A million tears

I cannot sleep tonight. My two boys are tucked into their beds...OK, well, Padraic is tucked into my bed, but regardless, they are here, they are safe, they are sleeping. But my friend Kate's family is in turmoil tonight because they just lost her sister's not-quite-4-week-old daughter, Peyton, to leukemia. It feels so selfish that it's hitting me so hard. I am trying to mentally sort out whether I am feeling all this pain for their sakes, or for mine. I think it's impossible to separate the two.

There is pain because an innocent child has died. There is pain because I know her parents must be going through hell. There is pain because I worry that I could lose one of my children simply by a bad twist of fate. And that is the selfish part. That I am thinking about my own situation as a mother and how I would handle such overwhelming grief. I don't know that I could, to be honest. I pray for them that they have more strength than I think I would have.

There is anger because life shouldn't be this way. I know God has a plan for us all and that we aren't supposed to understand every nuance of life, but I am having trouble digesting the idea that a child could come into this world, suffer from a medical condition and its attendant treatments from the first moments, and then die so young. I have a brain that thrives on logic, and it is asking, What was the point? Why make a baby and so many other people suffer like this? Why? What did it accomplish, other than extreme sadness, a permanent grief?

There is relief that the physical suffering of a little baby is over, although I'd prayed with all my might that her suffering would end with a cure, not her death.

And so, I can't sleep.