June 13 & 20 issue, completed May 30, 2012

It was hard to find the time to write about this issue. It was also something that I delayed because I was so profoundly affected by the article entitled "The Aquarium," which was about the death of a child. The author tried to channel his pain at losing his baby girl to cancer by placing a focus on the way his other, older daughter (who was just shy of three years old) experienced the tragedy. Within just 100 days of receiving the diagnosis that their baby had a rare form of cancer, she was dead. It was absolutely devastating to read. Every parent's nightmare.

Shortly after I finished this magazine, friends of friends whom I do not know were woken up in their bed by their 4-year-old and their 2-year-old who told them that their 3-month-old brother, also in the bed, wasn't moving. He had died during the night, presumably of SIDS. The horror of losing a child is something that I think about fairly often and this case, happening to a family that could easily have been mine, was painful to think about. Always the instinct is to rage that this should not be the way it happens - that yes, we are all prepared to accept the sad but inevitable day when we will bury our parents, but no, it should never be that we should have to accept the task of burying a child. We had them, after all, to replace us.  

The two stories forced the unpleasant contemplation of which was worse - watching your child suffer and die over the course of just a few months, always holding out that slim hope that she might survive, or just waking up one day and finding him dead with no warning, out of the blue. I think that the shock of the latter would still be better than watching the horrible, senseless suffering of the former. Although you could never understand why your child was taken from you so suddenly, at least the death was peaceful without much suffering. The absolute worst situation would have to be a sudden death where you know your child suffered and/or was in agony. Such as would be the case with an accident, or abduction and murder of a child.

Not really the kinds of things you want to think about when reading a magazine presumably for entertainment, but there it is. And now that I've written about it, perhaps I can move along with this project. It was stalled for a long time as I hesitated to write about this difficult topic.