Letting Go

Everyone has to learn to let go, at one time or another.  We let go of a hand to take that first step.  Let go of home so we can travel.  Let go of freedom for the gift of having children.  Those of us raising children with complex medical needs sometimes have even more to let go.  We let go of the dream of a healthy, rambunctious child, of the ability to live as others do.  And sometimes, we let go in the deepest, saddest sense, too, when "letting go" means "saying good-bye". 

It's been a year of good-bye's for me, all of them difficult in ways I never could have imagined.  A year ago, R., a beautiful 9 year old boy with a smile that defined the term "imp", suddenly died of his disease...a disease he shared with many of the children I know, including my own child.  R's death was my first experience with the loss of a child, and it tore at me.  The sight of his parents, and baby sister, making the words "grief-stricken" seem immeasurably inadequate.  The shock of seeing a little casket lowered to the ground, the days I spent weeping for a boy I knew only from summer camp.  And then Y., 10 years old and my best friend's daughter, a girl who shares so much in common with my own little girl, died in June, at home in the arms of her family.  A more expected death, perhaps, but no less agonizing in its reality.  I learned, again, how to grieve for a child, this time one I'd known since she was a darling 2-year-old in a charming pink hat, holding court in her hospital bed after the transplant where we met.  I learned how to sit with a mom who has lost her child, who has known, always, that she would lose that child...and who now must cope with the fact that knowing doesn't ease the pain.  And through both of these experiences, I've had to face again the reality that my child, too, has a life-threatening disease.  She has survived so many times when doctors said she couldn't...but there is always, always the fear of the time that they are right. 

Death is not the only loss, though for me it has been the hardest.  But saying 'good-bye' to a friend as he moved away brought a different kind of sadness.  The sadness of losing someone who understood the fears, and of seeing that change, even when we least want it, is inevitable.

It has been a year of grieving, of trying to find the small moments to celebrate, of discovering that faith alone is not enough.  A year of trying to understand the impossible, a year of learning to let go.