Luck

I've been thinking about luck coming from unexpected quarters, ie blessings in disguise, the silver linings of clouds, all that sort of thing. Not in a general sense: specifically in relation to the death of a child. To put things very bluntly - and today I'm in a frame of mind which prevents my finding any reasons whatsoever for NOT putting EVERYTHING bluntly - I wonder if the manner of Jessica's death was 'lucky'.

Given that she had to die, given that Martin and I had to lose her... was the way in which she died a blessing in disguise?

I suppose what's brought this on is a forwarded email I received today about a child in a Third World country who has a rare form of cancer. His parents are trying to get people from around the world to donate money so that they can pay for a particularly expensive form of therapy which may well save the boy's life. [This is a digression, but I didn't make a donation. I suppose I'm just too suspicious of how real these emails are. But that's besides the point.]

The point - for me, anyway - is: if you've got to lose a child, then would it be better for the child to die of cancer or for the child to be plucked away from you suddenly and inexplicably, like Jessica was? Children die every single day, don't they? They must die in their thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. They must die in all sorts of different ways, some of which I'm sure must be so unusual or awful as to be scarcely believable. Are some of these ways 'better' than others? We talk of the elderly as having 'good' deaths, don't we? Why can't the same distinctions be applied to children?

When I take everything into account, I sometimes feel I have to concede that Jessica's death was 'good', as far as deaths ago... and as far as one can put aside the age of the person who has died. She wasn't in a horrible accident. She didn't have a terrible illness or disability. She didn't commit suicide. [Of course, she was too young to have been able to do that anyway, but I've discovered that children not much older than she was take their own lives every single day around the world.] She didn't have her life taken away by somebody else.

I must stop myself from dwelling on these things.