Our lost child

The photo today is one of Amanda. She is only a couple of months old and has only recently gotten out of the neonatal intensive care unit. There is something about her eyes that haunts me, as if having been so near death at birth, she had a premonition that her life would be short. As I've written about so many times, we lost Amanda when she was only 11 1/2 years old. Hardly a day passes that I don't think of her, and no day passes that her life and death don't affect me.

Sally, Amanda's mother and my baby sister, is a ruined person because of the loss of this child, her first. On the surface, she appears to have dealt with her loss and moved on, but that isn't true. The effect on her is like a black hole that sucks life out of anything and everything near her. Even when she smiles, something is empty.

I read mystery and detective fiction books all the time, and one of the motives for murder is revenge, sometimes for only the slightest cause. It amazes me that Sally has never wanted to take revenge upon the woman who took Amanda's life from us, but that isn't true of me. I would love to have revenge, not the kind that took a life for a life, but the kind that would ensure that Carla lived in poverty, misery, and bad health for the rest of her life. If I could "wish" it, I'd have Amanda's face pop up in Carla's peripheral vision at odd and unexpected times. But that is not what Sally OR Amanda would want. At the same time, I recognize that we all make mistakes, and that Carla is merely human. What a stupid mistake, though, to drive a car with two children in it and not insist that they wear seatbelts!

To change the subject, my son's wife emailed me that he felt he'd done reasonably well on his first two days of testing but was dreading this final half-day of the bar exam. I guess we'll know more tonight, after he calls.