It has been a really crazy past couple of weeks probably month as I look back and I am still trying to digest all of what has happened.  To give a little background a couple of weekends ago my 4-year-old daughter had her very first dance recital on the same day we celebrated my son’s 7th birthday with all of our family.  It is always good to have our family in town for these events as it always seems we never see each other enough and these events are a great way to force us getting together.

Then Sunday came and I found out that a college friend of mine had passed away from a brain aneurysm (he was 34).  He was at home visiting his family and had some headaches.  He finally went to the ER but at that point, it was too late.  Then later on Sunday, my wife’s cousin and her husband had their third born who was a beautiful baby girl.  However, as we all knew prior to the birth the baby was going to be born with a hole in her heart and her time was going to be very limited to hours, days, or if lucky a couple of weeks.  So as expected but something we were all secretly hoping would not happen, the child passed away the following day.  I was glad that my wife was able to make it down to Iowa and visit her but honestly it was still hard to process that the parents only had less that 24 hours with their baby.  As a father of 3, it was hard to think of only having 24 hours with any of my three kids let alone even the 7, 4, or almost 2 years that I have had with each respectively.  To the parents credit, based on the pictures I saw of the child’s 24 hours on earth, they made sure to use/spend each one of those hours to the fullest holding the child, giving it lots of love and attention knowing/not knowing when their time would be up.

The weekend of the funeral, my wife and I attended while our kids were hanging out with my parents.  Typically we don’t shield death from our kids as it is something that happens and we they have lost a Grandparent (my wife’s mother, my mother-in-law) in their short lifetime. In this case, it is something that they didn’t need to see as it was hard enough for me as an adult to see such a small child less than a day old, no bigger than a doll, in a casket.

Tragic events like that really make me stop and think how short life is sometimes and you never know what is around the corner no matter how much you plan.