100th Post

Today I was going to write my 100th blog post. It was going to be some poem or short story. I was going to think that it was amazing and share it on social media and try to get lots of people to read it, but now that seems absolutely ludicrous. Instead, I would like to say farewell. Farewell to a tiny baby boy who never even got the chance to live. 

Just over a week ago, a friend of mine started his paternity leave in preparation for the birth of his son. One week ago today he became a father. Yesterday his beautiful baby boy passed away.

I am haunted by how he looked the last time I saw him. He was practically vibrating with excitement at the prospect of being a dad. He was promising to send us pictures, cheerfully refusing to tell us what names he and his partner had picked, and incapable of not smiling. 

Now my heart is breaking to think what he must be going through. I can't even fathom what it must be like. It's just incomprehensible. How can someone survive something like that, let alone find the will to pick themselves up and keep going? How can they go home to the crib and the clothes and the toys? How can anything I might say or do possibly ease the burden of such a loss?
No one should have to endure such a thing as this.

It makes me feel so unreasonably fortunate and so wretchedly ungrateful. I am always talking about how things have happened that have made me suffer, but now I know that my friend and his partner would trade an eternity of my worst suffering just for one more day with their boy.
How can I lament experiencing pain, when I have had a life long enough to do so? It seems utterly despicable that I have all this time that I take completely for granted. Minutes and hours and days that I happily waste, when this poor child and his family had so few. 

I have never believed in an afterlife. I have never even wanted to believe in it, but now I find that I am hoping that I can. I want so badly to be able to believe that there is some kind of heaven for that tiny little boy or that there is some kind of master plan in which this somehow makes sense. 

I'm not quite there yet so I have done the only thing I can think of, write about it.

It's a pathetic offering to one so wronged by the world but it's all I know how to do. 

I humbly dedicate this post to him, baby boy Young. Even though he was only here for a short time he left an indelible mark on the world and on those who loved him. 
He will live forever in our hearts.

I know it's nothing compared to the life he should have had, but at the very least, this tiny corner of the internet will always belong to him. 

R.I.P