it out.

A little over a year ago she was at the hospital when the family gathered around her other uncle’s bed and waited for his body to give out. Her tender heart remembers the sadness. When she asked at that time, I told her his body was very tired and sick and it just couldn’t work anymore.

This time though, there wasn’t an easy explanation. I told her that babies are very delicate. I told her I was delicate once, she was delicate once. I told her sometimes they just don’t make it very far into life. I told her her cousin wasn’t able to breathe on his own. They gave him some medicine and some machines that helped him breathe. When they do that, you can only have the machines do the work for so long and then they are either able to breathe on their own or they aren’t. With the baby being so delicate, he just wasn’t able to.

For the next hour, I held her as she asked a lot of questions about God and Jesus and how we breathe if we are made out of clay. And how do we have skin and bones? How she can know the baby is with God if she’s never seen God before. Someone at daycare told her God is dead. She wanted to know how God could hold a baby if he is dead. Or if he isn’t dead, if he is so old. She didn’t want anyone to die, especially not her family. Why does God take babies?

In between her sobs I explained the best any of us know how.

She wanted to know who was going to take care of her if anything happened to me. She didn’t want to ever leave this house. And her good friend Lily is leaving and she doesn’t want to go. And it isn’t fair that she has to go when she doesn’t want to.

At times an old Paty Loveless song ran through my head as I told her it is ok to feel sad. Remember Inside Out? How she also had to feel sadness. Sadness isn’t a bad thing. I know it hurts. I feel it, too. More than she knows. Then she started to walk through the part where she “didn’t even get to meet him or know him and maybe if she was there . . .”

Half of my answer was me trying to convince her, the other half me trying to convince myself that even if we were there, there was nothing we could have done to stop it.

My heart ached again because I want to rescue the ones who have been abandoned by his family. But all I can do is thank God that he brought us here before that world consumed us. That sentiment in my mind was followed by her lament that every day is always so happy but this Sunday just didn’t end happy at all. Then she fell into a tear exhausted sleep.

As I folded her clothes that aren’t so tiny anymore, I keep thinking about the conversation on the phone drifting to “reduced sentence” for attending anger management. I keep thinking about how oblivious  people can be about what the death of a child means for families in court. I keep praying for the soul of the “really good lawyer” who will be defending the offender. Because I, for one, would not be able to look myself in the mirror because of the things I would have to say to win that case.

Then my mind rests on Kelsey Briggs. The night my reporter and I were sent to Meeker, Oklahoma to try to find the home of a family who just lost their two year old. You will have to look that one up because I can’t re-write here the scene playing on a loop in my head.

I sent a message to her teacher explaining briefly what happened and that she might need a little extra understanding today. This morning I was sure to be tender about rushing her. I was sure to hug her that much tighter when I dropped her off. And now I have the day to try to busy my time so I don’t start formulating plans to bring them all to my home and raise them. My heart is broken right now and it hurts so very much.