A Time to be Born and A Time to Die

It has been a hard week.  It has been hard for lots of reasons, none the least that in the last fortnight, I have worked an impossible number of hours.  Pam was off sick today and said she wasn't sure if she was sick or if she was just so tired, that she couldn't tell the difference anymore.  This week more than most I have watched children dying.  I have tried to hold it back by sheer willpower but in love and compassion I have to at some point, bow to God.  I have watched a 15 month old, his strength now reserved purely to breathe.  It is the force in us all that drives us.  He breathes in and out with every accessory muscle until those too will fail him.  Why does he continue?  What drives him to continue in the face of a force that at some point will inevitably claim him.  There are many theories for that but I suspect, that death itself bows somewhat to our will.  Bows and retreats to the corner to wait.  Death doesn't leave you but perhaps to some extent we are permitted to choose our time.

I have watched a sweet 4 year old who can smile so sweetly, but who can't handle the saliva that pools as she lies on her back.  What deals has she struck with her creator?  She is unable to speak to us but who knows if she has other lines of communication that we can only dream of.  I think that these children have a knowledge that perhaps we don't.  They have outlived their timelines.  The predictions made at their births (or diagnosis) have been superceded.  Those predictions haven't disappeared though, they have just been delayed.  Perhaps from the very beginning they understood better than we do and with more grace, that there is a time to be born and a time to die.  Why then do they wait?  What are they waiting for? 

Are they waiting for their parents to be ready?  Are they hurting this much because of the love they have for their parents, or are they driven by a predirected timeline?  Are they still pushing back that prediction because we all still have something to learn from them?  Why have these sweet infants been burdened with such a load?  Any one of their parents would shoulder that load in a heartbeat but they have not been given that choice.  Their burden will be harder still to carry and perhaps these children hold on, just because, for every extra day they fight, it is one less that their parents will carry theirs.  I watch the parents, with the deepest compassion, because they think they know, but they don't.  They think that they know the depth of pain that occurs when their child dies, but they are wrong.  They are misjudging it, probably because if you knew beforehand, you would be unable to brave for your child.  You would be unable to do what likely they are waiting for.  You would be unable to let them go.

At some point you always pray.  Regardless of your religious upbringing, you always pray.  Then on some dark night,  you realize that you have already been answered. 

The answer is No.

Then you change your prayer.  You stop praying for healing or for hope or to switch places with your child.  You stop praying for a miracle cure or a last minute reprieve.  You start praying for the bigger miracle still. 

You pray for death. 

You pray that the burden that your child has carried for you, be lifted from him.  You pray that death is faster.  You pray for death to be painfree for your child, for the pain is only just beginning for you.  It is on that day that you invite death in from the corner where he has patiently waited.  You embrace him and give him the most precious thing in your life because now, at the last, it is the only way that you can truely be a parent. 

Then you need to learn the hardest lesson of all; how to continue to breathe.  You learn that there is too, a time to live, and you must now be brave enough to do exactly that!