Hope & Feathers

I am not the best at keeping up with all the blogs I like to read.  It got especially hard in December when we were all sick and the holidays etc.  But Gabriel spent the night at his grandparents last night and John is snoring away still so I had some time to catch up on things.

And then I found out what happened in December to Dana at Roscommon Acres. A dresser fell on her little toddler Mattias and he died from the injuries. A heavy solid dresser. The kind people think won't tip over.

I never met this woman or her little boy but still, I can't stop crying for her, for her husband, for her other children. For that hollowed out, stripped bare feeling of loss they are going through.  For their grief.  Lord, be with them.  What else can you pray?  There are no easy words or answers to the question Why? 

Lord, carry them.

A mama lost her baby. It doesn't matter that she has five other children.  Each child is precious whether it is an only child, the third, or the nineteenth. 

It used to just floor me in college when history and women's studies professors would say things like, "People had lots of babies back then to farm the land, plus they knew they'd probably lose half of them to disease so they didn't start bonding with their children until the twentieth century when modern medicine came around."

 
I've been to cemeteries from the eighteenth and  nineteenth century filled with the graves of children.  Our Lost Lamb.  Precious Angel.  Blessed Child.   I never saw a baby's grave that said Our Lost Future Farm Hand.

  Once you have a baby you know.  You know that love is primal.  It is ingrained. It is in our bones, our marrow, our flesh, our souls.  It is not some twentieth century social construct created by the capitalist consumer society to oppress women.  Mother love is visceral and it transcends all constructs.

It transcends death.