The uninmaginable

Recently my son's best friend, and one of the four- year old boys in his preschool was recently diagnosed with this childhood cancer.

I am in shock, I am numb - I am in awe that this would happen to such an awesome spirited child. It seems unreal, I can only imagine having to parent your child while making such life altering decisions such as how much lung tissue to remove, and when to start chemotherapy.

While I am grieving and angered that this would happen to this family, to any family, currently I am at a true loss at how to talk to my son about this. At four you are not supposed to have to grapple with the complexities of life and death. At four you are supposed to play spiders, dinosaurs and batman and run until you can no longer breath and laugh until you have tears streaming down your face.

How do you explain to your four year old that death is something that happens to people other than the elderly?

Lately, I have been struggling with Mr.T. My loving boy has become filled with rage and the emotional outbursts that come from him on a daily basis leaves me raw and frazzled. I find myself mumbling such cliche's such as 'being at my whits end' ...then there are these moments. Moments that snap you back into gratitude. Gratitude for health, and for the simple pleasures of life - so tonight after indulging my kids in watching a Friday Night Movie of Curi0us Ge0rge with all of their favorite foods I picked them up and held them tight. I held them and tried to soak them in and breath in their youth, their vitality and their spirit.

I feel like I am keeping some of my emotion at bay - that to truly allow it to come over me would be too much. The idea that any parent would have to face these issues at such a young age, is more than I can truly comprehend.