No title fits. Sorry.

All right...I'm taking a break. This week is going from bad to worse. And not just for me. One of my work-friends’ children has died. Her child was only ten years old. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but it upsets me more to hear people talk about how the child is in heaven, etc.; I mean, I guess it makes you feel better, but it just sounds to me like you’re saying it’s somehow ok.

I very much do not think that it is ok.

I am probably never going to get the chance to have children. I don’t not want children. I definitely don’t hate children--there are a number of reasons that maybe someday I’ll go into, but the fact remains that I’ll probably not get to have them. When I hear about someone losing their child, I can’t help but feel pain for them. I’m not assuming enough to go saying I feel what they feel—I know I cannot understand or even come close to imagining the pain they must feel—but I feel a deep sorrow in my own way. Because I know that if I ever did get to have a child, I would have so much love for them, and so much of myself in them in every way, that I would rather die myself.

I wonder if it actually does make the parents feel any better to hear this, or if it’s like when something bad happens to you, and someone says “I know just how you feel”, when they don’t and can’t. I wish I could ask, but I guess I can’t. Or, rather, I mean I know I can’t. I’m only guessing how a parent that has lost a child might feel, or how I would feel if I were they. I have had two very horrible things happen to me, and I believe that someone might feel really badly for me, but they don’t know how I feel. And it’s hard to assume what someone else is feeling, so I am probably getting whatever parents feel wrong, but I’m doing my best.

So what my co-workers say, I know, is none of my business. And I’m not trying to be judgmental. I don’t say anything censoring to anyone, I don’t give them funny looks; I just do the nodding my head thing. If that makes me a hypocrite, whatever. But I just don’t like it. Even if I did believe in heaven…it still wouldn’t be ok. So I am sad; I am very, very sad, and knowing that her child is in heaven, and everything else I’ve heard doesn’t make it better. I’m probably sounding “holier than thou”, and that’s not what I mean; I’m just trying to say that I don’t like the way the world is run. This whole thing isn’t fair, and I feel like the whole world should just stop for a while or something, and I know that people die all the time, and sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn’t, and the whole world can’t stop, but that doesn’t feel to me that it’s like it should be. Everyone is important. We should treat them like they are important. And it’s not ok that they are dead, even if you do think they’re in a “better place”. What if they were hurting, or were sad about something, or needed something, or…I don’t know. I mean, if I had a child die, every time I had not done as I should by them, or said no to something that, when you look back, is trivial really, all that would haunt me. Probably forever. I still sometimes feel badly when I think about when I was a kid and my mom had to have her mother—my grandma—watch me during the day; I wanted my mom, and I didn’t want my grandma, and as far as I was concerned, that was that. I tried to run away in my Big Wheel, and I did outrun my grandma, and really upset her and everything. And I still think about that sometimes and feel so very bad about being so horrible that it makes me cry. I hope my grandma understood, but maybe she didn’t. That sort of thing is what I am talking about, and all those sins of omission we do every day.

I also wish I knew how to help more if it really is as bad as I imagine it must be. I don’t know how to convey that it really is ok to call me, for example, even if it’s at three in the morning. I mean, of course I’ve offered to help, or listen, and everything, but I don’t know if that is enough. Really, I know that that isn’t enough. And that just makes me feel even guiltier, and I don’t know what to do differently. I just feel completely useless and inadequate, even more so than usual.