I blog on another site (somewhat more private). One of those friends is this fantastic person and mother, full of energy, always writing little tidbits and posting pictures of her adorable family. I feel like I know her and her children, more so than some of my good friends because of her constant updates.
Sunday morning, I go on and see she posted two things since Shabbos. I read the more recent one first. It says something about ‘thank you for your kind words’….’it’s quiet here now – older child is sleeping at neighbor…’ which starts to get me nervous — and than, my heart drops when I see something about ‘….glad I don’t have to think about the semantics of burying my baby’. Oh My God. My heart is pounding, there has to be a mistake or a metaphor or something. I scroll to the previous one where her first words are Baruch Dayan Emes. Baby girl passed away tonight.
Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! 
. This hasn’t stopped haunting me since I found out. Out of the blue, there was an accident and her precious baby is gone forever. She is in love with this child, always writing about how adorable she is and calling her the cutest nicknames, dressing her with bows and ribbons and eating her up. I’m telling you I wish I was half the mother she is. And her baby is dead. She writes about how she held her in the hospital and decribed how she felt and looked like, before she was taken to the mougue, never to be held again. Why? WHY? WHY? What is this world coming to Hashem?
You know it’s my biggest fear that I’m going to walk into Shaina’s room one morning and find her blue and dead. I think about it every now and than and it makes me crazy, just the thought of it. And now, this wonderful young mother has to live through this nightmare. How do you move on? How do you get through life? What do you do with her stuff and her pictures and car seat. How do you face the world? Every night when I kiss Shaina Good-night, I ask Hashem ‘please watch over my baby and protect her’. And every morning when I hear her morning babbles, it’s like the sweetest noise ever created being heard over and over again.
You know, our lives are BORUCH HASHEM, BLI AYIN HARA, so perfect now. Our Shaina’la is getting sweeter and yummier, old enough to be a barrel of fun but too young to be really challenging or chutzpadik. Marriage has gotten more and more wonderful and better with each passing month. We are iy’h going to continue to grow as a family. Money issues are not real yet because of our limited expenses. Friends and family are plentiful, we like our jobs, there’s good food to be had at whatever time of day we want. Sure, there are worries about where we are going to live and how we are going to afford tuition and stuff. But those are distant worries, the ‘cross that bridge when we come to it, and we’re barely even in the water’ kind Things are really going so well, I don’t remember I time in my life I felt so happy and content. And this scares the HECK out of me. I worry what might be waiting right around the corner to crush us and swing our pendulum of happiness smack the other way. I hope that it is nothing. That we will just continue to face our daily challenges and as our family grows, we will have to deal with the regular chinuch and financial and family challenges that face most families. But I worry sometimes that life is so good that it just can’t last.
Anyway, that’s me at my painfully honest self. Something about the death of a tiny baby that just makes you see life for what it is and share the fears and hopes that are buried deep inside my heart.
Tonight, I am iy’h planning on going menachem avel. Even though I never met this woman, I feel like she is my friend. Another blog friend will go with me so hopefully it won’t be too awkward. This shiva call will be one of the harder ones I’ve made and will make this tragedy that much more real. But I think it’s the right thing and that I will regret it if I don’t go.
Hashem should be menachem this family with all of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. And he should really bring Moshiach already — we can’t wait much longer!!