A four-month old cherub should be alive today. He should grow up, go to school, get married, have a family, and then begin the cycle again.
But today his cycle died and all of us, whether we knew him or not, lost a baby when he died. Several nights ago this baby lay asleep in his crib, safe, warm and dreaming magical baby dreams—until those dreams exploded—as did the room around him. The magic of those dreams was snuffed out when a car slammed into the house where he was supposed to be safe, and the nursery where he was supposed to be even safer. A seizure, they said about the driver of the car. A driver with seizures who still had a valid driver’s license. A single seizure at precisely the wrong moment and an infant lost amidst the Armageddon-like wreckage of the little nursery.
At first they couldn’t find him, but when they did, the pulse was gone, the little chest still. Frantic to save him, they made his tiny heart beat and his small lungs inflate. Then an entire city took up the vigil, praying for this baby whom most of us didn’t know, and hoping beyond hope that a miracle would happen. It didn’t. When I saw the news blurb on the local news station today, I cried. He was our baby, he was everyone’s baby. But with my sadness came fury about a world where an innocent infant, asleep in his own little crib, is not safe from human horrors.
madmuser 
This is really sad. I at the moment I don’t know how or what to say. The whole story needs to be told. Did the driver of that car know that they suffered from this? Did they knowingly put others at risk? If this were the first seizure, not much can be said. If this was not the first then there needs to be action taken to ensure that this does not happen to others. Who is at fault? The Doctor, for not having that drivers license pulled? Was it explained to the driver if it was not a first time event?
I suppose those answers will never be known. It is really disheartening when people put others at risk knowingly. Be it a medical condition, drunk driving, buzzed driving. No matter what it was if it was done knowingly that it could have a result as this. I don’t understand how people can deal with it after the fact. The best I can ask for is that it was quick and painless for the infant. I could go on and really rant about this, how ever not knowing the whole story it is best left unsaid.
Oh William, I so appreciate your comment and I feel everything you talk about here. I do have a few answers and some things I heard in addition. Evidently this little angel was born with a hole in his heart and they had recently planned to do surgery but then he got the enterovirus that’s struck so many children across the country. He was recuperating when this happened. As for the driver, he was on meds for seizures and had a clear driver’s license. Someone I know in health care said that if a person does not have a seizure after 6 months, they are able to drive. Sigh. I will write more as I hear of it, but I share your angst.
Maryanne, you’ve captured it beautifully. It’s so much more than the loss of an infant. It’s the loss of his future. When Mark and I lost our infant son (under much different circumstances), we were bemused when people felt they needed to shelter us from healthy babies. Why not little Boy Scouts, soccer players, graduates in caps and gowns, bridegrooms? That was, and is, the ongoing loss — no longer debilitating, but integrated into the rest of our lives.
I am so sorry you lost your baby, cpgwriter — surely a pain that continues to haunt you. Thank you for sharing that as well as for comments here. I’m so glad you found meaning in my post.