Patterico's Pontifications

9/30/2011

Another Post at Dear Elena

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:32 am



I have noted the Dear Elena blog before, here and here, about a six-year-old girl who died far before her time. Her dad has a new post up today, and it’s worth your time:

We have a real hole in the kitchen ceiling. It’s about four feet across and two feet high. The drywall’s ragged edges sag a bit and the wooden slats show through. It’s right above the stove. It’s been there for seven years now. We’ve talked about patching it before, but it reminds us of Elena.

Kim was in the basement doing laundry and water started running down the walls. She ran up to the kitchen to see if something was flooding there. Water was coming down through the ceiling over the stove. So Kim ran up another flight of stairs to the bathroom.

There was Elena standing in three inches of water with the toilet overflowing. She was trying to clear out the obstruction with a toilet cleaning brush. When Kim rounded the corner, Elena looked up beaming holding the brush high with wet toilet paper clinging to the end of it. “Don’t worry mom,” she said, “I’ve got it.”

I’ll make you go to the post itself for the bittersweet punchline.

4 Responses to “Another Post at Dear Elena”

  1. one time dad was up in the attic getting christmas decorations and he fell down into the garage through the ceiling and scared mom half to death and they didn’t fix the hole cause it wasn’t a priority and then dad died and mom fixed the hole and got some cabinets for to put the christmas china in so up in the attic there was just the lighter stuff in small boxes that she could handle on her own but neighbors always helped her get it down and then she died and this is making me sad

    happyfeet (a55ba0)

  2. Losing a child so suddenly to illness is something that has fortunately become rare. The thought that rang through my mind aside from shocked grief (even at something from many years ago) was the question of why? There’s no good medical reason that should have occurred, which is all the more troubling. Reading it reminded me of stories from earlier times, when a child was lucky to survive the myriad dangers of disease, poisons, and random accidents. Now, most childhood ailments are either chronic killers like leukemia or muscular dystrophy or mild illnesses that are little threat. The loss of child will never cease to be horrifying, but with a sudden, unnamed killer it becomes something out of the nightmares of parents across the ages. My beloved niece was the same age as Elena in 2006.

    OmegaPaladin (a63d4d)

  3. That was an exquisite, heart wrenching piece of beautiful writing.

    Many thanks for pointing the way.

    Daphne (fa710c)

  4. It is hard to imagine putting that grief on a blog post.

    I know of another blog about Madeline Alice Spohr, who had died before reaching her first birthday.

    Michael Ejercito (64388b)


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