It is not expected in our culture that children will die… We will leave them. They won’t leave us.
And then it is over…It is an affront. It is a reversal of nature.
-Martha Whitmore Hickman
When I decided to publish my book Dear Bobby, I began an internet search for publishing advice in general and recommendations regarding self-publishing in particular. A frequent suggestion was to establish an online presence with a blog, hopefully attract some followers who like what you write, then publish a book. Since how to go about writing a blog was even more foreign to me than publishing a book, I went ahead with the book first. Even though the blog/book order may be backwards, publishing Dear Bobby was a good experience for me. I’m glad that it includes things Bobby wrote, especially since several people have commented that his journal entries and poetry could have been written by their son or daughter. It’s as if he’s speaking for them as well as for himself.
Since I’m left-handed, I’m used to a skewed sense of order. I have a list of things that are backwards for me: scissors, can openers, the measurements on a measuring cup, spiral notebooks, 3-ring binders, some necklace clasps, and my personal favorite, the classroom desk/chair combo with the desktop on the right side. If I couldn’t snag the one left-handed desk in a class, I grabbed two right-handed ones. I needed one to sit in and one pulled up next to me so I had something to write on. Sometimes backwards doesn’t really matter or is a minor inconvenience.
Other times, something that appears to be backwards is life changing. We have an amazing ability to expect that certain things will occur even when there never has been and never will be a guarantee. The expectation that we’ll outlive our children is one of those things. The death of a child, no matter how old or for what reason, seems to break the rules, break some code that, if the universe didn’t put it in place, it should have. It’s never been the case that parents always outlive their children. In our culture, this is usually the case, but not always. I had one grandmother who lost triplets before their first birthdays and another who only had 7 of her 12 make it through childhood. I’m not far removed on either side from the reality of children dying very young. But still Bobby’s death feels as if it broke the rules. It feels backwards. Like a reversal of nature. He left too soon.
awake from my daydream stifling a scream
baking in the midnight moon
I feel as though I left you all
too soon
-Bobby Young