Grief and Judgment After Mom Kills Her Baby

My children have ten children between them. The challenges they bring are numerous, the joys abundant. Because I have four children, I know first hand the joys and the sorrows of raising them. I also know that no parent can possibly be everywhere every second of every day for every child. Nor should we be. How is it even possible to keep an eye on every child 24 hours a day? How many of us have made decisions that could have resulted in tragedy but didn't? We catch our babies as they fall into the corner of a coffee table just in time. We grab our children from the curb before they run into the street. What if we were even one second late?

Is it our fault if our children die in accidents that could have been prevented if only we hadn't decided to use the bathroom at that moment? How dare us think we can take even one second for ourselves! And yet we condemn other parents who don't watch each child constantly.

Two decades ago, I attended the saddest wake I have ever visited. The mother was a former sister-in-law of mine. Her two-year old daughter was the same age as my son.

On the way to celebrate her daughter's second birthday, while driving on the cloverleaf of the expressway, her baby fell out of the car. Mommy ran over her baby.

All I could imagine was the gut-wrenching pain my sister-in-law felt when she realized what had happened. All I could picture in my mind was her cradling her dead child on that cloverleaf, rocking back and forth sobbing. For years I could not talk about it, yet I also could not stop thinking about it.

At the wake, pictures of the beautiful little girl were everywhere. I walked up to one tabletop that held a number of pictures and through blurry eyes looked at the once vibrant child. What I thought was a tabletop was actually her casket, a tiny box holding a tiny child.

Nobody could speak without crying. All we could do was wrap our arms around her mother and cry with her.

I'm sure that because my son was the same age as her daughter, I could not stop thinking about how grateful I was that my son and his sisters were all still alive. But I also could not stop thinking about how my sister-in-law was going to deal with her guilt.

In those days, the use of child restraints wasn't a law. Still, I know her pain was deeper than anything I could imagine. Of course, she wished she had restrained her daughter in a car seat, but she didn't.

I saw her on television after her daughter's death advocating the use of child safety seats. Eventually, law dictated the use of car seats.

How many people judged her? How many people inflicted more pain upon her by pointing fingers at her?

Hopefully more people embraced her and prayed for her and her other surviving daughter than judged her. Hopefully time healed her guilt.

My son just returned from his fourth tour in Iraq. Though I thank God for his safe return, I can't help but remember the little girl who never came home and the mother who still misses her.