Sometimes, when I’m contemplating a blog post (which, honest, occurs much more frequently than the posting here suggests), I wonder if I dare delve as deeply into cliche as I have a mind to. I quietly debate the merits of cliche. And as you long-time readers know, I almost never pull myself out of this nosedive before I begin typing. Why should today be any different….
Leah and I were shocked this week to read about the death of a little girl in Florida whose body was found by detectives as it tumbled into a landfill from the back of a garbage truck. The last time she’d been seen alive was by her siblings, who had stopped to talk to friends as the kids walked home from school together. The little girl just kept walking. Down the sidewalk, around the corner, and away.
Before I had Ava, stories like this made me sad and angry, mostly in my imagination. I thought about sitting alone in a house I imagined I owned with a woman I imagined I’d married, my head in my hands as I struggled to understand that someone had taken my little girl and hurt her. Had, in fact, killed her. Ended her.
I imagined my fury as I confronted my daughter’s killer in court (before I learned how infrequently these killers are caught), maybe pulling a gun or a knife from my waist, or maybe just wrapping my hands around his neck as we both fell to the floor. I imagined the anger of my friends and neighbors, there in the courtroom to get a look at the monster who could live so far outside our world (before I learned that we were actually all living in the monster’s world). They’d sit in the rows of chairs behind the defendant with stern, grim faces; some would weep.
Now that I have Ava, I’m mostly just scared. I’m afraid that this will happen to her, and I’m afraid that I won’t be there to protect her. I’m afraid she’ll walk up around the corner and be gone. I’m afraid that the last words I’ll have had with her will be a growled directive at the dinner table to sit still for five damn seconds and eat her edamame. Human fears of the unknown. The uncontrollable.
But the real fear, the saddening fear, is the fear of the missed opportunity. The fear that I am the man who reads about this broken, lifeless little girl and then pushes the story aside without another thought. That I don’t take anything from the descriptions of the devastated mother, who would now give her own life just to have five seconds — any five seconds — with her daughter at the dinner table again. That I still won’t let myself soften in the face of my daughter’s exasperating mealtime antics. That I won’t take the smallest moment in the morning to reach across the bed and run my fingers through the hair of the woman I love. That I can see the life I need to live and not live that life. It will never be enough merely to know what needs to be done, and one day it may actually be far, far too little.