Beautiful, beautiful essay by a father who lost his only child
and found the courage to love his new baby.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/opinion/sunday/children-dont-always-live.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-top-region®ion=opinion-c-col-top-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-top-region
My daughter, Greta, was 2 years old when she died — or rather, when she was killed. A piece of masonry fell eight stories from an improperly maintained building and struck her in the head while she sat on a bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her grandmother. No single agent set it on its path: It wasn’t knocked off scaffolding by the poorly placed heel of a construction worker, or fumbled from careless hands. Negligence, coupled with a series of bureaucratic failures, led it to simply sigh loose, a piece of impersonal calamity sent to rearrange the structure and meaning of our universe.
She was rushed to the hospital, where she underwent emergency brain surgery, but she never regained consciousness. She was declared brain-dead, and my wife and I donated her organs. She was our only child.
The incident was freakish enough to be newsworthy. Requests for interviews flooded our email while we still were at our daughter’s bedside; television trucks trawled Manhattan looking for us. When we left the hospital, I caught my daughter waving at me from the corner of my eye. A picture of her from my wife’s Facebook page was on the cover of The Daily News.
SNIP