A tortured parent

After nearly five months, I have a reason to blog.

I reason I did not need or want.

One of the most terrifying thoughts a parent can contemplate has to be the loss of your child. It involves fear, panic, unspeakable dread, and an overwhelming sense of something you care deeply about going terribly and strangely out of your control, getting beyond what is within your own ability to maintain.

And I began that process Sunday night, when my son called me to tell me that his sister was in a fatal accident - another man had died - that put her in the hospital, in very serious condition.

Blind panic. I had to get to her. But I was hundreds of miles away, and far away from my responsibility, from where I was needed.

Guilt at leaving her crept into my soul. It was just a month ago that she called, crying at the distance between us and telling me that she loved me so much. She knew why I left, that the chance for a changed life was too valued to pass up. But still there was a searing, empty pain that sat behind my heart and thumped at my tortured soul.

No sleep. No comfort. she hurts, I hurt. That's as it should be.

Would I ever see her again? Will I ever be able to see how much love comes out of those brown eyes when she looks at me? Can I live with that? A parent outliving their child brings an odd, perverse feeling of wrong, an absence of balance. It is disquieting, a disharmonious discomfort that comes as though you took something which you did not deserve.

It is like no feeling I have ever experienced.

Seeing her in intensive care, unconscious, knowing she is better off right now being unresponsive to my touch or to my voice, and yet wanting to see that spark of recognition in her eyes ... wanting to be with her, and yet standing in the frustration of uselessness ... it's all a part of the tearing of your soul.

She is not out of the woods. It will take time for her to begin a tough road back. It will take adjustment to the new challenges that await her, and everyone around her.

It will take adjustment for me, was well. That's fine. Facing that adjustment is the sweetest challenge that awaits. Because in facing that challenge, she will have survived. And survival for her is all I ask.

She lost her foot. We got her life, at least for now. In the current moment, I will take that and thank God for it.