From the New York Times today

I need to consider this article when I have more time, so I am posting it here. My daughter almost died when she was 14 months old and was diagnosed with kidney cancer, so this article caught my attention immediately this morning. I want to read it carefully and consider it, though I don't know if I will blog about it. I do know that the experience changed me and certainly changed the dynamics of my marriage.

Suffice it to say that when I see children who do not receive regular medical care, it cuts to the deepest part of me, of how I know this sinful and broken world to be. When I see children who have the opportunity to receive regular medical care, but their parents choose not to provide it to them, my heart breaks for those children and, I confess, I become angry at such negligence. Had I done the same thing, my daughter would never have seen her second birthday, and once again, I would be a mother with no children as I was for 11 years before her birth.

My Daughters Are Fine, but I’ll Never Be the Same

HARRIET BROWN

Published in the New York Times: April 8, 2008

For a parent, there is no sorrow deeper or more encompassing than the loss of a child. But there is another that approaches it, and that, paradoxically, is grief averted — the grief of the narrow escape when a child comes close to death but survives.

No matter what the cause — illness or accident, cataclysm or slow decline — a child’s close call reverberates through the rest of a parent’s life. Those of us who have experienced it are marked forever by our child’s brush with the unimaginable.

Within the span of 18 months, both my daughters contracted illnesses that might have killed them. My younger daughter, then 8, developed Kawasaki disease, a childhood illness that could fatally damage the heart. She spent five days in the hospital and months convalescing at home.

Four years later, she still gets every virus that comes around; a rough patch in the middle of one cheek flares up when she is tired or upset. But her heart is fine and so, as far as we know, is her prognosis.

Not long afterward, my older daughter, then 14, developed anorexia and landed in the intensive care unit. A long, brutal year followed, but she recovered fully and is now a healthy 17-year-old who shows no signs of relapse.

During both illnesses, I was very calm. In times of crisis, the brain goes into protective mode, a kind of extended present tense intended to get you through danger without wasting energy or emotional resources. After all, there is no evolutionary advantage to worrying about the future when the future may never come.

Once the danger has passed, though, you have all the time in the world to feel — and you do. In the year after my older daughter’s recovery, I developed insomnia and palpitations and a kind of continuous panic attack that kept me from sleep and pretty much every other meaningful activity.

My friends didn’t understand. “Everybody’s healthy!” one exclaimed, a bit impatiently. “Stop worrying and enjoy!”

Frankly, I couldn’t understand what was going on, either. Why was I falling apart now, when everything was going so well, when I had held it together for so long? Talk about cognitive dissonance; my daughters were fine, but I was going down fast.

What saved me was a conversation with another friend, whose son had nearly died several years earlier in a freak accident. His recovery had been astonishing, but also long and rocky. When she asked how I was doing, I told her the truth: I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t shake the image of my daughter, gaunt and anxious in a hospital bed. I could still smell the hospital’s sharp antiseptic, see the precise angle of the sunrise as I would watched it from the window of the I.C.U. Sometimes, I told her, I wondered if I was going mad. “But everything’s really fine,” I added. “I should be happy.”

“But you’re not,” she said quietly.

She had gone through the same thing during her son’s recovery. She had found herself turning inward, going through flashbacks and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Other parents worry about the worst,” she told me, “but they don’t really believe it could happen. We know better.”

We know better. That was it, exactly. We parents throw everything between our kids and danger: bike helmets, seat belts, vaccinations, tooth sealants, self-defense classes. We are creating the illusion of safety as much as anything else, weaving a kind of magic circle of protection. Like all illusions, once broken it can never be made whole again.

I see how my friend’s life is different — how she is different — because of what happened to her son. I can’t yet see how our lives have changed; it is too early. But somehow acknowledging that they have changed makes me feel better.

I still have trouble sleeping; I still flash back to the hospital and to the days that followed. I’m still parenting without the illusion of a safety net. The difference is that now I can also take pleasure in life again. I feel intensely grateful for the way things worked out for both of my children. I’m thankful for the doctors who cared for them (and us), for the friends who stuck around, for the ordinary life we have taken up once more.

But I notice that I still seek out the other parents, the ones like us. We may never talk about what happened to our children, but I’m comforted just knowing that they, too, have skirted the unthinkable and survived. That they have lost the illusion of safety and go on anyway, day by day.

Harriet Brown is a writer in Madison, Wis.